Venice Travelling Studio Exhibition

The 2018 Venice Travelling Studio took our masters students to the Architecture Biennale in Venice.

Each student was allocated a nation in the Giardini section of the Biennale, and given a ‘hidden history’ which would be incorporated into and shape their final project in whichever way they chose. This exhibition showcases the final projects produced during the studio.

The studio saw masters students observe, document and critically engage with the vanguard of contemporary curatorial practice, which is redefining architectural exhibition making, representation, publicity, museology, and indeed the role of the architect today.

Students engaging with the curatorial practice throughout the Biennale drew on theories of New Institutionalism (the global proliferation of the temporary festival phenomenon – the Venice Biennale being only one), Identity and Curatorship.

This Travelling Studio also focused on the specific context of Venetian practices and the work of Carlo Scarpa, renowned for his many fine modernist buildings within the Veneto region.

As an outcome of this immersive experience, students were required to define, through project, their own attitudes to curatorial practice and its associated expanded field of architectural production.

Studio Leaders: Prof. Alan Pert and Scott Woods

La Biennale Architettura
The first Architecture Biennale was held under the direction of famed Italian architect and theorist Paolo Portoghesi in 1980. Thereafter directors including Aldo Rossi (1985 and 1986), Kazuyo Sejima (2010) and Rem Koolhaas (2014) helped forge the festival’s formidable reputation as a generator and proliferator of new discourses of architecture globally. Such is the importance of La Biennale Architecture, a who’s-who and who-wants-to-be of world architecture collide on the famed pavements of Piazza San Marco, Ponte di Rialto and Punta della Dogana to soak in vast swathes of exhibition, performance and discussion with established and emerging international architects, urbanists, theorists, curators, scholars and many from outside the discipline.