O’Donnell + Tuomey

Folding Landscape / East and West, Biennale 2018

Venice

Italy

Freespace gives emphasis to generosity and spatial involvement, to physical presence, to forward thinking about lasting values in history and future time, to the social and topographical aspects of architecture.Our installation, designed in response to the curators’ manifesto, combines common aspects of two compatible projects. The installation plays on similarity and difference, getting inside the ideas and outside the form of two quite different designs, made for utterly different waterside locations, and at wildly different scales; a current project in the West of Ireland and a recent competition finalist in China.

Area:

37m2

Address:

Corderie dell'Arsenale, Venice

GPS:

45.433256° N, 12.354986° E

Start Year:

2017

End Year:

2018

Exhibitions:

Folding Landscape / East and West

Venice, Italy, 26th May - 25th Nov 2018

Related Media:

Casabella Lecture, 01.12.2020

Mackintosh School of Architecture Lecture, The Index of Influence: O'Donnell and Tuomey, 23.10.2020

Rencontre avec O’Donnell + Tuomey, 06.11.2019

Folding Landscape: Venice Biennale, 2018

Folding Landscape: Venice Biennale design concept, 2018

At scale 1:2, a civic space, for public gatherings and studio retreat, sited at the end of a pier in Connemara. At scale 1:10, a city of opera, with interlocking foyers, theatres and roof-gardens, located at a bend in the river in Shanghai.

The visitor will notice the matching roof-scape of both projects, their sawtooth skylines rising between the columns of the Corderie. A central stair leads towards a south-facing window. Climbing up the sunlit passageway, between seemingly similar elements, a viewing point allows you to look out through the old high window, then a second stair leads you down again to divide your direction, eastward, to see into the Shanghai opera house section, or westward, to walk into the volume of the Roundstone gathering hall.

The installation might also be understood in a different sense, full-size at scale 1:1, as a testament to our own experience of whitewashed monastery chapels in Greek mountain landscapes, where built ground is integrated with building form, where east meets west.