As part of an ongoing series of posts highlighting faculty and alumni projects featured in and associated with the Venice Biennale’s current 17th International Architecture Exhibition, the School of Architecture is pleased to feature the Veneta Porta Lignea, one of two projects by NADAAA in the Biennale. 

Located adjacent to the Giardino delle Vergini, the installation occupies a critical location in Venice as both a destination at the end of the Arsenale, and its gateway as one arrives by boat. Historically, this vaporetto stop has been seen as a back door. However, with the Arsenale serving as an important open space during COVID, more outdoor installations have been conceived as part of this year’s exhibitions, warranting a gateway that acknowledges the site as a new front door. 

NADAAA strategically conceived the project’s assembly and disassembly, focusing on proposals that could be erected in less than two days without having a substantial impact on the context, its fondamenta, and gardens. With an eye towards optimization, NADAAA adopted a panel of cross-laminated timber (CLT) as a single member into which it could carve and stencil without wasting material or labor.



The office’s first approach adopted a mass-customized strategy to optimize a cantilevered structure, giving depth to the core span while milling out material at its cantilevered edges and drawing out the herringbone pattern of the CLT to the surface. Surprisingly, this approach also increased the use of material and labor.

NADAAA’s second approach addressed the predicament of labor and materials with the idea of building the entire installation out of one CLT slab. This relegated the exposure of the CLT end-grain to the edges of the slab, where the silhouette of the CLT plank is excavated with divots affording nested joints for compressive and tensile members. The resulting design articulates a base, a shaft, and a lintel which both frames the threshold into the Giardino and recalls the symbol of Venice—the winged lion of St. Mark which holds the city’s welcoming words in an open book to the waters: Pax Tibi Marce Evangelista Meus (Peace unto you, Mark, my Evangelist). 

The base serves as a wood foundation, liberating it from penetrating the Venetian soil. The “piloti” is triangulated, a figural “V,” and an allusive registration of the open book containing Venice’s welcoming words—all while framing a view of the fortification tower beyond the lagoon. The lintel is displaced asymmetrically, cantilevering over the arrival passage and pushing the installation’s structural capacity to its limits; a Venetian stone maintains its balance on the opposing end. Set on the stones of the fondamenta, this wood construction also alludes to the wood piles that hold up this maritime city.

NADAAA also wished to develop a structure that would help to bring people together, frame the space at the Giardino, serve as an edge for the garden, frame the serene view north towards the lagoon, and provide a foreground for other Biennale installations.



The 17th Venice Architecture Biennale How Will We Live Together? is curated by Hashim Sarkis. 

Project Team: 

Principals: Nader Tehrani, Arthur Chang 

Project Coordinator: Alexandru Vilcu 

Project Team: Eric Cheung 



In Collaboration With: 

Canducci Group, Structural Engineer Consultant 

Andrea Canducci, Alessandro Canducci, Alessandra Feduzi, Giulia Leopardi, Antonio Eroi 

Donors/Sponsors: 

Means Method Mission 

Canducci Group 

Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown 

Payanini SRL





 

The School of Architecture is pleased to share Other Ways of Living Together, a housing study by NADAAA, as part of an ongoing series highlighting faculty and alumni projects featured in and associated with How Will We Live Together, the Venice Biennale’s 17th International Architecture Exhibition curated by Hashim Sarkis. 

NADAAA’s study addresses housing in four environments—urban, suburban, industrial, and rural—across the greater Boston area. These studies have been guided by three strategies: using the ethic of Existenzminimum, or the minimally acceptable elements required for healthy dwelling, to improve the social and environmental performance of residential buildings through enhanced density, flexibility, and efficiency; reconsidering typological and code conventions to enable these performance improvements; and leveraging cross-laminated timber and stud framing, both derived from naturally renewable mass timber, as interdependent building systems. 

Vertical Row House | Boston, MA

Sited on Washington Street in Boston’s South End, this study explores opportunities for building in urban centers where nearly all infill sites have already been developed. More specifically, it focuses on rewriting zoning by-laws and acquiring air rights for urban corridors, typically with preexisting tall buildings, that could benefit from higher density. An innovative approach to the study’s fire stair is key to its efficiency: through up-zoning and hybridizing, the fire stair also becomes a communicating stair between two units or two floors of the same unit, affording a design that triples the number of bedrooms in the building.

Suburban Mat | Revere, MA

This housing study addresses the inefficient use of space on suburban, residential lots by drawing on the mat-building strategies of high-density, repetition, and modular organization. Referencing the work of Israeli architects Nahum Zolotov and Danny Havkiv for their model neighborhood in Be’er Sheva, Israel, the study positions U-shaped apartment units—interlocked in plan and section with individual courtyards facing in opposite directions—around a central skylit corridor, running the length of the block, from which all units are accessed. With an emphasis on densification, this study eliminates unused lot spaces while optimizing circulation and ensuring that every unit has its own private outdoor room.

Big Box Adaptations | Greater Boston Area

In response to the ongoing shift from big-box retail to web-based delivery, this adaptation study introduces a microcosm of the city into a converted industrial shell. A second floor comprised of efficiency units is inserted into the big-box envelope while keeping the first floor open for light industry. Composed of small businesses, artist studios, and fabrication workshops, among other possible work spaces, the ground level is maintained as is, with large lofts that can easily be subdivided and reconstituted as larger and smaller units at will. This programming hybridization also includes re-zoned neighboring lots, allowing for the development of new streets, transportation systems, public spaces, and supporting sites.

