The theory of shadows

What is architecture made of? What survives of modernity? The questions raised in the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale seem to find complementary responses in two contributions developed by Hiroshi Sugimoto for leading Venetian institutions, the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini with Pentagram Stiftung.

The photographs on show at Palazzetto Tito curated by Filippo Maggia examine the essence of architecture, in anticipation of the major retrospective that the Fondazione Fotografia Modena is to dedicate to the artist in February 2015. Eleven photographs, many of which are previously unpublished, outline a particular response to the question: what is architecture made of? Of the variable coalescing of shadow, Sugimoto seems to answer. In his photos, shadow and light allude to volumes, trace elevations, free or anchor buildings to the ground.

Japanese culture has considerable familiarity with the secrets of shadow: Junichiro Tanizaki talks about it in his In'ei Raisan (in Praise of Shadows), in which – during the mid 1930s - he questioned the effects of modernity on the life and aesthetics of the country. Sugimoto also focuses on the architecture of modernity, that he explores “to track the beginnings of our age”. In the artistic approach developed over recent decades (the Architecture series began in the mid 1990s), a highly personal synthesis of the eye of the camera and time, architecture is subjected to “trial by erosion” to test its durability.

Countless buildings dissolve completely in the process - there remains no trace of them. Survivors are rare, thanks to an iconic strength that is somewhat close to Warburg’s memory of the image, “Ghosts for adults”. In the photographs, in which “patches of light amalgamate with shadow” (Tanizaki), we thus find the monument to Sant’Elia and the Einstein tower, homages to the much-loved Duchamp and Bauhaus. A prominent feature of the exhibition is a large-scale triptych dedicated to the 2012 pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery: the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei is captured with the ineffable quality in which the confine between nature and artifice is blurred and the pool of water on the roof becomes an instrument for the creation of a world.

Similar in spirit but of a very different mark, is Sugimoto’s intervention on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Invited by the Fondazione Cini and Pentagram Stiftung to create a pavilion connected to a portion of the island salvaged from dereliction, the artist himself developed a site-specific architectural device: he has conceived a transparent cube dedicated to the tea ceremony and entrusts shadow with calibrated interventions of the landscape – the wooden fence in cedar and bamboo, the access route with its varied texture, the paving with stone and Venetian antiquitates, the pool of water in glass mosaic.

Hommage à Mondrian, by virtue of the universality of the compositional principles of the Dutch painter, The Glass Tea House accommodates the ceremony that over the course of the centuries has transformed an everyday act into art, endowed with the single scope of entertaining one’s guests: an ancient art, still very much alive that embraces all the individual western arts in a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk.

To the Glass Tea House therefore Sugimoto entrusts the task of transmitting the ultimate meaning of architecture: a place of relationships, between one thing and another, between one person and another, between people and things.

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Glass Tea House Mondrian by Hiroshi Sugimoto
Le Stanze del Vetro
Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice

Until 12 October 2014
Hiroshi Sugimoto. Modern Times
Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa
Palazzetto Tito, Venice

Until 23 November 2014
14. Biennale di Architettura
Fundamentals
Venice