Venice Biennale: Full ten-minute five-screen film installation - OPENSTUDIO
Venice Biennale: Full ten-minute five-screen film installation

The 2018 Venice Architectural Biennale closed in November. To celebrate our participation in this event, we have posted the full ten-minute five screen installation video here. In Venice, the five screens were mounted perpendicular to the walls, were of different sizes, and were offset relative to one another, to give a sense of layered architectural spaces. This film was created by Tatjana Meirelles, in collaboration with the team at Openstudio.

Time

When we design our buildings, we imagine places that will exist in real time, that will weather and age, will contain lives we cannot anticipate, years we will not live to see, people we will never meet. We think of how this particular house will sit in the landscape, we think about cold and heat, the desert sun and the wind that blows from the mountains. We decide how it will be made, the materials that will form its walls and floors, where the openings will be, what they will allow to be seen and what they will conceal, and the way the spaces will be lit as night falls.

Space

We imagine spaces that breathe vertically and out into the landscape, that expand and compress to define different areas, that allow for individuals to retreat and generous groups to gather, for a sense of freedom and choice, unrestricted movement and surprises.

We imagine a house that can flex and splay in response to the complexity of the place in which it sits, that forms an uneven profile against the mountains, that retains an essential purity in its spaces. The building is jointed, tight and loose, screened and layered.

Existence

The house exists in its particular place in the world; birds nest in the pergola and frogs appear in damp plants.

It enables its visitors to develop their awareness of changes in the natural world, and their place within it. Doors, shutters and screens are moved to mediate light and temperature as time passes through days and seasons. It grounds people in that time, that place, that day, and magnifies the intensity of light and darkness, of sunlight moving along the wall as the sun rises, the tracking of shadows across the rough brick floors and the colour of the light on the mountains as the sun sets.