At the gardens of the Arsenale designed by Piet Oudolf, a small pavilion, the Casa Scaffali, encloses a fantastic world of smells, textures and artifacts, a Wunderkammer (wonder-room) curated by NY-based Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.

A special group of architects and artists from around the world were invited to share the artifacts that inspire them, shipped in boxes to the Biennale.

We had the chance to interview Tod Williams and Billie Tsien during the opening of Wunderkammer, and we also got a chance to see them both and their team setting up the installation during the previous days, a special atmosphere as they were opening these boxes now turned into chests full of surprises.

The group includes Anthony Ames, Marwan Al Sayed, Matthew Baird, Shigeru Ban, Marlon Blackwell, Will Bruder, Wendell Burnette, Johan Celsing, Taryn Christoff and Martin Finio, Annie Chu and Rick Gooding, W.G. Clark, Brad Cloepfil, Chen Chen and Kai Williams, Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio and Charles Renfro, Peter Eisenman, Steven Holl, Stephen Iino, Toyo Ito, Bijoy Jain, Claudy Jongstra, Diébédo Francis Kéré, Jennifer Luce, Thom Mayne, Richard Meier, Murray Moss, Glenn Murcutt and Wendy Lewin, Enrique Norten, Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey, Juhani Pallasmaa, Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam, Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe, Karen Stein, Elias Torres and José Antonio Martínez Lapeña, Ursula Von Rydingsvard, and Peter Zumthor.

Text from the architects after the break:

During the 13th Venice Biennale we had the chance to interview Spanish architect Juan Herreros, founder of Herreros Arquitectos (full interview in a following post).

The exhibit Dialogue Architecture aims to expose the complex relations that happen behind the scenes of a project, part of the technical aspects of architecture from where innovation informs the creative side of it.

More about the exhibit after the break.

For the Venice Biennale, a group of 20 Peruvian architects (with no state support) presented a reflection on one of the most interesting territorial projects in South America. After 80 years in construction, a 20km tunnel connecting the Amazon to the dry region of the Pacific Andes has been completed, a tremendous infrastructure project that will turn this region into a new fertile land.

The “Olmos Transandino Project” will be ready in early 2013, and will attract more than 250,000 people with agriculture jobs (you can see more at Build it Bigger). However, despite this incumbent massive migration, there is no urban planning project on the country’s agenda, leaving one big question still to be answered: what should this territory, with its new urban quality, be like? That’s what a group of 20 architects from different backgrounds and ages set out to present at the “Yucun or Inhabitat the Desert” exhibit at the Biennale.

Each office worked on a 25ha site for three months, coordinating with their “neighbours” to create a unified urban fabric, which is represented with 1:1000 models.

The most important part of the firms’ research was their historical investigation into the region’s ancient Moche culture, a civilization that built astonishing abobe cities, as well as the first irrigation systems, 2,000 years ago. Inspired by Moche traditions, the firms generated a plan that would provide a sustainable future to this new territory.

More from the curator of the exhibit after the break:

Architects: Burgos & Garrido arquitectos Location: Madrid, Spain Architects In Charge: Alberto Pieltain, Justo Fernández-Trapa Collaborators: Saúl García, Ángeles García, Agustín Martín, Almudena Carro, Beatriz Amán, Pilar Recio, Alberto López, Héctor Pérez Project Year: 2008 Photographs: Ángel Baltanás

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Last year, thanks to a photo essay by architecture photographer Iwan Baan featured in the New York Magazine, the world became aware of a dramatic urban context in Caracas, Venezuela, the result of a lack of available housing: The Torre David (David Tower). The tower, built as the headquarters of the Confinanzas Group during the economic boom of the 90s, was left unfinished after the company went bankrupt in 1994, placing the building in a murky legal void where its ownership was put into question. Since 2000, the tower has suffered looting and decay; the public take-over culminated with the occupation of the tower by more than 2,500 people in 2007.

For over a year, Urban-Think Tank studied how the tower’s mixed-use occupation worked, with improvised apartments, shops, and even a gym on the terrace. The community operates under the strict rules imposed by the informal tenants, who have been accused by many Venezuelans of being nothing more than criminals.

Invited by curator Justin McGuirk, Urban-Think Tank recreated ‘Gran Horizonte’, a restaurant in the Torre de David, at the Arsenale of the Venice Biennale. The restaurant serves the same traditional food as the original, while photos by Iwan Baan reveals tenants’ day-to-day lives, immersing visitors into the tower.

The installation explores how the informal settlement works in ways the building’s architect never would have conceived, and posits that the informal dynamics found in emerging countries could serve as a vital source of innovation and experimentation for urban problems in our hyper-urbanized world.

