02/09/2010
VENICE IN PERIL
Marcus Field, Evening Standard, 3 September 2010
There is a very large puddle outside the British Pavilion at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. 'It's a very beautiful puddle,' says Vicky Richardson, the director of architecture at the British Council who is in charge of organising the pavilion. 'Somebody has been making it out of concrete for four days.' This is the first outward sign that something strange is going on at the British entry for the Biennale, a vast international jamboree, where architects from 54 countries are currently showing their work. Most exhibits are in national pavilions in the Giardini di Castello, the official showground on the edge of Venice. But the London-based art/ architecture collective Muf has occupied the British Pavilion - a former tea-house acquired by the British government in 1909 - and subverted it to create a fairground haunted house, re-christening the neo-classical building 'Villa Frankenstein'.
Inside, things get weirder. The entrance hall is filled with a giant model of the London Olympic Stadium. In a gallery are notebooks and drawings of Venice by the Victorian sage and critic John Ruskin. An archive of photos of the city fills another room. At the rear of the building, 24 stuffed birds from the Venice Natural History Museum perch alongside a huge glass tank containing a slice of real Venetian salt marsh, complete with tidal movements.
Welcome to Muf world, a dreamy wonderland where everything is more than it seems. As the UK exhibit at the Biennale, Muf has turned the pavilion into a live event, inviting artists, scientists and visitors to investigate the contrasting conditions of Venice and London.
'People have big plans for Venice all the time, so it mirrors London,' explains Muf founding partner Liza Fior. 'But our motto is to slow down and look at the assets you already have before you do anything new.' This painstaking approach has been Muf's habitual mode since the practice was set up by four women in 1995 (largely staffed by women, they now employ men too). Artists and architects by training, the original partners were friends with an academic interest in public space. But rather than just talking or writing about it, they wanted to shape it.
Fifteen years later (the two remaining partners, Fior and artist Katherine Clarke, are now in their forties) a raft of imaginative and irreverent projects have made Muf famous, and infamous, in architectural circles. Highlights include working with Armitage Shanks to make ceramic benches for Stoke called Pleasure Garden of the Utilities, grazing sheep on a London housing estate, and being sacked from the Millennium Dome for insubordination.
More recently Muf has worked in Dalston to improve its public spaces. The results so far range from a temporary windmill and a wheatfield, to a wooden barn as a meeting place. In Barking town square Muf has created an 18th-century Romantic landscape complete with a brick folly. The square has won an award for the best new public space in Europe.
These projects would not make a practice rich, or even viable, so Muf's interests are diverse. Fior and Clarke are visiting professors at Yale, and Muf's other work includes exhibition design for the Tate Galleries, talks and consultancy.
Back in Venice, Fior describes Villa Frankenstein as 'speeded-up Muf' as their projects generally take several years. Over the three months of the Biennale, the contents of the pavilion will begin to make sense as props for projects about Venice. So the model of the Olympic Stadium is a space for drawing workshops and discussions about the future of the city. The Ruskin notebooks and photo archive are part of an installation by the German artist Wolfgang Scheppe. The salt marsh and the birds are the focus of study by Venice-based scientist Jane da Mosto about the protection of this habitat. And the puddle is by artist Lottie Child, who worked with Venetian children to find out how they use the city's changing conditions (including floods) as their playground. The exchange of ideas between London and Venice has already had some impact at home, where Muf is tweaking public spaces around the Olympic village and the Royal Docks. 'We are thinking about how water can become part of everyday life in London,' says Fior.
Presiding over Villa Frankenstein is the spirit of John Ruskin, whose painstaking study of Venetian architecture, The Stones of Venice, led to the popularisation of the neo-gothic style in Britain. This he lived bitterly to regret, fleeing his home in South London in 1872 to escape the pseudo-Venetian houses and pubs which he called 'accursed Frankenstein monsters of, indirectly, my own making'.
What would Ruskin have made of Muf? His horror of the female body aside, he would have approved. 'The greatest glory of a building is in its age,' he wrote, preferring existing architecture to anything new. And this, says Fior, is why Villa Frankenstein's name should convey a note of caution about any ideas it may generate, lest any monsters should escape. 'You always have to be careful what you wish for.'
