Tod Williams (1) (1943–)

One of the most lasting impressions from last year’s Venice Architecture Biennale was the Wunderkammer installation, curated by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Specifically it was the smell of incense pulling me into the ivy-covered Casa Scaffali, the “House of Shelves” that housed seeds and gardening equipment at the far corner of the Arsenale. Inside I discovered the source of the incense: one of the thirty-four boxes arrayed on the shelves and in the middle of the small space, each one a personal collection of artifacts that exhibited their maker’s personalities and priorities.

A book of the same name documents the Wunderkammer installation, which started with Williams and Tsien soliciting friends, family, former employees, former employers, and others (architects mainly, but also artists and critics) to fill a sturdy gray box made by cabinetmaker Stephen Iino with “objects that inspire them.” Importantly, the objects were not to be architecture. Like Valerio Olgiati’s The Images of Architects, the boxes responded to Biennale curator David Chipperfield’s theme of “Common Ground.” Yet in the case of Wunderkammer the things that inspired and connected were tangible and real rather than images of real things or places.

While visitors to the Biennale saw only the boxes staged in a particular manner in the Casa Scaffali, readers of the small book (the same size and format as Yale University Press’s Unpacking My Library books) can read statements from the contributors and see sketches and additional photos about what went into each box. The extra documentation becomes a replacement for the act of seeing the artifacts in person, but it also extends the life of the project, important since each box was returned to its maker.

To give a sense of what was inside the boxes, a few of my favorites include: the three layers of Sheila O’Donnell’s and John Tuomey’s Joseph Cornell-esque memory box; the box Francis Kéré filled with dirt and a tool from Burkina Faso; Chen Chen & Kai Williams’s deconstructed box fitted with a magic eight ball filled with the brackish water of Venice’s lagoon; and Claudy Jongstra’s 600 balls made from 10,000 meters of wool and silk dyed with 30 kilos of onion. And let’s not forget Marwan Al-Sayed, who turned the gray box into a gold “Shrine to the Shimmering Inversions of Form and Space,” where incense wafted from a black iron vase to pull visitors into Casa Scaffali’s wonderful cabinet of curiosities.

(The above review was written for Designers & Books and published on their website on November 7, 2013.)… (mehr)