I just discovered this online. It was such an honor to be recognized at this exhibition. These were my hosts, architect/teacher Leopold Banchini (left) and artist/curator/teacher Lukas Feireiss (right). They both spent an afternoon here in our studio in 2019, planning the exhibit, which displayed our books Shelter, Domebook One, and Domebook 2, as well as stick models made from the buildings shown in our books.
I also just read that 300,000 people attended the exhibit, a biennial international architectural exhibition which was open from May to November in Venice. That means that maybe at least 100,000 people saw the Shelter exhibit, since it was just inside the entrance. Wow!
There is a wonderful exhibition of wood-framed buildings at the American pavilion of the Architecture Biennale in Venice, with a large pavilion and a bunch of exquisite models.
Read the text on the importance and uniqueness of stud framing in America. Click on appropriate subjects.
The curators of this unique exhibit were Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner. The scale models were researched and designed by students at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois College in Chicago. Now there’s an architecture school I would check out if I were a student!
Leonardo never built one, but apparently sketched one, along with a chain, in the 1500s. There’s a lot of controversy over who really designed the first bike.
Lukas Feireiss, my host in Venice and co-curator of the display of Shelter books at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and my companion and guide for 3 days in this magical city. He arrived from Berlin and me from California within 15 minutes of each other at the Piazalle Roma on Friday night — talk about cosmic timing!
He’s fluent in Italian and knows the city well. We’ve been staying in a lovely flat on the water near Via Garibaldi, a great street with bars, restaurants, and shops far from the tourist madness.
•Larry’s on Windward, half-block from Venice Beach, 27 beers on tap, big sports TVs, good food.
•Restaurant Hama on Windward, 2 blocks from beach. Super sushi place, noted for very fresh fish.
•Poke-Poke,1827 Ocean-Front Walk, v. popular place Hawaiian rice/fish/wasabi etc.
•Reel Inn Fresh Fish Market & Restaurant, Hwy One near Topanga Canyon road. I mentioned this before, great seafood, draft beer, sit outside, surfer hangout.
At left: 2 fish tacos, shrimp cocktail, dark draft, $17 at Reel Inn
Article and video of exhibition of our books, Domebook One, Domebook 2, and Shelter in Berlin (translated from the German). This is the same exhibit, that was at the Biennale Architettura in Venice in 2021, titled “There Are Walls that Want to Prowl” (a line from a poem by Richard Brautigan that was in Shelter.) The exhibit runs in Berlin until January 15, 2023.
Actually, Lloyd Kahn is not an architect. Nevertheless, he builds houses himself and writes about how people can live in harmony with nature. A new exhibition at the German Architecture Center in Berlin shows its utopian power.
How would we like to live?
“In the early 1970s he was already dealing with the questions that still concern us today,” says critic Laura Helena Wurth: How do we want to live together, in small families, large communities and what can that look like? Do we want to live in homes treated as commodities, or more in tune with nature?
His first experiments with building forms and typologies resulted in “domes,” round tents. At the opening of the exhibition in Berlin, Kahn admitted his mistake from back then: “Domes don’t work.” One cannot add to these round, closed constructions. According to Wurth, we can learn from him for the way we build today, that we need flexible architecture that can adapt.
Kahn’s life consists of mistakes, he told the curators, and back then he made a mistake that he had to correct. So Kahn stopped printing his book Domebook 2 and published Shelter.
Don’t build for eternity
According to Wurth, Kahn’s architecture is one that also breaks down. And then evolves. The builder recedes behind it and the people who live in it come to the fore. “Sustainable does not mean that something has to last forever. If we build a house out of concrete today, the CO2 emissions will go through the roof.” A house made of wood could break down, but would have a much better ecological balance.
According to Wurth, however, this idea is difficult to implement in an urban environment like Berlin. It’s also about space. Nevertheless, there is an “uncanny utopian power” in these works by Lloyd Kahn.
The exhibition “There Are Walls that Want to Prowl” can be seen until January 15, 2023 at the German Architecture Center in Berlin.
