University Team Weaves With Wood In The Biennale Architettura In Venice
After a year of uncertainty, the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of the La Biennale di Venezia in 2021 has opened, and features the installation Learning from Trees: transforming timber culture in Aotearoa from the School of Architecture and Planning, University of Auckland.
Learning with Trees
La Biennale di Venezia, or Architecture
Biennale, is the leading and longest-running architectural
event in the world, and runs in alternate years to the Art
Biennale, with more than 60 countries participating.
It
is an invitation for architects and designers to explore
questions and possible solutions to respond to current
social and environmental pressures. Each pavilion is curated
in response to an overall theme, which in 2021 is “how
will we live together?”.
Unusually, the School
was invited to exhibit in the Italian Pavilion, which is
curated by Professor Alessandro Melis, a former staff member
at the School of Architecture and Planning.
The theme for
the Italian Pavilion is ‘resilient communities’, which
is reflected in the team’s installation, Learning from
Trees: transforming timber culture in Aotearoa. It was
designed to showcase the opportunities offered by the use of
timber as a building material, especially in terms of carbon
sequestration and earthquake resistance.
Learning from
Trees is a complex lattice-like 35m2 structure that
looks as if it has been woven, only out of wood. It is
comprised of 436 ‘sticks’, 287 brackets and, if the
sticks were lined up end-to-end, 1.2 kilometres of timber.
Crossing through the enclosure is a long seating bench made
from digitally-tooled kauri, rescued from a former Housing
New Zealand house and which highlights the potential of
salvaged and refurbished timber.
Learning from
Trees draws on New Zealand’s history of building with
timber, both our colonial and well as Pacific architectural
provenance, which is sometimes described as ‘stick
architecture’.
“But new technologies, such as BIM
[Building Information Modelling] is allowing us to model and
construct with wood in a way that would not be possible by
hand,” says Dr Michael Davis, School of Architecture and
Planning and a member of the project team. “So this is a
way to draw attention to new ways of working with wood that
has been made possible by new technologies and fabrication
techniques, that builds on and advances our manual and craft
traditions.”
Timber is having an international
renaissance, particularly as a sustainable building
material, says team leader Associate Professor Kathy
Waghorn, formerly of the School of Architecture and Planning
and now at the Auckland University of Technology.
“There’s an increasing recognition of the need for a
sustainable material that can add to rather than take from
carbon storage, which is what trees do.”
“As we
recognise the importance and urgency for New Zealand to
achieve the 2030 United Nations’ Sustainable Development
Goals and the targets of the Paris Agreement, the building
industry needs to reflect on the role and impacts of
constructions holistically” says Associate Professor Paola
Boarin, School of Architecture and Planning and member of
the project team. “Timber provides the opportunity to
achieve both high quality architecture and reduced carbon
footprints in our cities, and the abundance of this
material, as well as the dominant timber construction
culture, places New Zealand in a unique position.”
The
team spent much of the summer of 2020 testing the
methodology of the construction of the exhibition – how to
fit all the pieces together. They also timed themselves.
“We estimated that it would take about ten days to
construct the timber pavilion in Venice,” says Dr
Waghorn.
The installation of many, many parts was shipped
off to Venice in February 2020, with each of the 426
‘sticks’ given a unique label, and each package of
sticks weighed to ensure that it can be carried by two
people. Unfortunately, the covid-19 pandemic had put the
Biennale Architettura on hold and the installation has been
sitting in the Venice Arsenale since it reached the Italian
shores in April 2020.
In recent weeks the New Zealand and
Italian teams worked together with the Biennale technical
team to oversee the construction of the installation
remotely, ready for the opening on 22 May.
Exhibiting in
the Italian pavilion means the installation will be seen by
thousands of people from around the world, it being one the
most popular and most central pavilions, at an event in
which space is sought after and hard to come
by.
“It’s very unusual for a university from
outside Italy to be invited to exhibit in the Italian
pavilion,” says Dr Waghorn, “but Alessandro Melis taught
at the School, and was extremely interested in the
country’s traditions in working with timber, and our
research on the material”.
New Zealand is
well-positioned, both in our ability to sustainably grow
timber as a building material and with our timber-orientated
construction culture which has fostered innovations in
fabrication techniques and the use of new
technologies.
This is a rare New Zealand presence at the
La Biennale di Venezia. In 2014 and 2016, New Zealand’s
participation was supported and organised by the New Zealand
Institute (NZIA); Dr Waghorn was co-director of New
Zealand’s “Future Islands” exhibition in 2016.
The
School was also invited to participate in a student
competition in the 5th Architecture Biennale in 1991 and was
awarded the Venice Prize (a ‘best-in-show”, an
equivalent to the current Golden Lion). The students who
worked on that project included Andrew Barrie, now a
Professor at the School and a member of the Learning From
Trees team.
The School’s – that is, New
Zealand’s — participation in 2021 has been supported by
the Italian Government, the University of Auckland’s
Faculty Research and Development Fund, the School of
Architecture and Planning’s Performance-Based Research
Fund, and through product sponsorship from Abodo, an
Auckland-based architectural timber supplier, and Spax, a
specialist for connection technology.
The 17th edition of
the La Biennale di Venezia runs from 22 May to 21 November
2021.
Read more at the official website of the Italian Pavilion 2021 and La Biennale.