Design That Moves You is proud to be a part of the Venice Architecture Biennale this year! We went to Venice for the inaugural events leading up to opening day. The exhibit will be open to the public from August 29th – November 25th, 2012.
Out of 55 national participants, the US Pavilion was one of 3 Special Mentions (Poland and Russia were the others) in the competition for the Golden Lion for Best Pavilion, which Japan won (commissioner Toyo Ito). This honor is a first for the U.S. at the architecture biennale! Congratulations to all of the designers, architects, organizers and curators who made this come together so well.
We were thrilled to see this review of the biennale in the NY Times- Projects Without Architects Steal the Show by Michael Kimmelman, Sept 11, 2012.
It discusses the strength of the US Pavilion in this excerpt in particular:
“Among national pavilions, each organized independently, Spain, Russia, Germany, Israel, Japan, Britain and a few others have generated some buzz, but the United States deserves the last word.
Every city is a fixer-upper, as one architect puts it in a video running at the pavilion: that’s the American message. “Spontaneous Interventions” is the title of the presentation, which highlights 124 small-scale, often anonymous, mostly collaborative projects to improve cities. They range from pop-up book-shares in disused phone booths to plug-in street furniture for food cart patrons; from portable playgrounds and guerrilla gardens that hijack newspaper-vending boxes for ready-made planters, to flea markets on abandoned lots.
Organized by Cathy Lang Ho, Ned Cramer and David van der Leer for the Institute for Urban Design, along with Michael Sorkin, the institute’s chairman, and Anne Guiney, the show may not be the first but it is the latest and one of the most panoramic surveys of this sort of insurgent, unplanned, provisional, do-it-yourself micro-cultural citizen activism.
That many of the projects here skirt authority and don’t involve architects suggests not that architects aren’t important or that cities don’t depend on top-down plans. It suggests that cities and architects still have a ways to go to catch up with an increasingly restless public’s appetite for better design and better living.”
Stay tuned for future collaborations with other interventionists this fall!
Common Ground Banner for Architecture Biennale
The US Pavilion
Spontaneous Interventions – US Pavilion exhibit
- “Skipping Only Zones” by Design That Moves You
- “Stairway Stories” by Design That Moves You
Spontaneous Interventions exhibit
Design That Moves You 