Venice Biennale 2010.

Photographs if the Hungarian Pavilion Patricia Parinejad. Beautiful installation using humble wood pencils. Love.

The 12th International Architecture Exhibition is being held until 21st November 2010 at the Giardini and at the Arsenale, and in various other venues in Venice. Entitled ‘People meet in Architecture’, the participating 48 international firms, architects, engineers and artists are illustrating their positions regarding the interaction of new social and natural environments.

The Venice Biennale has for over a century been one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world. Established in 1895, the Biennale has an attendance today of over 370,000 visitors at the Art Exhibition.

This year the 12th International Architecture Exhibition is directed by Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA (she is also this year’s Pritzker Prize winner… this may be inappropriate, but she is my intellectual girl crush material). As the first female director of Venice’s architecture biennale, Sejima’s intention is to explore the relationship between architecture and new lifestyles and values in society. “The idea is to help people relate to architecture, to help architecture relate to people, and to help people relate to themselves… In the end, we would be happy if, thanks to this exhibition, we could feel where our society might be going, what dreams the future might hold for us” said Sejima.

For more information visit the Biennale’s website, or follow the videos via YouTube uploader at Biennale Channel.

Here’s a pick of some of my favourite pavilions and installations this year.

I wish I was going dammit. Has anyone ever been to the Venice Biennale? Is it amazing? Must be.

Floating Croatian pavilion was based on the idea of Mirage, a naturally occurring optical phenomenon in which light rays are bent to produce a displaced image of distant objects or the sky. Pavilion was designed by a group of 14 leading Croatian architects, who have made the recent Croatian architecture visible on the global scene.

“Cloud Spaces” by Transsolar + Tetsuo Kondo, a delicate steel ramp onto which visitors walk up high into the space through a cloud of saturated air and condensation droplets.

Lisbon firm Aires Mateus Architects are exhibiting these houses with sandy floors, photographed by Nelson Garrido. Called Casa Areia, the project comprises seaside accommodation made of wooden frames covered in natural fibres. Sand covers the floor in the kitchen and living space, connecting them to the beach and landscape outside. Bedrooms are housed in separate structures.

Toronto architect Philip Beesley has installed a forest of acrylic leaves that move as though breathing inside the Canada pavilion. Called Hylozoic Ground, the installation is covered in sensors, microprocessors, mechanical joints and filters.

Visitors to the Polish pavilion launch themselves off a pile of birdcages into a sea of artificial clouds. Called Emergency Exit, the installation by Agnieszka Kurant and Aleksandra Wasilkowska consists of empty metal cages stacked up to form the jumping platform, smoke machines and a neon sign spelling out ‘Emergency Exit’. The pavilion was curated by Elias Redstone.

Blue-foam model city is suspended in the top half of the Dutch pavilion titled “Vacant NL”. The installation is curated by Rietveld Landscape and aims to highlight the potential of temporarily vacant government space for use by creative enterprises. Top right image shows a drawing created with threads and pins.

Visitors to the Romanian Pavilion are invited to experience the population density of Bucharest. A 94 square-meter box encloses most of the space inside the pavilion, with one person admitted to its interior at a time. Queueing visitors can glimpse the enclosed space through three peep holes in the gap between the enclosure and pavilion walls. The interior is illuminated by a large circular hole in its ceiling.

{via here, here and here}