As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage, we present the completed Croatian Pavilion. Below, the curatorial team describes the exhibition in their own words.
Cloud Pergola / The Architecture of Hospitality at the Croatian Pavilion is a collaborative site-specific environment conceived by the pavilion curator, Bruno Juričić. as Cloud Pergola is an installation crossing the boundaries of architecture, art, engineering, robotic fabrication, and computational models. The exhibition is structured through an interplay of three interventions: Cloud Drawing by Alisa Andrašek in collaboration with Bruno Juričić, To Still the Eye by Vlatka Horvat, and
Ephemeral Garden by Maja Kuzmanović.
In the cultural context of the Mediterranean, the typology of the pergola, as a minor architectural element, maps a specific experience. A simple, elementary, vernacular structure, which performs a vivid spatial gesture, it inhabits the space in-between private and public, acting as a conduit between the man-made and the natural environment, as well as providing shade and shelter from the sun. The installation promotes a notion of hospitality as experienced under the pergola, using the position that the role of boundaries, either physical or non-physical, is no longer to enclose space, or police its limits, but rather to form tissue for osmotic exchange. Furthermore, it recognizes the active participation of non-human forces in “events,” and an understanding that the agency of space exceeds human intentions.
The Cloud Drawing installation by architects Alisa Andrasek and Bruno Juričić uses computational models, robot fabrication and big data, as mediums to create a new kind of spatial structure—an n-dimensional microstructure that brings into dynamic relation natural forces and human intervention. By mathematically capturing the complexity and beauty of cloud formation, the installation integrates site-specific weather data into a synthesis of novel tectonics, complex porosity, light filtering and shadow casting.
The Cloud Drawing installation measures 3.3m in height and covers an area of 57.6sqm, making it one of the world’s largest and most complex structures to be 3D printed entirely by robots. Formed of 300 kilograms of 3D printed bio-degradable plastic, the pavilion cloud-like structure is formed of voxels oriented along a field of vectors designed by using a multi-agent algorithm. Arup provided structural guidance throughout all phases of the design in the definition of the voxels and in the analysis of the complex structure made of more than 100,000 extruded elements. Arup collaborated with the 3D manufacturing team of Ai-Build to develop a simple assembly sequence for the complex and delicate piece which is meant to be touring various exhibition spaces after its passage at the Venice Biennale 2018. Skira Architectural Lighiting developed a programmable dynamic light design.
A wall-based work titled To Still the Eye by visual artist Vlatka Horvat comprises a series of drawings made by bare feet immersed in an acrylic wash. Manifested as a trace of the body’s journey across paper, the work explores the notion of the horizon as a physical manifestation of distance, an endpoint destination for the eye, and a metaphor for the future and for a sense of possibility.
Transdisciplinary artist Maja Kuzmanović proposes a sound installation titled Ephemeral Garden that evokes a sense of convivial gatherings under a pergola. The murmur of conversation, complemented with the sound of animated matter, conjures a space where human and non-human voices intermingle.
The interplay of the three interventions creates new complex ecologies by inviting previously unrelated subjects and objects, people and things, to come into contact with each other in a way that exceeds language, self-identity, rigid conceptual determination, ideology, or political declaration. Ultimately, Cloud Pergola creates space whereby new sensations, new thoughts, and new social realities may develop, whilst proposing an expanded notion and experience of “hospitality”, something that Predrag Matvejević calls “The Mediterranean Alternative.”
Curator: Bruno Juričić
Curatorial Advisor: Branka Benčić
Commissioner: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia Nina Obuljen Koržinek, minister
Coordinated By: Nevena Tudor Perković
Organized By: Moderna galerija – National museum of modern art, Zagreb (Biserka Rauter Plančić, director)
EXHIBITED WORKS:
Cloud Drawing: Alisa Andrasek in coll. with Bruno Juricic
Ephemeral Garden: Maja Kuzmanovic. in collaboration with Nik Gaffney
To Still the Eye: Vlatka Horvat
EXHIBITION PRODUCTION & DESIGN TEAM
Exhibition Author: Bruno Juričić
Programming: Madalin Gheorghe
Structural Design: Arup Group Limited (Henry Unterreiner, Peter Lenk, Carolina Bartram, James Griffith)
Robotic Fabrication: Ai-Build (Daghan Cam, Michail Desyllas, Leonidas Leonidou)
Light Design: Skira Architectural Lighting (Dean Skira, Dean Matika, Godvin Poropat)
Fabrication Material: FormFutura
Visual Identity: Bunch
Light Fixtures: Intra-Lighting
Update: The text of this article was replaced on June 7th 2018 at the request of the curator, Bruno Juričić. The previously published text, which was also provided by individuals connected to the pavilion, focused only on the Cloud Drawing installation and was therefore replaced by text that addressed all the elements of the pavilion.
