A mirrored plane mounted on girders that traverse the windows of the Fundaco Marcello building on the Grand Canal was the central object of the Portuguese representation at the Venice Biennale, for which José Gil and Joaquim Moreno were the curators. In a more immediate reading, this element completed the front of the single-floor store building and established continuity in terms of alignment with the adjacent buildings. The use of a mirrored surface added a certain amount of provocation, considering the current trend towards conservatism in Venice; after all, glassed and neutral surfaces are the greatest symbols of the maligned “modern city”.
     The creators of the intervention, Eduardo Souto de Moura and Ângelo de Sousa, have also assumed reference to the famous Robert Venturi drawing featuring a crude building with a huge sign on top of it proclaiming “I am a Monument” (at the time this was a “counter-project” for Boston City Hall). In the course of the creative process, they even considered the possibility of using that phrase, inscribing it on the plane, or an alternative one: “Io Sono un Specchio” (I Am a Mirror, perhaps an unusual cross between Venturi and Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe). Venturi’s drawing is an application of the “decorated shed” theory, a theme from Learning From Las Vegas¹: architecture can be both fancy and basic, given that a superimposed decorative element would make it festive. That is “populist” architecture.
     In Venice the mirrored outdoor element introduced a public dimension to the modest warehouse. However, it did not do so by resorting to graphic or scenographic elements à la Las Vegas, but through the mounting of a curtain wall – precisely the typical image of modern architecture Venturi fought against. Despite this paradox, the reference to the “decorated shed” in this Venetian context was a beautiful homage. In his habitual evocations of Venturi and Aldo Rossi, Souto de Moura speaks of architects who are on the threshold of what is happening today.
     Even if in decline, Venturi, who argued in favour of “common sense”, and Rossi, in favour of “exalted reason”, still have standard bearers. In the Grand Canal, the suspended hypothetical outdoor in front of the Fundaco Marcello was a bow to that final rationality. Further ahead is Filarete’s column, which Rossi refers to in his Scientific Autobiography².
     There is another way of reading the intervention, one that places it firmly within the theme of the Biennale: Out there. Architecture Beyond Building: as the ruin of a curtain wall, the “found” fragment of something greater, a mysterious, enigmatic object that is “out there”. José Gil and Joaquim Moreno opted to interpret “out there” literally as “outside”, which they counterpoised with Out Here: Disquieted Architecture. But “out there” also has other meanings, such as something unknown “at large” or something beyond the norm or fantastic – in colloquial terms, “out of it” or “out of the loop”. The curatorial premises of Aaron Betsky, the exhibition’s general curator, and the set of visionary or “strange” objects exhibited at the Arsenale – and, in particular, the Asymptote Architecture “houses” – pointed in this direction. Betsky proposed an architecture as an “alternative world”, the “continuous revelation of where we are and perhaps who we are”; or also, in that context, a “spectacular architecture” outside the mainstream. Although it was distant from the digital visionarism and that burning desire to be “beyond the building”, the Portuguese installation – by focusing on a mirrored, fragmented and inconclusive plane, on a game of mirrors in the interior of the space, and by gaining expression through the crudity of the means – was decidedly “out there”. If we see the mirrored surface as a recovered fragment, perhaps from a late-modernist building demolished in Mestre or the Lido, we are “beyond the building”, in a spectral architecture, “out there”. Or disquieted, to use the words of the curators.
     From his early works onwards, Souto de Moura has been experimenting with the passage from the neo-plastic system to a system of ruin: each plane that was once limpid, prefabricated or mass-produced now tends to be archaic (in stone), fragmentary, displaced. From the modern totality a few fragments – perhaps phantasms? – have remained, such as this mirror exhibited in Venice. The anxiety over totality and “Miesian” muteness leads to the fragmentation of the ruin; and the ruin is full of meanings; the ruin “speaks”. It is in this circuit that Souto de Moura has been working since the 1980s and it is here that his architecture takes on contemporary expression. The line between the domestic “normality” of “minimal” houses and the strangeness of architecture stripped down to the bone is very fine and sometimes that line is crossed, as is the case here.
     Betsky’s approach at the Biennale referenced “architecture that is strange, useless, out of the ordinary and magnificently absurd”. The mirror on the Grand Canal fits into that “Out there” dimension, even if its references are closer to Roma Interrota – the re-edition of the 1978 exhibition at the Arsenale (including Rossi and Venturi, amongst others) – than the Uneternal City, the prefiguration of the Rome of the future. The pencil, the iron structure and the mirror can be stranger, even if more archaic, than light, sound and effects of the digital discotheque. In Venice, one entered the exhibition space via the area where the counterweights for the large mirrored surface were placed – little dissonances; little shortcuts. |

11th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia
Curators: José Gil and Joaquim Moreno
Conception: Eduardo Souto de Moura and Ângelo de Sousa
14 Septemer to 23 November 2008

______________________________________________

¹ VENTURI, Robert; BROWN, Denise Scott; IZENOUR, Steven. Learning from Las Vegas (rev. ed.). Cambridge Mass. : The MIT Press, 1977.
² ROSSI, Aldo. Autobiografia Cientifica. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1984.