2018 Biennale of Architecture: British pavilion

Splendid isolation? On the contrary: at this year’s Biennale of Architecture in Venice, Great Britain presents itself as an open, generous country. It’s all thanks to the team of curators – artist Marcus Taylor and the two architects Adam Caruso and Peter St John – who set up and cleared the pavilion in an exhibition entitled ‘Island’. A platform on the roof offers panoramic views. We met with Caruso in Venice to discuss extreme times, the effect of facades and the post-Bauhaus era in Germany.

Mr Caruso, why did you choose the theme of ‘Island’ for your exhibition in the British pavilion? Haven’t you had enough of all the Brexit stuff?

The exhibition does actually refer to Brexit. But nothing in the pavilion or the catalogue speaks explicitly to current politics. If you go to the building in the Giardini, you just see a lot of scaffolding. You’re not quite sure if the British pavilion might be torn down. Does the UK want to leave the Biennale, too? Then you go inside and see that the pavilion is empty.

We are setting a counterpoint between this ostentation building and its national machismo. On the roof, by contrast, we’ve created a completely new area that links to the Grafton ‘Freespace’. It’s a generous space with decorative flooring. You can see the lagoon and the islands from there. We serve tea at four o’clock in the afternoon. We’ve invited all participating countries and organisations to have tea, use the pavilion, and actually many are taking us up on that offer. Our pavilion is an absolutely generous place.

So you are trying to create an image of Great Britain as you would like it to be?

When you consider the characteristics of nations, you see that Great Britain has often been the voice of moderation and tolerance. It used to be a country where extreme points of view could hardly take hold. But we now live in an age of extremes and there are some seriously extreme happenings at the moment.

In the course of your career, you’ve built or renovated a series of exhibition spaces. To what extent has this experience influenced your concept for the pavilion?

It hasn’t really influenced much. It was actually Marcus’ idea as an artist. Our contribution is a temporary piece of architecture, a situation that you experience.

Our knowledge of exhibition spaces played a much bigger role in the Freespace exhibition by Grafton. How and why does one design an exhibition within a large architectural exhibition? That was the question here.

Can you tell us more about your ‘Freespace’ contribution?

The contribution is called ‘The facade is the window to the soul of architecture’. After all, building facades have the greatest effect on people. Whether you want to or not, you have to pass some buildings every day, like on your way to work. This can be a neutral experience. Or perhaps the buildings have a negative effect on you. But in the best case – like here, walking through Venice – the buildings help lift your spirits a bit from deep within at an unconscious level.

And what are you presenting, specifically?

In our ‘Freespace’ section, we are presenting drawings of 22 facades, all current projects of ours. The idea is that these facades are characters that create a certain atmosphere in the city. Underneath these drawings on the lower part of the wall, you see a row of photographs by Philip Heckhausen. They show normal, everyday situations from twelve different European cities. You might recognise several buildings; some of them are even our designs. But there are also lots of usual buildings.

What you see is a constellation of these different buildings that all play a part. That is exactly what makes the identity of the European city.

When the Bremer Landesbank building you designed opened almost two years ago, it caused quite a stir on the German architecture scene because it seemed to revive old contradictions like traditionalism versus modernism. Did you expect that?

We were the only non-Germans who submitted a bid, and the only ones to suggest a brick building – in the middle of Bremen!

That was surprising, of course. It’s a city of UNESCO World Heritage sites, where brick is everywhere to be seen – Bremen is brick! – so why would you build a bank with a white facade render there? But the architect’s job is to create buildings that are meaningful within their context. I don’t think that it was about the reactions to historicism or modernism. But they show that in Germany – with its particular history and the role of architecture in this history – a type of post-Bauhaus modernism is still considered the tried-and-tested, safest way of constructing buildings.

The responses did not surprise me especially. But of course we are glad that the bank building is so popular in the city. Thousands of people visit on open house days. Bremen’s residents understand intuitively that the building fits their city.