Michael Marsland/Yale University Photo
Robert Stern, dean, Yale School of Architecture
The Yale School of Architecture will have a significant presence at the Venice Biennale’s 13th Annual Architecture Exhibition, which opens on Aug. 29 and continues through Nov. 25 in Venice.
Yale University announced last month that “Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, has been elected as chair of the international jury for this year’s Venice Biennale.” The jury, the university’s announcement indicated “will choose winners for the Golden Lion for best national participation, the Golden Lion for best project in the international exhibition, and the Silver Lion for a promising young architect in the exhibition.”
In a follow-up news release, Yale announced that the exhibition will also showcase a project conceived by “professor Peter Eisenman, critic Matthew Roman and 14 of their students.”
According to the news release, “Eisenman, the Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice at Yale, and students from his second-year spring seminar, are exhibiting a project that provides a new dimension, literally, to a landmark work by 18th-century engraver, mapmaker, and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720 – 1778). … With access to Piranesi’s original folio, housed in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Eisenman’s students ‘re-invented’ Piranesi’s Rome as a detailed gold-painted 3D-printed model at the scale of the original etching — the first of its kind.”
Yale students’ 3D-printed model of an etching by Piranesi
An introduction to the exhibition by its director, Sir David Chipperfield, explains that “the ambition of Common Ground” — the exhibition’s theme — “is to reassert the existence of an architectural culture, made up not just of singular talents but a rich continuity of diverse ideas united in a common history, common ambitions, common predicaments and ideals. In architecture everything begins with the ground. It is our physical datum, where we make the first mark, digging the foundations that will support our shelter. On the ground we draw the line that defines the boundary of what is enclosed and what is common. Today our relationship to the ground is no longer so direct, but it remains critical to our understanding of our place and where we stand.”
The Yale School of Architecture’s participation in the celebrated exhibition is the result of Chipperfield soliciting a proposal from Eisenman’s eponymous New York-based firm.
According to Yale’s news release, “Eisenman, in turn, invited his Yale students to contribute the historical analysis produced in the seminar as a platform for three contemporary interpretations of Piranesi’s drawing.”
In related news, Yale School of Architecture student Nicholas Hunt was featured in the July issue Metropolis magazine, which reported that Hunt “designed an inserted-armature system to stabilize the aging Arsenal structure in (Venice’s) northeast corner. Once a military shipyard, the Arsenal now finds itself hosting public functions, including the Biennale.”
Learn more about the Venice Biennale here. Visit the 13th Annual Architecture Exhibition website here. And explore the Yale School of Architecture online, here.