The Biennale attracts exhibitors from far and wide, but few came from further or wider than Melbourne, Australia-based John Wardle. “The gaze of architecture is rarely on Australia,” the architect says, though there’s a bit of false modesty there, at least as pertains to him: Besides his recognition back home, Wardle has considerable exposure abroad, including in the pages of ARCHITECT, for his design (in collaboration with Nader Tehrani and his Boston-based firm NADAAA) of his hometown’s architecture school. What Wardle has brought to the Arsenale seems to have at least an indirect affiliation with that Melbourne project—and a rather more direct one with the theme of this Biennale as a whole.
Like the design school, with its Swiss Army knife-like hyper-functionality, his installation “Somewhere Other” is a highly refined machine—ungainly in outline but richly and alluringly surfaced, in this instance in a dark-grained wood. Its function is also a great deal more abstract than that brick-and-mortar project: As the funnel-shaped envelope of "Somewhere Other" suggests, it’s a telescope, a mechanism for viewing, but one that affords multiple points of view. “It’s a long lens that transports you all the way to Australia,” Wardle says, pointing into the narrow end of the scope, where a grooved armature receives the viewer’s face and points to it a screen showing images of his firm’s work back home. At the wide end of the installation, visitors walk into the structure itself, only to be confronted by a series of twists and turns with mirrored walls that have a disorienting, funhouse effect. The possibility that someone might smack into their own reflection did not escape the designer. “We decided not to worry about it,” Wardle says, chuckling.
Though unafraid to have a little fun, the intent of the installation is quite serious. “Freespace”, the official theme declared for the Arsenale's exhibition by 2018 curators Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Dublin's Grafton Architects, elicited a number of responses from the participating architects in a not-dissimilar vein from Wardle’s: spatial, structural, or perceptual experiences that abjured grand statements for puzzlingly poetic encounters. Not far from “Somewhere Other” in the Arsenale, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Hon. FAIA’s installation—images of a renovation project in Portugal that seemed to show almost no intervention whatsoever—won this year’s Golden Lion for the international section; among the national exhibitors, Switzerland took home honors for an Alice in Wonderland-ish pavilion that used doorframes to create dizzying shifts in scale. Wardle may be from far and away, but it appears he’s right in tune with the global architecture scene, which showed up in Venice in a distinctly enquiring and reflective mood.
