In his 1972 novel Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino described Zora as a city of unforgettable qualities. “The city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember.”
This depiction of the city as a vessel for powerful collective memories is one of the images that has made Calvino’s book a cult classic. You can read Calvino’s linked poems in it as meditative journeys into mystic fiction or as a straight-up tribute to Venice (the book’s narrator is the adventurer Marco Polo, who was Venetian). But, this time around, I’m most intrigued by the Italian writer’s reference to the lightness of a city’s design, like a honeycomb of cells.
A honeycomb of cells, both artificial and organic, dry and wet, is what Canadian architect Philip Beesley will unveil for Canada’s official entry for this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, the most prestigious international event for contemporary architecture. His Hylozoic Ground is a reef of white fronds that will infiltrate the Canadian pavilion within the historic exhibition grounds (Venice’s Giardini Pubblici). It’s a highly speculative piece of artful architecture sweetened by its lightness. In a world made increasingly heavy by urban concrete, Beesley is floating some ideas of next-generation architecture with his diaphanous design, pointing ever so gently toward materials that are light, healing and can potentially renew themselves.
All is not lightness in Venice. A furor has erupted among German architects over whether or not to demolish the country’s Nazi-style pavilion in the Giardini. If the monstrous building is allowed to stand, decades after it was horribly Nazified in 1938, German artists and architects will be permanently punished for the heaviness of their country's past sins.
This weekend, members of Beesley’s team leave Toronto for Venice to begin construction in the Canadian pavilion. Beesley joins them next week, along with some 30 architecture- and art-student volunteers from across Europe. They’re gathering, says Beesley, to participate in a labour-intensive “quilting bee” that will produce an inhabitable kinetic sculpture. Hylozoic Ground is electronically wired to recoil from or reach out to a visitor. Architecture that feels? Not yet. But design might some day show its feelings toward human beings and respond emotionally. Given that we’re drowning in lifeless, aesthetically bankrupt architecture, that’s an ambition worth exploring.
For now, as experienced recently during a sneak preview at the Design Exchange in downtown Toronto, the beautiful mutant designs by Beesley move unpredictably and without warning. The lightweight components are made of acrylic – true, that’s an eco-pity – and the myriad pieces are fitted with microprocessors and proximity sensors. Imagine tens of thousands of white fronds and whiskers responding shyly in an exhibition hall packed with people.
Throughout the ages, architecture has almost always been heavy – firmly rooted in principles of solidity and durability. But Hylozoic Ground has its creative roots in the study of geotextiles begun some 15 years ago when Beesley, then a young Prix de Rome scholar, was assisting with excavations on the Palatine, the spread of hilltops that overlooks the ancient Roman Forum. Since then, he’s created lightweight geodesic systems that seem to float above or grow out of the ground. For Haystack Veil (1998), Beesley cut and bundled 30,000 sapling twigs, applying his obsessive passion for finding new forms of architecture to construct a rustic perforated blanket, measuring one-quarter of an acre, on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Maine.
