Venice architecture biennale preview; Peter Cook on why Terunobu Fujimori is the person he most wants to meet; The opening of an events building by unsangdong architects in Seoul; last call for entries for the ar awards for emerging architecture.

FROM OUT THERE TO IN HERE

'Buildings are objects and the act of building leads to such objects, but architecture is something else,' declares the director of this year's Venice Biennale, Aaron Betsky. An accomplished impresario and critic, his chosen theme for the biennale is 'Out there: architecture beyond building', a provocative and stimulating starting point for what should prove a successful event (it opens on 14 September). Betsky's own proposition about architecture shows how much room for argument there will be: 'It is the way we think and talk about buildings, how we represent them, how we build them'. Nothing about design, then, though rest assured that the army of architects whose work will be displayed in the Arsenale will be distinguished by the fact that they are great designers. What will they make of Betsky's further proposition that buildings are 'the tombs of architecture, the residue of the desire to make another world'. Venice is probably the right place to air such a view, a city of redundancy and ruins amply represented by the Arsenale itself.

The concomitant proposition, if buildings are not architecture, is that the usual histories of architecture are inadequate to explain what has really been happening: 'There is a secret history of architecture separate from the progression of styles and the vagaries of technological perfection,' in Betsky's words. Or perhaps not so secret, since his own writing, on Modernism for example, adds to existing histories as any thoughtful research would do. (It is sometimes said that there can never be a satisfactory history of architecture because such a work would be the history of everything, that is to say all the events and movements represented in the architecture, in this case buildings, of any given period.)

Perhaps it is less a question of secret histories, and more a matter of what one could think of as the inner life of architecture, susceptible to exposure and discussion but operating independently of the formal requirements of clients and the thickets of regulation apparently indispensable to architectural production. This inner life is where creativity, the 'art' side of architecture, meets science and the 'normal' world. It is where reflections can be made on what is happening 'out there', rather in the manner of those Dutch artists of the mercantilist era, painting interiors where there is generally a window out to the wider world - but that world is not shown. The power of those paintings, for example by Pieter de Hooch, lies partly in the reversal of the usual perceptions of exterior and interior, where it is the former which is known and the latter only guessed at. Betsky shrewdly points to the potential influence of enigma in architecture, certainly a suitable subject for discussion in Venice.

PIANO COUNTERPOINTS

International debate over Renzo Piano's proposals at Ronchamp is reaching a climax.

Will Renzo Piano win permission to create a modest building close to Le Corbusier's late masterpiece, Ronchamp? It appears that a decision may be taken later this month following polemical arguments for and against the proposal, a convent for a dozen Clarisse nuns on a slope below Corb's chapel.

The argument centres round the impact of the half-buried convent on views to and from the chapel, and whether the integrity of Corb's design in the round, and in particular in its relation to topography and horizon, are at risk. There is a subsidiary question of new entrance arrangements, replacing the current messy car park.

One gets the feeling that some of the participants in this debate are dealing with a shrine to the architect rather than a piece of architecture by an architect, and that nothing likely to be proposed will, somehow, ever be good enough. There have even been suggestions that any improvements or additions to the chapel environs will have the effect of in some unpleasant way popularising the site, making it too convenient.

Whatever he may have said about the building during his lifetime, it seems unlikely that Corb himself would have shirked the challenge of creating a new building next to a great one, especially one with such a modest programme. The critic William J. R. Curtis will discuss this issue in the context of Corb's work in next month's AR. P. F.

The petition against the Piano project ('Pour la sauvegarde du site de Ronchamp') can be found at http://ipetitions.com/petition/Ronchamp. The petition in favor of the Piano project can be found at htto://ipetitions.com/petition/rehabilitationronchamp

Poster from Pino's office urging support for the Ronchamp project for a convert for Clarisse nuns.

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VENICE BIENNALE

An online competition about urban identity pulls in the students ...

Venice Biennale director Aaron Betsky's online competition, EveryVille, has attracted more than 780 registered participants. In response to a text written by Betsky, participants from schools of architecture in over 48 countries have accepted the challenge to consider proposals for a 'new exurban community', in EveryVille; an imagined place that has emerged around the intersection of Avenue Z and X Street, just to the south-west of the intersection of Highway 1 and the Beltway around Megalopolis, about 20 kilometres from the city's core.

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As narrated by Betsky, after several factions proposed different strategies, the City Council are seeking the response of the architectural fraternity for ideas of how to give Everyville coherence and identity. Believing that architects would have the expertise to determine whether any new buildings would be necessary to do this, or whether what was really needed was a method of creating common and shared space with a clear and distinct Everyville identity, the challenge has been set: How might they create an image, a coherence, a character and a civic sense for this small town, appropriate to its location and to its history, its site and its future?

The work will be selected by an international jury, including Zaha Hadid, Thom Mayne and Louisa Hutton, and the winning projects will be exhibited in the course of the 11th International Architecture Exhibition.

www.labiennale. org/en/architecture/exhibition

... as the Le Corbusier exhibition gets a Biennale warm-up.

The flurry of recent books devoted to Le Corbusier, undergoing a huge revival of interest in the last year, will be echoed in two events at this year's Venice Biennale, opening to the public on 14 September.

