PAPER TRAIL

Have you always admired the James Stirling building, or did it just seem like an ordinary bookshop?

The wonderful thing about the Stirling Pavilion is that even though it comes from this moment in which the architect genius was such a cult figure — and Stirling is an enormous cult figure — so many of the architects who have been to the Biennale time after time will have no idea it’s a Stirling building. It’s amazing he was able to fly under the radar like this — the idea of the invisible Stirling is wonderful.

In a way, it’s an example of architectural reuse.

It is reuse. And they’re building a new book pavilion, as I understand it, for two reasons: you can no longer have a bookshop without a café, and you can’t put a café in the Stirling Pavilion. It points to how bookshops are no longer about books — they’re about social gatherings. Even if people did not know the pavilion was a Stirling creation, it was very often a meeting point. “Let’s meet at the bookshop.” So even though it was intended to be super-focused on books, it was also a social magnet, almost in spite of itself. I don’t think that was the point of the design, but it became that.

The great thing about buildings is that they can do whatever they want, in a way.

They have a way of collecting people and practices. That’s all. The other thing that I find very amusing about the Stirling Pavilion is that its interior environment is not very good for books. So it’s both accommodating and hostile in elemental terms. Carlo Ratti, who curated this year’s Biennale, focused this year’s programming on the “perimeter of architecture.” In my understanding, for the Stirling Pavilion, he had in mind a kind of three-dimensional bibliography in which there would be some display of books about morphology and psychoanalysis, which was a trend among architects in the 90s.

So let’s give some limits. Let’s put up a perimeter in cartographic terms.

I think for him it was about what is just outside the fence. I don’t think it was about containing. It was about what is on the edge of architecture. How far has architecture gone? And then, I found two drawings in the book pavilion’s archive that I found really deeply fascinating. One was a structure for displaying books that was never built. The top surface of the bookcase was designed so that you look at books through the window and from the inside — there were two books on each side, and you could see different ones depending on which way you looked at them. So the perimeter was porous. I thought, okay, if we’re in a building that imagines its own perimeter to be open, we have to do something that straddles the interior and the exterior. It’s almost like a membrane. I suppose it’s part of a Modernist fantasy because there’s no glass — it’s actually just open. Stirling made many sketches of the building. Some show the building as a Corbusier ocean liner, and others showed it as what they called in the 80s a primitive hut: a big roof with four columns.

First of all, why this focus on porosity? It comes up a lot in this year’s Biennale, and Ratti talks about it very frequently.

I assume it’s because porosity can be a critique of architectural hermeticism. I think fixed perimeters are the common denominator of architecture’s outsized carbon footprint. So whether it’s borders, temperature, wind, or light, anti-porosity, or perimeters that allow nothing to cross them, has been one of architecture’s biggest contributions to climate change.

But the real question is: why have you always been interested in elements?

Well, for me, elemental philosophy is a way of looking at the world. It makes earthly matter philosophical. I’m anxious about the data-driven positivism of most climate environmental discourses. It leads to more technocratic solutions, which are always a problem. I’m not against practical solutions, but I think they can’t be drivers alone. They have to also be philosophical and intellectual. So elements, or what is called elemental philosophy, I think is an umbrella that enables all of those things to remain together.

What kind of elements of this philosophy did you put in the pavilion?

I tried to group them in ways that were particularly salient to architecture. Earth, when it takes the form of stone, is more obviously architectural than some other things. Air, when it comes into contact with humidity, is a huge dimension of environmental control systems. So I curated the elements to make salient points of contact with architecture. Fire is an interesting one, for example. Fire has such a fascinating and long history.

Especially now.

Yes, but the Arsenale is famous for having had fire after fire, not because of the climate crisis, but because gunpowder depots would explode. Or sugar, which is highly flammable, and came to Venice even before it was developed by colonists in the Caribbean. It was stored in basements and would catch fire. So there’s a pyrological history to the Arsenale that is absolutely fascinating. And the model in my exhibit is particularly interested in fire as a weapon against books in particular.

