Building Knowledge.
La Biennale di Venezia, Venice 2016
Building Knowledge.
La Biennale di Venezia, Venice 2016
Building Knowledge: An inventory of strategies
15th International Architecture Exhibition- La Biennale di Venezia `Reporting from the front´ (curated by Pritzker laureate Alejandro Aravena)
Indian architect Anupama Kundoo returns to the Arsenale this year with a full-scale installation of a low-cost house and prefab toilet.
Displayed alongside these will be the key projects from Kundoo’s 25 years in practice, revealing both her ongoing quest for knowledge about building and for building knowledge within the community. She refers to these projects as ‘an inventory of strategies’, a set of solutions for dealing with the ‘battles’, as Aravena calls them, that face architecture today, chief amongst which is affordability in housing.
“We’re not just talking about affordability in terms of money here; we’re also talking about impact on the environment. We can’t afford to keep building the way we do. My work is to find alternative solutions to build using significantly less materials, and action them,” she says.
Architect Anupama Kundoo is internationally recognised for her experimental work in sustainable, affordable construction. She became best known for The Wall House, a handmade brick-and-terracotta building that she re-created for the 2012 Biennale. She has been Chair of Affordable Habitat at the UCJC School of Architecture, Madrid since 2014.
At this year’s Biennale she will reveal not only the fruit of over 25 years in practice, but also the underlying roots dedicated to research that have grounded her work throughout. For 15 of those years she has been researching the potential uses of ferrocement, a lightweight, highly resilient material that is simple to prefabricate and tint, which Kundoo feels has yet to be fully exploited in housing production. Her research proves that ferrocement can be used to create both sanitary blocks and housing elements, with built-in storage, that are practical, stackable, durable and beautiful.
The key to building an affordable future must be education”, says Kundoo. “My architectural projects are about building knowledge across the community – craftspeople, engineers, designers, students, manufacturers, users – and empowering them to get the housing they need and can afford to have. The emphasis is on affordability through efficiency and inclusivity,” she adds.
Kundoo relates Aravena’s theme of the battleground for architectural progress to the issue of processing dualities: “When the opposites in a duality work in union, there is enrichment and knowledge. If the quest for knowledge is ahead of the action, there is evolution (Mahabharata). If the impulse of action is ahead of reflection there can be destruction. Knowledge informs the act of building, and building widens knowledge.”
The installation at the Biennale this year physically places these dualities either side of the Arsenale’s walls. The visitor’s journey between the dualities represents the ‘Front’ from which Kundoo is ‘reporting’. To the left hand side is ‘Spirit’: 1:50 models of the practice’s variants on housing solutions and public buildings, showing their relationship to external space. Amongst these is Light Matters Housing, an origami principal that offers high-speed, resilient shelter.
To the right hand side is `Matter’: physical samples of material research and 1:5 scale tectonic models showing how the different elements are assembled. The models have been produced by IUAV Venice, through a workshop held there.
Situated at the intersection of these, the 1:1 scale central pieces suggest the potential for synthesis if the dualities, to the left and right, work together. They are equally suitable for urban and rural contexts: a Full Fill Home – a ferrocement house that can be assembled in 6 days and dismantled in a day; and an EASY WC – 6 prefabricated ferrocement elements that can be assembled in one day.
LIVE KNOWLEDGE – IAAC AT THE 15TH VENICE BIENNALE
The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia takes part in the 15th Venice Biennale, with an interactive installation made in collaboration with Anupama Kundoo.
Information Technology has opened up new ways of sharing knowledge, moving towards faster and more inexpensive manners, making knowledge more accessible, and making it easier to gather people around common topics of interest.
The interactive installation Live Knowledge showcases the hyper-connection among key topics, through the display of live discussions on Twitter, around one central theme: the housing.
Users are invited to add their voice to the discussion by sharing tweets which feature the hashtag #housing and another of the keywords present in the installation.
RECYCLING MATERIALS, RECYCLING KNOWLEDGE
During Kundoo’s last Biennale installation (2012), she carried out a study on the annual waste generated by this massive temporary exhibition. In 2014 she worked with the students of IUAV to investigate the impact of this waste and the harsh realities of day to day life in Venice’s suburbs. In order to minimise her waste output at this year’s Biennale, her team is recycling material from the 2015 Art Biennale’s German Pavilion to build the installation and, through collaboration with Rebiennale, a local team of activists, will reconstruct the Full Fill Home prototype post exhibition to make it fit for use by the homeless people in nearby Marghera. This double recycling project will be developed through two workshops, open to applicants worldwide through Madrid’s University Camilo Jose Cela’s School of Architecture, to take place in January 2017.
GERMAN ENGINEERING
Another key collaboration for this Biennale is with the Chair of Conceptual and Structural Design Department of Technische Universität (TU) Berlin, headed by Prof. Mike Schlaich, a partner at Schlaich Bergermann, and Dr. Arndt Goldack. Kundoo has introduced skilled masons from India to the research, and engineering students of TU Berlin to bring high-tech thinking to the low-tech ferrocement practice. A team of Indian masons has spent two weeks with the German engineers at the TU lab, the famous Peter-Behrens Hall in Berlin, to further refine the Full Fill Home design, including testing for withstanding strong winds and seismic loads and experimenting with different ratios of cement to mesh. For Kundoo, the process of building is as important as the product, and the funds generated for the installation in Venice will go towards building knowledge among many people, in many places.
“By helping communities to fabricate a set of simple building components, we can build knowledge and bring housing back to the people,” Kundoo concludes.
Videos:
Building Knowledge. The Process.
Nothing Stays Forever: The Life on an Installation
Press:
Financial Times. Venice Biennale of Architecture ´ June 3, 2016
The Guardian. `Venice architecture biennale 2016 – ideas for real world problems´ 29 May 2016
Dezeen. `Anupama Kundoo uses ferrocement to create pioneering “Lego-like” house´ 14 June, 2016
ArcVision. ` Architecture biennale 2016 – Anupama Kundoo´
19 July, 2016
https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/55970238/bookleta5-20-pages-pdfx-3
Category:
Exhibitions