Rural House/Apartment | Ayer, MA

Located just outside the village center of Ayer, the rural house/apartment study integrates our current understanding of the need for social distancing, the possibilities of working productively online, and the dynamic nature of the family unit. In response to this complex array of programmatic possibilities, the project questions the conventional relationship between urban and rural living. It employs several innovative design strategies, including a peripheral, wrap-around stair; a poché zone above and below the stair; flexible living arrangements; and the use of cross-laminated timber panels with traditional stud framing.

Project Team

Principals: Nader Tehrani, Arthur Chang 

Project Coordinator: Alexandru Vilcu 

Project Team: Christian Borger, Nicole Sakr, Harry Lowd, Phoebe Cox, Adrian Wong



Printing and Graphics Installation: Arteurbana

Installation photographs by Roland Halbe

As part of an ongoing series of posts highlighting faculty and alumni projects featured in and associated with the Venice Biennale’s current 17th International Architecture Exhibition, the School of Architecture is pleased to share Geoscope 2: Worlds, a project by Jesse Reiser (AR’81) and Nanako Umemoto (AR’83) of RUR Architecture.

Geoscope 2: Worlds is a split-sphere, multimedia installation showcasing over a dozen (and counting) contemporary voices inside and outside architecture, from Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kazuyo Sejima to radical ecologist and philosopher Timothy Morton. Visitors to the installation find themselves enveloped in a pneumatic, panoramic environment where projections on 42 individual facets generate a complex, kaleidoscopic ecosystem—a tableaux of world-thinking on the edge. Inspired by Daniel López-Pérez’s provocative and luminous book R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern Thinking (Lars Müller Publishers, 2020), Reiser, Umemoto, and their team were challenged with displaying the breadth and quality of its content for an exhibition at Princeton University in February 2020. The result was the first iteration of Geoscope 2, a continuation of Fuller’s original geoscopes reimagined through contemporary means. The project’s second iteration is now on view at the 2021 Venice Biennale. 

 

The first geoscopes, constructed by students of R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) 60 years ago, were conceived as embodiments of the world looking at itself, and a means of comprehensively understanding one’s relationship to the world. In response to the Biennale’s question “How will we live together?” Geoscope 2 flouts the idea of a single world body in favor of “many worlds”—chaos generated by multiple bodies interacting with each other—by literally splitting the sphere in half and opening it up to multiple contributors and perspectives.







As López Pérez and Reiser note:

Fuller’s geoscopes, while conceptually ambitious, were technologically limited by their times: literally analog vinyl spheres covered in decals in the shapes of the continents. The way we see it, new technologies and advances in how we view the world have allowed us to simultaneously reimagine and challenge Fuller’s original project. We believe that disunity, disjunction, and dissensus—‘worlds’—are to be celebrated as evidence of true diversity in how we think, act, and interact with one another. This is our critical take on how will we live together: spirited agon as opposed to polite relativism.

Photos and video by Princeton University’s School of Architecture.

 

Team


Mission Control: Daniel López-Pérez & Jesse Reiser


Geoscope 2 Design: RUR Architecture, Reiser+Umemoto


RUR Architecture Team: Julian Harake, Katherine Leung 


Inflatable Design: Pablo Kobayashi / Unidad de Protocolos


Inflatable Fabrication Team: Lucía Aumann, Ernesto Falabella, Emilio Robles, Pablo Kobayashi / Unidad de Protocolos


Experience Design: Jan Pistor - Bureau 314 / for iart with support from Denim Szram


Exhibition Manager: Kira McDonald / Princeton University School of Architecture


Partnerships & Communications: Lukas Fitze / iart 


Trailer Video: Onome Ekeh / Futurezoo  

 

As part of an ongoing series of posts highlighting faculty and alumni projects featured in and associated with the Venice Biennale’s current 17th International Architecture Exhibition, the School of Architecture is pleased to share The Zayandeh-rud River Basin, a project by Dean Tehrani’s office NADAAA.

This project is NADAAA’s contribution to Future Assembly—a curatorial initiative developed in response to Hashim Sarkis’s invitation, as the curator of the Biennale, “to imagine a design inspired by the United Nations—the current paradigm for a multilateral assembly.” Future Assembly invited all Biennale participants, more than 50 of whom participated, to address the following prompt: 

“The Assembly of the future we envisage consists not only of humans but also of animals and plants, the ephemeral traces and voices of multiple species, and of the air, the water, the trees, the soil. How do we, as spatial practitioners, imagine giving standing to these more-than-human voices in a vision for our shared future?” 

The Zayandeh-rud River Basin weaves together an aerial view of Isfahan—a city in central Iran—with a planimetric scan revealing various institutions that populate the city’s urban fabric in confrontation with its larger river watershed. The animation draws on the Beaux-Arts tradition of the Analytique, a composite representational technique, which here has been critically reinterpreted through seamless, kinetic montage sequences that synthesize divergent representational methods—including photographic, planimetric, and perspectival elements—toward a shared narrative.

The delicate balance between cities, historic preservation, and social ecologies is commonly overlooked, especially when questions of energy policy and larger territorial legislation are involved. At the same time, key historical examples help to frame these possible connections in poignant ways. As a critical hydrological conduit that overcomes the commonly held divide between rural and urban cultures, the Zayandeh-rud river basin serves agricultural lands as much as it gives birth to the city of Isfahan as we know it. In 1972, in the name of progress, the Shah Abbas Dam recalibrated its water flow, leading to the “dehydration” of the very river that gave life to this historic city. Isfahan’s viaducts, left to wither in this new landscape, have lost the waters that once gave them a reason to bridge. The Zayandeh-rud, the iconic Sio-se-pol bridge, and the entire river basin are the “more-than-human” voices NADAAA nominates for this narrative dedicated to the United Nations Assembly of the Future.