In general, though, the basic element of the exhibition is books.

I wanted to make sure that a book pavilion would not be misunderstood as an information pavilion. In fact, when the building was finished in 1990, it was the height of textuality in architecture. And in the famous Strada Novissima [the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale installation featuring works by Frank Gehry, Hans Hollein, Rem Koolhaas, and more], architecture is a screen, [built by the Ente Gestione Cinema in the workshops of the famous Roman film studio] Cinecittà — flat like a film set. This flatness was a metaphor for the page of a book, in which a façade was not something structural — it was a text to be read. This was the conceit of that period: architecture as text. Book culture is expansive. Books are also made out of paper. They’re industries. There are machines for reading. Books draw people around them, and so forth.

And you incorporated carta azzurra, the handmade blue paper that became a favored material for artists and printers in early 16th-century Venice.

The minute you say book, paper, and Venice, you get to carta azzurra. And, of course, carta azzurra is also fascinating because it is elemental in all of these senses. Ratti is very interested in circularity. When I started looking into the history of paper production in Venice, I realized it stretched as far as Genoa. I had no idea. It was such a huge thing. Paper production extends all that way, and it requires people moving around rags that are dyed with indigo or smalt to mills in the Valle delle Carteria [a historic alley in Bologna once associated with papermaking and bookbinding]. When paper became white, it was this moment when paper production started its journey towards becoming one of the most toxic industrial processes ever. Artists were encouraged to think of the blue as atmospheric, but they eventually figured out how to make naturalistic images without needing blue anymore. So blue paper, for me, was elemental — to go from a rag to the invention of atmospheric perspective, to me, is a fabulously suggestive dynamic of how earthly matter and ideas work on each other to produce what becomes a convention.

And then you used the blue in this floating, paper architecture in the middle of the exhibition.

I was interested in certain books about underexplored architectural and elemental possibilities. Stonehenge, for example. From a certain point of view, it is a peripheral monument in multiple senses. It was literally on the edge of the Roman Empire — about as far north as you could go and still remain within its borders. It’s on the edge of history because it’s prehistorical — it’s on the edge of written language. When British travelers started to look at it again in the early 16th century, their only way to conceptualize such big pieces of stone was to imagine them as a Roman temple. There are these crazy drawings of architect Inigo Jones and other people trying to understand how Stonehenge could be assembled as a Roman temple. In that case, I gave architects who I knew were interested in prehistoric stone books on Stonehenge and commissioned them to make me something that shows how the encounter of architecture with Stonehenge was a different story than the one that we’re familiar with.

Were you fascinated by pop-up books when you were a kid?

I was not a very sentimental kid, but I love book technology, like Victorian theatre boxes, all of those things. We lost a lot of time imagining that we would have those kinds of books here. But nobody’s going to lend us those kinds of fragile, rare books. I will say, entre nous, per favore, that almost every one of the architects’ first thoughts were, “I’m going to do a pop-up book.” Because it’s kind of the obvious book-as-architecture. Some people have done it — Thomas Demand has. But those books do sort of stand in for books as technological artifacts.

You also made a tribute to James Stirling with the models.

I wouldn’t call it a tribute.

Well, there’s the Stirling Pavilion in one of the models — the one in the center.

Those are his designs. Stirling was asked not to cut down any trees when making the pavilion, and all of those sketches were Stirling proving Francesco Dal Co that if you didn’t cut down any trees, you would have a bad building. So I’m trying to suggest that these sketches, where the building is shaped around the trees, are better. It’s a total critique. “You have to cut the trees.” Fuck off. Why?

How many books do you have in your house?

A lot, but I don’t like them.

What do you mean?

I don’t like to collect books.

Me neither.

First of all, that’s for libraries. Go to the library. People are so fucking lazy that they can’t go to the library. Also, there’s a kind of orgoglio [a strong sense of pride] — “I have this many books, or you have a first edition of this or that.” I’m not into it.

But in any case, you’re a book lover.

I do love books. I do love books.