Robert Gerard Pietrusko collaborated on the installation ”A Satellite Symphony,” which explores how satellites frame how we understand the earth itself; the viewing structure was constructed from trees from the Veneto region downed by storms. (Photo Gaia Cambiaggi / Studio Campo)
One in a series of reports on faculty and students invited to exhibit at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia and the European Cultural Centre's Time Space Existence.
On May 10, the 19th International Architecture Exhibition opened in Venice, curated by Carlo Ratti and featuring installations and presentations from a global network of architects, designers, artists, and educators on the theme of “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” The effort to rethink the relationship between architecture and the environment is also apparent in the many concurrent exhibitions around the city, notably the European Cultural Centre’s Time Space Existence. Work from more than half a dozen members of the Weitzman community, like Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Robert Gerard Pietrusko, are on display in Venice’s pavilions and palazzos through November.
These include Winka Dubbeldam, Professor and Director of Advanced Research & Innovation Lab (ARI) and founder/principal of Archi-Tectonics. In the past, Dubbeldam has brought the work of her students to biennials in Buenos Aires and Bogota as well as Venice. This year, she and Archi-Tectonics have a trio of offerings: Hopeful Monsters, which showcases a 47-hectare masterplan of hybrid taxonomies and rammed-earth structures in Hangzhou, China, in the Arsenale; masterplans to rewild the city of Tiranë, which will be presented in the Albanian pavilion in the Giardini; and a panel of international architects, writers, and publishers at Palazzo Bembo, to explore her firm’s new monograph Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Forms. “We’re looking for interesting clues for how we should deal with architecture and nature,” she says. “It’s a chance to share ideas and be open source about what you’re doing.”
Richard Garber’s work also shows good things come in threes. For Time Space Existence at Palazzo Mora, the Weitzman Lecturer and founding partner of GRO Architects is exhibiting projects built in Jersey City and Newark which explore the potentials of micro-housing, modular construction, and adaptive reuse. GRO Architects’ Nest apartment building, for example, includes units just 200-square-feet in area with custom furnishings that easily transform to be used for sleeping, eating, and working. “There’s a mechanized desk that folds out of the wall, and there’s a kind of Murphy-Bed-on-Steroids, where a couch supports a mattress,” Garber says. An Italian company built the furniture for the New Jersey project, and will supply examples in Venice. “Hopefully, it will encourage people to sit, take a load off, and really learn about the project,” he says. “It’s important work for the direction of cities, and we hope to entice them with a piece of furniture.”
The future direction of cities is what animates Hina Jamelle, associate professor of practice in the Department of Architecture at Weitzman and co-founder of Contemporary Architecture Practice, and her second-year Master of Architecture students. Time Space Existence is conceived by organizers as an educational platform, and academic institutions are invited to contribute to the cross-disciplinary dialogue by displaying models, drawings, site-specific installations, videos, and prototypes that addresses this year’s theme of Repair, Regenerate, Reuse. Taking stock of the dramatic shifts in the workplace following the COVID-19 pandemic, Jamelle has curated a selection of projects from the Graduate Urban Housing Studios in an exhibit that addresses the adaptive reuse of commercial office buildings for residential purposes. In keeping with Repair, Regenerate, Reuse’s focus on environmental performance, material innovation, and policy awareness, the exhibited projects support both urban regeneration and social equity.
Weitzman Associate Professor of Architecture Masoud Akbarzadeh is also showing among the palazzos, offering a small-scale version of a large-scale concrete beam which resulted from a three-year collaboration with Sika Group Switzerland. “It illustrates our novel approach to structural design,” says Akbarzadeh, who directs the Polyhedral Structures Lab at Weitzman. “We minimize construction material by 60%, reinforcement by 80%, and use geometric stiffness to gain strength. Robotic concrete 3D printing minimizes waste and creates efficient architectural structures applicable to building systems and infrastructural projects.”