They have rechristened the neo-classical building 'Villa Frankenstein'.
There is a very large puddle outside the British Pavilion at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. 'It's a very beautiful puddle,' says Vicky Richardson, the director of architecture at the British Council who is in charge of organising the pavilion. 'Somebody has been making it out of concrete for four days.' This is the first outward sign that something strange is going on at the British entry for the Biennale, a vast international jamboree, where architects from 54 countries are currently showing their work. Most exhibits are in national pavilions in the Giardini di Castello, the official showground on the edge of Venice. But the London-based art/ architecture collective Muf has occupied the British Pavilion - a former tea-house acquired by the British government in 1909 - and subverted it to create a fairground haunted house, re-christening the neo-classical building 'Villa Frankenstein'.
Inside, things get weirder. The entrance hall is filled with a giant model of the London Olympic Stadium. In a gallery are notebooks and drawings of Venice by the Victorian sage and critic John Ruskin. An archive of photos of the city fills another room. At the rear of the building, 24 stuffed birds from the Venice Natural History Museum perch alongside a huge glass tank containing a slice of real Venetian salt marsh, complete with tidal movements.
Welcome to Muf world, a dreamy wonderland where everything is more than it seems. As the UK exhibit at the Biennale, Muf has turned the pavilion into a live event, inviting artists, scientists and visitors to investigate the contrasting conditions of Venice and London.
'People have big plans for Venice all the time, so it mirrors London,' explains Muf founding partner Liza Fior. 'But our motto is to slow down and look at the assets you already have before you do anything new.' This painstaking approach has been Muf's habitual mode since the practice was set up by four women in 1995 (largely staffed by women, they now employ men too). Artists and architects by training, the original partners were friends with an academic interest in public space. But rather than just talking or writing about it, they wanted to shape it.
Fifteen years later (the two remaining partners, Fior and artist Katherine Clarke, are now in their forties) a raft of imaginative and irreverent projects have made Muf famous, and infamous, in architectural circles. Highlights include working with Armitage Shanks to make ceramic benches for Stoke called Pleasure Garden of the Utilities, grazing sheep on a London housing estate, and being sacked from the Millennium Dome for insubordination.
More recently Muf has worked in Dalston to improve its public spaces. The results so far range from a temporary windmill and a wheatfield, to a wooden barn as a meeting place. In Barking town square Muf has created an 18th-century Romantic landscape complete with a brick folly. The square has won an award for the best new public space in Europe.
These projects would not make a practice rich, or even viable, so Muf's interests are diverse. Fior and Clarke are visiting professors at Yale, and Muf's other work includes exhibition design for the Tate Galleries, talks and consultancy.
Back in Venice, Fior describes Villa Frankenstein as 'speeded-up Muf' as their projects generally take several years. Over the three months of the Biennale, the contents of the pavilion will begin to make sense as props for projects about Venice. So the model of the Olympic Stadium is a space for drawing workshops and discussions about the future of the city. The Ruskin notebooks and photo archive are part of an installation by the German artist Wolfgang Scheppe. The salt marsh and the birds are the focus of study by Venice-based scientist Jane da Mosto about the protection of this habitat. And the puddle is by artist Lottie Child, who worked with Venetian children to find out how they use the city's changing conditions (including floods) as their playground. The exchange of ideas between London and Venice has already had some impact at home, where Muf is tweaking public spaces around the Olympic village and the Royal Docks. 'We are thinking about how water can become part of everyday life in London,' says Fior.
Presiding over Villa Frankenstein is the spirit of John Ruskin, whose painstaking study of Venetian architecture, The Stones of Venice, led to the popularisation of the neo-gothic style in Britain. This he lived bitterly to regret, fleeing his home in South London in 1872 to escape the pseudo-Venetian houses and pubs which he called 'accursed Frankenstein monsters of, indirectly, my own making'.
What would Ruskin have made of Muf? His horror of the female body aside, he would have approved. 'The greatest glory of a building is in its age,' he wrote, preferring existing architecture to anything new. And this, says Fior, is why Villa Frankenstein's name should convey a note of caution about any ideas it may generate, lest any monsters should escape. 'You always have to be careful what you wish for.'
They have rechristened the neo-classical building 'Villa Frankenstein'.
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