ARCHITECTURE:Amplifying Nature
Architecture as a domain of the collective knowledge of nature and a way of experiencing the planetary scale is the underlying idea of the project “Amplifying Nature” aiming to reconstruct the planetary imagination of architecture and is on presentation in in the Polish Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Polish Pavilion in Venice Archive
Members of Warsaw-based CENTRALA architecture studio have analysed the phenomena of gravity, light oscillation and water circulation in modernist projects created in socialist Poland on the verge of Great Acceleration with an empathy for and understanding of the Earth’s workings. They have also designed two new ones, taking the natural processes hinging on the phenomena: rain and circadian rhythms, as actual matter of architecture. This proposal, which acknowledges that geological and life-sustaining metabolism of the planet are changed by humans in general, points to the local and particular modes of imagining and constructing the collective life. Iza Tarasewicz, who has interpreted the effects of CENTRALA’s research, created an installation that highlights the project’s processual character. Her sculptural representation of the concept of amplifying nature will visualize the fluctuability and scale of the natural phenomena and processes that architectural constructions are subject to, and which constitute their underappreciated constructive element. The exhibition can be approached on three levels. It presents the research on selected 1954–1976 works by affiliates of the Art and Research Unit at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, also these who became known for their later individual practices: Team 10’s Oskar and Zofia Hansen, and visionary Jacek Damięcki. It premieres the new sculptural interpretation of these taken-for-granted processes undergirding both the planet and architecture. In this venture, CENTRALA collaborated with sculptor Iza Tarasewicz to create the affective and materially responsive environment of the exhibition. It also proposes the concept of “Amplifying Nature” capturing this dynamic in various scales and a collection of research materials and interdisciplinary conversations in the book “Amplifying Nature. The Planetary Imagination of Architecture in the Anthropocene”, edited by Anna Ptak. The exhibition takes off from five spatialised locally design assemblies to propose a reconfiguration of the narrative on nature-in-architecture and architecture-in-nature. In their optics the planetary scale: the Earth as geological/pluriversal system supporting life as we know it, is indispensable to go on with architectural thinking.
Info: Curator: Anna, Commissioner: Hanna Wróblewska, Ptak, Deputy Commissioner: Joanna Waśko, organizer: Zachęta-National Gallery of Art Warsaw, Polish Pavilion at the Venice International Architecture Biennale, Sestiere Castello, Giardini della Biennale, Venice, Duration: 26/5-25/11/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, http://labiennale.art.pl and www.labiennale.org