The team at Weitzman's DumoLab Research with one of the bio-based shingles they designed and fabricated for VAMO, a collaboration with MIT and ETH Zurich (photographed on Penn's campus)
Innovation in materials and construction is the focus of VAMO, a joint effort between ETH Zurich and MIT with contributions from Assistant Professor of Architecture Laia Mogas-Soldevila and a team of master’s and PhD students from Weitzman involved with her DumoLab Research. VAMO (an abbreviation for “vegetal—animal—mineral—other”) is an ultra-lightweight, transportable canopy cladded with experimental materials from organic waste, and includes four large-format shingles showcasing DumoLab’s novel cellulose-based lattices. The shingles will be composted in a local forest at the closure of the Biennial. “By embracing disassembly, reuse, and material transformation,” the project’s richly-illustrated publication explains, “VAMO challenges traditional construction practices by envisioning architecture as adaptable, regenerative, biodegradable, and circular.”
Innovative materials and production are also explored in exhibition by Mette Ramsgard Thomsen, the Cret Chair Professor of Practice in the Department of Architecture. A collaboration with the Danish firm 3XM, Thomsen says the installation is intended to explore “how the desire to work in a circular design paradigm allows us to reroute architecture into ideas of locality.” This includes her ongoing research into biopolymer composites as architectural materials, which, she says, can be “waste-based, resilient, and residual material. So: coming out of waste streams, but also streams that are either reclaimed or themselves bio-based.” Her experience teaching studios at Penn has offered abundant inspiration for this. “We’ve been looking at the principles of lifespan thinking and how that upends the fundamental value proposition of architecture,” she says. “But through research projects with the students, we’re coming to understand the resource landscapes around the buildings.” Circular design, she says, “is actually a landscape project.”
As is much of the work of Randy Mason, the director of Weitzman’s Urban Heritage Project and a professor of historic preservation, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture. “The Project,” he says, “works on issues at the intersection of cultural landscapes, built heritage, and social change through multi-disciplinary research and practice.” In Venice, Mason is exhibiting Reflected Heritage, a collaboration with Julie McGilvray, a landscape architect and, until her recent resignation, one of the Project’s main partners at the National Park Service. “Our idea is to deploy forms of data and representation created to document and manage National Park buildings and landscape as virtual cultural landscapes,” he says. “The point-cloud images function both as demonstrations of advanced conservation methods and proxies for actually visiting the places, which we expect will keep changing, be threatened, or become inaccessible.” Landscape design is, in a sense, about change. “The question we ask is about designing change, as opposed to resisting it.”
And, perhaps, how to protect it. “Collectively, in our studios at Penn and in the work we’re doing,” says Marion Weiss, the Graham Professor of Practice in Architecture and co-founder of WEISS/MANFREDI, “we’re interested in really understanding that infrastructures have a public dimension: urban environments near waters’ edges are vulnerable to sea level rise, and indeed all the structures that we built have an impact on a future of sustainably constructed environments.” To deepen that understanding, Weiss is displaying, in the part of the Arsenale devoted to the theme of intelligence, recent projects including the designs for Hunters Point South Waterfront Park in New York City and Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. The former is what she calls “a submersible earthwork, which is also a public park,” while the latter is centered around “a living, breathing glass house.” Both, she says, “create new forms of public nature.” And both are ways of “wondering how we can be much more precise about inhabiting the intersections between infrastructure, architecture, and landscape,” she says. “To build less, actually, but a less that matters, and a less that is resilient and ultimately has impacts on identities that are far-reaching, in terms of protecting our fragile ecosystem—and also supporting, I would say, our equally fragile public life.”
Indeed, public life has rarely felt more threatened than our current moment, particularly in America. It, like a landscape itself, must be nurtured, appreciated, and innovated. These faculty are looking globally for ways to do just this—and they’re also looking locally. “The social and cultural agenda is really strong at Penn,” Dubbeldam says. “The Biennale gives us the chance to actually put it out into the world and say: Well, if you wanted to put us in a box, we would like to escape that box. That’s what we’re working on.”
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