Text description provided by the architects. Alison Brooks Architects have been invited by the 16th International Architecture Exhibition curators Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects to respond to this year’s theme of ‘Freespace’ by addressing the subject of housing and urban dwelling.The Biennale theme ‘Freespace’ celebrates architecture’s capacity to find additional and unexpected generosity in each project – the spaces, textures and moments of human experience in architecture that can be freely enjoyed.

Plan

Alison Brooks Architects has created a large-scale, site specific installation that simulates the critical freespaces of our work in housing as four inhabitable ‘totems’: Threshold, Inhabited Edge, Passage, and Roofspace. The totems invite exploration, emerging from a unifying plinth to frame an amphitheatre and collective gathering space. Each totem offers a particular spatial, emotional and sensory experience, harnessing the Corderie’s specific qualities of light and volume. It has been this practice’s mission to reveal housing architecture’s civic role and its potential for meaningful, subjective experience. ReCasting also communicates mystery and delight: mirrored surfaces, organic geometries and forced perspective create a series of expansive illusions. Together, the totems, plinth and amphitheatre cast an informal stage for gathering and looking outward.

© Luke Hayes

• Architects

  Alison Brooks Architects

• Location

  Venice, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy

• Category

  Installation

• Area

  30.0 m2

• Project Year

  2018

• Photographs

  Luke Hayes