International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam
By The Holland Times Friday 11 December 2009, 11:12
What better city to host the International Architecture Biennale than Rotterdam, where beacons like the Erasmus Bridge and the residential Cube Houses make the city one of the world’s epicentres for striking modern architecture.
Now in its fourth year, the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) is an international urban research biennale founded in 2001 to consider architecture as a wide-ranging public concern. Beginning in September and running until 10 January, IABR is a festival of exhibitions, conferences, and lectures devoted to themes in the field of architecture and urbanism.
Linking contemporary Dutch concerns to an international context, IABR serves as a platform between local and global cultures, supporting an international exchange of architectural ideas and encouraging discussion among designers, researchers, academics, artists, politicians, real-estate developers, private investors, social organisations and the public at large.
With three major exhibitions, and an extensive side program of lectures, film screenings, debates, and workshops, the 2009 edition of the IABR embraces the theme of the Open City: Designing Coexistence.
Moreover, IABR explores the notion of how a city can be a lively place of diversity that is socially sustainable, and where people can productively relate to each other culturally, socially, and economically. The question of urban, social cohesion from the point of view of its designer is raised throughout the IABR's many programmes, namely: how can architects make realistic contributions to the sustainable quality of the urban condition?
Centred at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) the IABR’s curator is Dutch architect Kees Christiaanse. When launching the Biennale in September, Christiaanse explained that “the pressures and fears of migration, and the dominance of developers pandering to individualistic or iconic, rather than social, aspirations in architecture, means the notion of an Open City remains a distant one for many cities around the world today.”
According to the IABR programme, an Open City stands for, ‘the unhindered flow of people, goods, and information, both within and beyond the city’s boundaries.” In essence, this is what the itself IABR does for architecture enthusiasts. With five sub-sections of exhibitions (Refuge, Reciprocity, Community, Squat, and Collective) made by architects, artists, and research groups, IABR aims to illuminate situations in which geographical, spatial, typological and socio-cultural conditions reveal the qualities and potential of an Open City.
Amid these exhibitions are many striking public installations: a giant cardboard globe with buildings poking jauntily from it by the Dutch collective Stadt-Igel; Linda Roodenburg’s dinner table set for a banquet, with photos of Rotterdam’s immigrants and descriptions of their experience in the city arranged underneath the glass table top; and the haunting Neotopia, by Swiss artist Manuel Pfrunder, a large two-dimensional map which hypothetically posits the perfectly equal distribution of the world’s resources across 6.4 billion identical islands, and which rather alarmingly tells us all that such “an apocalypse of Justice” would mean we would all have to go hungry 47 days a year.
On a more optimistic note is Madelon Vriesendorp's giant Styrofoam chess set featuring a regiment of generic grey modernist blocks versus a multicoloured, post-modern army of blobs, shards, and chiselled angles.
The largest exhibition at the NAI is dedicated to practical architectural proposals encouraging openness in Rotterdam itself, under the heading Maakbaarheid, meaning 'make-ability' or 'do-ability.' An introductory film tells the story of Rotterdam’s precisely planned, government-run reconstruction after its devastation in World War II, which led to stultifying homogeneity in the city’s housing and planning. The exhibition continues with a photographic catalogue of development projects that highlight Rotterdam's dense, yet spacious housing.
While many domestic concerns continue to speculate about Rotterdam becoming a 'ticking time bomb' triggered by high unemployment and urban alienation, the city is renowned the world over for its varied and intricate architecture, and holds up very well when compared with other modernist, master-planned cities built from scratch such as Warsaw, Brasilia, and Canberra.
Nevertheless, “it is time to destroy the mythology of the Architect as Visionary,” the Maakbaarheid architects proclaim, adding, “We do not believe in making Big Plans, we believe in creating Facts on the Ground. … We cannot afford to wait for the restoration of Big Government.”
The most striking of their plans is Paris-based Atelier Seraji’s proposal for a kind of hyper-High Line for Rotterdam - a continuous green strip of development that would include not just a park for promenades but a little bit of everything: a skate park, swimming pool, wind farm, farmers’ market, housing, studios, and cinema.
INFO BOX
For the first time in 2009, IABR have joined forces with IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam), the world's largest documentary film festival. This year IDFA has compiled a special series of documentaries about cities to be shown during IABR.
Mai Iskander's Garbage Dreams is a beautifully poetic look at disadvantaged people’s direct relationship with the urban environment.
The Zabbaleen people of Cairo are trash collectors and proud of it. This community of around 60,000 Christians inhabit a suburb of Cairo. For generations, they have been collecting, sorting and processing the trash this metropolis produces. They see it not as waste, but as a way of life. The arrival of foreign refuse companies using "modern" trucks is a threat to their continued survival. Suddenly, they are being forced to fight for their trash and it seems there is no future for the young generation. Garbage Dreams follows three boys as they each find their own ways to deal with the new challenges facing them. A social worker tries to make the Zabbaleen people aware of the risks of working with refuse and to solve the problem of their diminishing incomes.
