Somewhere Other

Just before their installation was packed up and shipped off to Venice, John Wardle Architects had photographer Trevor Mein capture their creation. Now with the opening of the exhibition  they have shared these photographs and provided some commentary on what they have produced.

Somewhere Other

“For some years now the practice has had a fascination with many areas of parallel creative practice, particularly the visual arts.  We have transformed many of our projects within the public realm into opportunities to engage with artists, incorporating their work into ours.”

John Wardle.

Experimentation across disciplines drives the project John Wardle Architects has recently unveiled at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Exhibited in the Arsenale, the installation Somewhere Other is the result of a multidisciplinary collaboration between the architects, artist Natasha Johns Messenger, filmmakers Coco and Maximilian, plus numerous other artisans, engineers and joiners.

Photo credit: Trevor Mein

“In response to the invitation from Yvonne and Shelley, an idea formed around the theme of translation and working between two distinctly different places. The installation presents an instrument that draws a long lens from Venice back towards Australia and our work both in the urban context and the Australian landscape.”

John Wardle.

As curator and design critic Rory Hyde rightly suggests, “Being ‘other’ is central to the work. This slippery phrase defines what it is not, or rather, where it is not.” For his part, Wardle likes to allude to a text fragment written by DH Lawrence in 1922, when he was in Australia working on his novel Kangaroo. In letters home to England the author would sign off: “DH Lawrence – upside down at the bottom of the world.”

As an “instrument” – metaphorically musical, scientific or, as John describes it, “a camera with its casing removed to express its working functions” – Somewhere Other is a meticulously constructed structure made by Geelong-based joiners Jacaranda Industries and clad in spotted gum, an Australian native hardwood.

Photo credit: Trevor Mein

The exhibition represents a response to the concept of architecture as an act of generosity, a spatialised gift, enshrined in Farrell and McNamara’s manifesto Freespace, originally issued as a reference point for the curation of the biennale.

Towards this concept, Somewhere Other evolved from a link already made between John Wardle Architects, Venice and the Veneto region. In 2015 the studio was joint winner of the Australian Tapestry Workshop’s inaugural Tapestry Design Prize for Architects, responding to a brief suggesting the winning design would hang in the newly completed Denton Corker Marshall-designed Australian Pavilion at Venice.

The winning tapestry, Perspective on a Flat Surface, represented a contemporary response to Andrea Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vincenza and, in particular, the trompe-l’œil onstage scenery created by Vincenzo Scamozzi. For the 2018 biennale, John Wardle Architects proposed to physically realise the abstract space of its tapestry.

Photo credit: Trevor Mein

The limitations of this approach soon revealed themselves.

“Our proposal went through an ungainly adolescence … It was, by our own admission, too building-like,” John Wardle

“Moving through an iterative process we then determined our exhibition to be a series of portals and thresholds that acutely orchestrate various forms of engagement, from the most intimate to the most social, with opportunities for entering within, or standing back and observing.”

“The exhibition functions as an optical instrument that ‘thickens’, stretches, and demarcates the space between its location and the ‘other’ place of our practice and projects. It’s a framing device, and the idea of frames, views and perspectives – physical and conceptual – has long played an integral part in our architecture and thinking.”

Photo credit: Trevor Mein

Max Delany, artistic director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, has described Somewhere Other as “a quasi-pavilion exploded in plan … characterised by an elasticity of form and dimension, dynamically contracting and expanding from intimate to public scale”.

“This shift in small to large spaces serves to emphasise the relationship of the individual to the civic community – a compression and expansion which metaphorically extends from Australia to Europe, and from solitary perception in the present to the collective experience of public space and history”

Max Delany

Integrated with the installation’s portals, thresholds and viewing points are a series of screen-like mirrors and films – by artist Natasha Johns-Messenger and filmmakers Coco and Maximilian respectively – and an optical device created in collaboration with Venetian glass master Leonardo Cimolin.

Photo credit: Trevor Mein

Created by steel fabricator Derek Johns from a workshop in rural Victoria, a fine steel-rod filigree woven through the structure conceptually records the iterative journey of the design process.

“Derek’s steel ‘script’ represents an architectural line drawing and defines our role as architects – on this collaborative project we are proposers not makers. We always look for collaborative opportunities but this project in particular highlights the value of drawing upon others’ ideas to enrich the outcomes,”

John Wardle

An Australian artist now based in New York, Johns-Messenger is known for her spatial installations that use light, gravity, site and space to explore the gap between knowledge and perception, making us question what is real and what is not. She has a ten-year working relationship with John Wardle Architects.

“The capacity of Natasha’s work to confound perception and challenge what and how we see things led us to invite her into our project for Venice,” Wardle says.

Coco and Maximilian have, to date, created six short films based on John Wardle Architects’ projects. Created in a spirit of artistic collaboration, these films – which will be screened within the Somewhere Other installation – present experiential and emotional engagements with architectural space rather than being purely documentary exercises.

A cantilevered cone at one end of the installation tapers to a viewing portal, one inspired by two very different masks: Venetian carnival masks and the horizontal eye slit in legendary bushranger Ned Kelly’s iron-armour helmet (and through this to Sidney Nolan’s engagement with the Australian landscape).

This viewing portal immerses one viewer in a perfect single-point perspective view into the five-metre cone, and onto a widescreen projection of Coco and Maximilian’s films.

“It’s suggestive of the way we engage with interior space”

John Wardle

Photo credit: Trevor Mein

At the other end of the installation is a U-shaped passageway where there is another film-screen, vertical this time and at human scale. This film, projected at an exact one-to-one scale with reality, presents a journey through a series of slender portals –passageways, windows and door openings – derived by Coco and Maximilian from previous John Wardle Architects projects.

This screen works in conjunction with Johns-Messenger’s intervention: two angled mirrors create the illusion that the filmic space is extensive and continuous, such that it enfolds the viewer.

“Natasha creates the illusion of a space that is continuous. By walking into it you become participants in the film – the film creates the setting of these narrow, linear portals and by walking into this instrument it’s as if you become a player on the stage within the movie. Together, these two films – one vertical at one-to-one human scale, the other in wide format – merge places within projects to convey the impression of a constant journey, through many portals and across many thresholds.”

John Wardle

As Hyde suggests, “Somewhere Other speaks to the firm’s fascination with framing of views and of landscape. The projects are instruments of looking, of alignments with features or moments.”

A final portal is designed to be viewed from the previously mentioned U-shaped passageway. A polished chrome cone embedded within the wall extends beyond the architecture through a funnel-shaped form blown in Venetian glass by master craftsman Leonardo Cimolin. A small mirror then refracts the view into the exhibition space of the Arsenale.

Photo credit: Trevor Mein

Referred to by Wardle as “the Venetian Portal”, this viewpoint has an opposite function to the others. Whereas they are concerned with the translation of the “somewhere other” of the southern hemisphere this vantage underlines our perception of the architectural pavilion space. The two are conceived to work in tandem, each underlining – but also questioning – the other.

“An instrument is created to see what otherwise cannot be seen. This recasts portals, thresholds and edges as ‘free spaces’ that give visitors a vantage point to experiences beyond their immediate physical space, to Somewhere Other”

John Wardle

Photo credit: Trevor Mein

Curated by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, Freespace, runs from 26 May to 25 November.

To accompany the exhibition, John Wardle Architects has commissioned a 152-page monograph, Somewhere Other: John Wardle Architects, by Uro Publications. The book features essays from John Wardle; Rory Hyde, curator of contemporary architecture and urbanism at the Victoria and Albert Museum; and Max Delany, artistic director and CEO of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.