The morning before a student workshop will examine Corb's unrealised hospital project for Venice, taking place in the library of the San Giovanni Paolo Hospital, which owns all the drawings and models of the project. On the same day in the afternoon at the Palazzo Loredan on the Grand Canal, a symposium chaired by Charles Jencks, including Massimiliano Fuksas and Wolf Prix, will debate Corb's global influence and his legacy as the first global architecture 'brand'.

Both events (AR is media partner) are organised by the RIBA Trust, and are sponsored by the UK's Northwest Regional Development Agency, which is responsible in part for cultural investment in cities such as Liverpool. The RIBA Trust is staging Le Corbusier--the Art of Architecture in Lutyens' crypt of Liverpool RC Cathedral from 2 October to 18 January, after which the show moves to London.

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Peter Cook

The person I most want to meet.

Luckily (for I can't resist the place) I have been invited to Japan again: as the European Curator for 'New Directions in Architecture', tagging along with a posse of much younger architects from Stavanger, Oporto, Budapest and elsewhere, presumably maintaining the line that Europe still carries the flame of experiment, initiative and wit in our wayward field. Yet 29 years ago it was my heart that pounded at the thought of finally seeing in the flesh their strange, gawky and sometimes impossible structures that were already straying quite far outside our own confines of Modernism.

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The intervening years have been informed by multiple revelations, whereby the experiences of Japanese friends and Japanese structures have become intertwined, all of us enjoying the same passion for gadgetry, layering, robots, translucency, here-not-here or a taste for provocative juxtapositions. The initial impact of Tokyo's exuberance or Kyoto's ambiguities has not paled, but acted as an incentive for architects as unlike as Peter Salter, Enric Miralles or Herzog & de Meuronto perform at peak - only too aware that down the street the locals can contrive just as ingeniously and think just as deviously.

My own personal admiration and enjoyment has been on site, where the depth of Arata Isozaki's mind, the audacity of Itsuko Hasegawa's compositions, the finesse of Fumihiko Maki's spaces, the cuteness of Atelier Bow-Wow's observations or the sheer range and virtuosity of Toyo Ito's whole output sends you back West feeling very humble.

So exposure to the weird world of Terunobu Fujimori at the 2006 Venice Biennale hit me oddly sideways. At first I treated it as 'craft', as a form of provocation altogether too coy, and instinctively recoiled from an implicit attack upon my friends mentioned above. Isozaki had admittedly made built responses towards traditional Japanese conditions but remained an International architect through the substance of the pieces, but this stuff was more edgy, more worrisome.

So the recent lavish book (published by TOTO) was irresistible; a brilliant level of translation has been achieved with both Fujimori's descriptions, his own essays and an illuminating piece of gossip from Genpei Akasegawa, his friend and client.

We are confronted by the 'Sprout of the Earth' and the 'Tokyo Plan 2107' where hive-like mounds recall those ant-cities or maybe cacti. Then onto teahouses of ever increasing audacity sitting upon progressively more exotic sets of legs. All backed by an extraordinary atmosphere of nonchalant but naughty observation. The kind of disarming matter-of-fact, but at the same time oblique, line of explanation that only the English (and, it seems, the Japanese) can pull off: 'Ultimately, I decided that I would have to commit an architectural crime and conceal the structure under natural material ... the act would be a failure if it were discovered or seemed somehow suspicious'. Or provocatively: 'Has anyone before Gaudi in the long history of Christian churches ever designed a cathedral that has a snake as its starting point? Are giant lizards, crocodiles and serpents indispensable to the Holy Family?'

His decision, on graduating, was to be an architectural historian; Kathryn Findlay, a colleague teaching at Tokyo University, remembers him only as such. But in the book, he narrates bit by bit his gradual return to design. Nearly all his work claims to be inspired by material: its naturalness, its localness, its manner of being cut or honed or planted. Yet as he narrates and as the buildings become more and more purposeful, we become aware of a complex set of motives. With observations that are certainly cosmopolitan - the guy has travelled, looked and read far beyond his locality of Nagano Prefecture (where his first works were made) yet his rediscovery of the 'stuff' of architecture is bedded in narrative and local memory. He intriguingly gives us an insight into an approach to Modernism whereby he debates whether Mies or Gropius is its 'point of origin', a line of creative agonising that few of my own (European) mentors would have dared to expose.

I would love to show him the 'House in the Clouds' at Thorpeness, Suffolk, and can imagine him sharing my delight at this one-time water tower as sky-borne cottage which (after the dismantling of the water tank) actually became a house. He'd surely get the double irony if we are read his friend Akasegawa, who recalls, ... the next time I saw Fujimori was at a broadcasting station ... once we began talking, we really hit it off. He proved to be so entertaining we talked for two hours straight, though the original plan had been to talk for half an hour. The radio station staffers the other side of the glass were in stitches'.

Yet his own buildings are several notches more sophisticated than the Suffolk folly. In some ways they are built critiques, in some ways built rhetoric, in some ways I might claim from them my own territory of desire (reiterated again and again since Archigram days) that our architectural vocabulary is generally so narrow, so hidebound, surrounding us with politeness and circumspection. That perhaps we insult the tradition of Modernism by being so mean with it. I'm looking forward to having that conversation in Tokyo.

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ERRATUM

In the June issue of the AR, the landscape component of the Rogers Stirk Harbour Maggie's London was incorrectly attributed to America contemporary artist Dan Graham.

This was of course an error. The landscape component for Maggie's was in fact done by Dan Pearson. Our apologies.

www.danpearsonstudio.com