The project has been highly controversial among the Venezuelan architecture community, as shown by the letters and articles in local newspapers reproduced at the installation, and on the Internet. Most of these letters’ authors claim that the project supports the illegal occupation and depicts a distorted image of Venezuela’s reality. But, on the other hand, the Venezuela Pavilion at the Biennale showed only cheerful paintings and images of propaganda, avoiding its purpose: to critically observe and stir debate. The controversy between the two visions only further highlights the current polarity in Venezuelan society, particularly on this issue of urbanization.

For this project, Justin McGuirk, Urban-Think Tank, and Iwan Baan were awarded with the Golden Lion by the Biennale’s Jury.

More from the architects after the break:

The master plan presented by Vittorio Magnano Lampugnani at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition is for a private company, even though it operates at city scale. Designed for the Swiss pharmaceutical and biotechnology company Novartis, it demanded a balanced response to the needs of industry, commerce, and human interaction, as well as the rationalization of a site that had advanced, unplanned, for a century. The plan also required finding a common ground between the approaches of many architecture practices from around the world: individual buildings are to be designed and constructed by architects such as Peter Märkli, Diener & Diener, SANAA, and David Chipperfield. Lampugnani’s vision is represented here in the form of a large-scale model, allowing visitors to appreciate its scale, complexity, and careful poise.

The artists in this installation share, with Thomas Demand, a very particular attitude towards models, which stems from their engagement with architecture. Models, according to Demand, are ways of understanding the environment without the distraction of a multitude of diverging stimulations. They are pieces of cultural technology.

Architects: BAUEN Location: Luque, Paraguay Architect In Charge: Aldo Cristaldo Kegler Project Year: 2012 Project Area: 600 sqm Photographs: Marcelo Jiménez, Mónica Matiauda

For the 13th Venice Biennale, Norman Foster was invited to create two exhibitions. On the one hand, there’s Central Pavilion, “Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank HQ”, specifically commissioned by David Chipperfield, which presents how a public space, created by physically lifting a tower to make a space at its base, has been used by people over time.

On the other hand, we find“Gateway.” Located at the beginning of the Arsenale, it is one of the first spaces the public encounters at the Biennale. In this installation, viewers are presented with an intense dose of images and words, representing different types of buildings and spaces, criss-crossed with the names of the architects, designers and planners that have influenced our built environment over the years.

We had the chance to interview Norman Foster, who tells us more about “Gateway” in this video. Full interview coming tomorrow!

More about this exhibit after the break:

This exhibition, curated by London-based Sergison Bates Architects, explores the common spaces between the public city and the private room. It considers six recent social housing projects in six cities: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Geneva, Paris, Trondheim and Winterthur. The work, by six different practices, reveals an interconnected culture of thought and practice, a common ground of influence and affinities that extends back to past practitioners and typological precedent.

Since its opening in January 2011 we have presented two articles related to this project designed by Frank Gehry, home for the New World Symphony founded by renowned american director Michael Tilson Thomas. Today we have this great video that Cristobal Palma just shared with us, for a better understanding of the spaces and surroundings.

You can check some more videos by Cristobal Palma at ArchDaily:

How to think about today’s architecture, captured in the pragmatic flows of changing society? Can architecture once more be captivating, romantic, humanistic, visionary, and everyday at the same time? It appears that today’s architecture is becoming increasingly complex and ambiguous, and thus increasingly manipulative. It is lost in the cloud of the everyday. But how can architecture be seen again in its elementary correlations, geometry, form, use? To be derived from the specific, idiosyncratic, everyday, and face the timeless, resistant level. How to find the vertical of the everyday? The everyday that makes sense only if it is reflected in the sublime.

More from exhibitor Metamak – Architectural Collective after the break.

Yes, it could begin this way, right here, just like that, in a rather slow and ponderous way, in this neutral place that belongs to all and to none, where people pass by almost without seeing each other, where the life of building regularly and distantly resounds. What happens behind the flats’ heavy doors can most often be perceived only through those fragmented echoes, those splinters, remnants, shadows, those first moves or incidents or accidents that happen in what are called “common areas,” soft little sounds damped by the red woolen carpet, embryos of communal life which never go further than the landing. The inhabitants of a single building live a few inches from each other, they are separated by a mere partition wall, they share the same spaces repeated along each corridor, they perform the same movements at the same times, turning on a tap, flushing the water closet, switching on a light, laying the table, a few dozen simultaneous existences repeated from storey to storey, from building to building, from street to street. They entrench themselves in their domestic dwelling space—since that is what it is called—and they would prefer nothing to emerge from it; but the little that they do let out…

- Georges Perec