Maverick Scots architects take a fresh look at the Venice Biennale

Arts Correspondent

Monday 10 September 2012

Up-and-coming architects from Scotland have taken a maverick approach at the world's largest showcase of its kind and displayed a number of small-scale community projects in a bid to beat the recession.

off-beat: Projects by Stone Opera, above, and DO, left, represent a revival of the 'community architecture' popular in the 1970s.

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Phil Miller Arts Correspondent In venice

The young professionals have taken a fresh approach at the Venice Biennale of Architecture and shunned ambitious design plans or extravagant models of the kind usually on show.

In the most off-beat display at the festival, they have allowed children to build their own homes from cardboard blocks, organised a community banquet and carried a large portable gallery through the city. A balloon has also been floated over a lagoon.

Ian Gilzean, chief architect at the Scottish Government, said their work on "event or community architecture" was the way forward for a profession still hamstrung by the downturn in new building. Such "community architecture", which aims to place more importance on people than plans on drawing board, was demonstrated in the display of four Glasgow-based architecture companies, DO, GRAS, Pidgin Perfect and Stone Opera, at Scotland's contribution to the Biennale this weekend. The projects in Venice, funded by the British Council, Creative Scotland and the Scottish Government, are the kind of architectural practice that was popular in Scotland in the 1970s and is now making a comeback due to the recession, the architects said. Stone Opera worked with three local schools, with children aged five to 12, using 5000 cardboard building blocks to allow them to erect their own buildings, a learning process that the architects, Kathy Li and Hanneke Scott Van Well, hope can be used in Scotland. The Banchetto or open-air community banquet organised by Pidgin Perfect, led by Dele Adeyemo and partners Marc Cairns and Becca Thomas, brought together people from the Castello, a working-class area of the city that usually is detached from the Biennale festivities, and resulted in a filmed night of theatrical discussion and song that festival project director Jonathan Charley said could be replicated throughout Scotland. He said "It is vital these ideas are repeatable and transportable, so I can see Banchetto idea working as well in Drumchapel and Wester Hailes as it has here. "I think we have set a benchmark here that can only be good for Scotland." GRAS moved a polystyrene gallery space around the city and placed it over some of the more than 6700 wells in Venice, to draw attention to a once vibrant but now abandoned architectural feature. Mr Charley said he could envision the gallery, a circular structure that can be quickly dismantled and carried, placed over similarly ignored or decommissioned features in Scottish cities, such as public toilets, telephone boxes or closed letter boxes. Kathy Li, of Stone Opera, said: "There will always be a role for big characters and big buildings, but this kind of working is a way forward." Mr Gilzean said the fresh wave of ideas had come in response to the tougher economic climate. He added: "During the boom years, financing for all sorts of projects was available, there were big public-sector programmes, but we have had about four years of quite severe challenges for architectural practices. "So younger practices like DO or Pidgin Perfect have set themselves up in a different way. Its not necessarily a new phenomenon, but its coming back because of the economic circumstances we are in."

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Maverick Scots architects take a fresh look at the Venice Biennale

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