Architecture Books – Week 15/2024
Ah, Venice!
This newsletter for the week of April 8 heads to Venice, looking at a book about a pensione overlooking the Guidecca Canal and two old books about pavilions in the Giardini. In between are the usual new books and headlines. Buon divertimento!
Book of the Week:
A Room With a View edited by Verena von Beckerath, published by Monroe Books (Buy from Monroe Books / Printed Matter)
This year’s Venice Biennale, the 60th International Art Exhibition, opens to the public in just over a week, on April 20. Although I’ve only attended the architecture exhibitions that alternate with the more established art exhibitions, the timing seemed like a good excuse to take a look at A Room With a View, the 2023 book that is the tenth title in the Notes on Architecture series published by the Chair of Design and Housing at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. The chair is Verena von Beckerath, architect and partner at Heide & von Beckerath in Berlin, who, with art historian and curator Sassa Trülzsch, organized the A Room With a View seminar in 2022 to look at “the cultural, economic, technological and spatial conditions as well as the temporary and recurring ways of living together in a family-run hotel in Venice.”
I’ll admit the subject is a surprising and somewhat unlikely one for an architectural seminar, but the book that came out of it is rewarding and beautifully produced. It brings to the fore many of the issues Venice is facing today, such that the hotel — the Pensione Seguso on Dorsoduro — can be seen as a microcosm of the city. The character of the hotel and nearby parts of Venice come across in the photographs that comprise the bulk of the book’s 128 pages, but the most valuable part of the book is the class’s interview with Yvonne Matijas Seguso and Lawrence Hoque, the mother and son running the pensione. They illuminate what it’s like to run a business and maintain an old building in Venice, ranging from the obvious (dealing with rising waters and changes in tourism) to the not-so-obvious (technology upgrades and the choice of furnishings). The general feeling after reading the interview was that, even though the MOSE barriers have made a difference in recent years, the city will have to make dramatic changes locally in response to the accelerating effects of climate change. The whole world has to do so, but Venice’s unique situation amplifies that need.
The book closes with an essay by architect Ludovico Centis that discusses modernization of the city in the middle of the 20th century by engineer Eugenio Miozzi as well as visits to the city by Nikolaus Pevsner in the 1930s. Miozzi made a larger impact than his obscurity indicates; Centis calls him “possibly the most notorious power broker in 20th century Venice,” for the way he inserted contemporary projects like the Municipal Garage into the historical city. Pevsner, on the other hand, was drawn to postcard views of the city, as evidenced by his archival photographs of the Rialto Bridge and Basilica San Marco accompanying the essay. Centis links both personalities to Pensione Seguso: Miozzi in the ongoing tension between modernity and history in Venice as a whole; Pevsner in his un-pensione choice of accommodations: a room “tiny, decrepit and full of mosquitoes.” If Venice enchants, its mosquitoes repel — they are my least favorite part of Venice, as I pointed out with visual proof years ago, so I can relate to Pevsner’s annoyances. Centis thinks that today Pevsner would “look for a rather spartan yet authentic place such as the Pensione Seguso, which is still popular among artists and intellectuals.” Perhaps I should do the same on my next trip to Venice.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
Creating the Hudson River Park: Environmental and Community Activism, Politics, and Greed by Tom Fox, published by Rutgers University Press (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — The High Line and, more recently, Brooklyn Bridge Park get lots of attention, but a precedent for a linear park on former industrial land in NYC is found in the 4-mile-long Hudson River Park. This is the park’s story, written by the first president of the Hudson River Park Conservancy.
GMP Architekten von Gerkan, Marg und Partners: Architecture 2015–19, Bd. 14 edited by Stephan Schutz, published by Hatje Cantz (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — The latest installment in GMP’s oeuvre complete with Hatje Cantz covers 53 projects over just five years—yet another highly productive half-decade for the firm of the late Meinhard von Gerkan.
Outside the Outside: The New Politics of Suburbs by Matt Hern, published by Verso (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — The suburbs are no longer homogenous places socially, economically, demographically, and politically; they are as diverse as the cities they ring and therefore, Matt Hern argues, should be seen as “vibrant places of resistance and regeneration.”
Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect by Richard Anderson, published by The MIT Press (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — An in-depth account of Wolkenbügel, artist El Lissitzky’s 1924 proposal for horizontal skyscrapers at major intersections along Moscow’s Boulevard Ring.
Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.
Book News:
Naomi Pollock gives some background on her latest book, The Japanese House Since 1945 (featured in newsletter 46/2023), over at Nikkei Asia: “My primary aim was to convey the atmosphere of each home. I wanted to capture what it felt like to be there, to live there.”
Wallpaper* previews a new monograph on Belgian “interior sculptor” Christophe Gevers (1928-2007) by Jean-Pierre Gabriel.
Last week I went to the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair and shared a few highlights on Instagram:
From the Archives:
If A Room With a View can be seen as a case study of a pensione, Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice: Voices from the Archives is a case study of a padiglione, one of many at the Giardini della Biennale. I reviewed the book, written by Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen, and published by Pax Forlag and Lars Müller Publishers, back in 2021, calling it “an impressive book that is packed with an enormous amount of archival information on the building, one that many people consider a modern masterpiece,” myself included. But if you want to know about the numerous other pavilions in the Giardini, be sure to check out:
Marco Mulazzani’s Guide to the Pavilions of the Venice Biennale since 1887 was first released in 1987, one hundred years after a temporary building was erected in the Giardini for the first National Art Exhibition, the progenitor of the Biennale, which would hold its first edition in 1895. As of the expanded edition published in 2014, there were 26 national pavilions spread across the Giardini, plus the all-important Central Pavilion and the Book Pavilion that was designed by James Stirling and opened in 1991, on the occasion of the 5th International Architecture Exhibition and seven years after Carlo Scarpa’s art book pavilion was destroyed in a fire. The 28 pavilions, which Mulazzani admits to “vary[ing] greatly in architectural quality,” are presented in chronological order, with historical and biographical information, photographs, and drawings. Only Australia’s pavilion, torn down and replaced in 2015 with a black box designed by Denton Corker Marshall, has changed since 2014, but it is presented in the book through renderings. This isn’t the only book devoted to the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, but, unlike Common Pavilions, a large photo book from 2013, Guide to the Pavilions of the Venice Biennale since 1887 is portable, great to take along on your next trip to Venice.
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— John Hill