ADDITIONS
Architecture Along a Continuum
Additions - the Israeli exhibition for the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale - is an examination of the concept of adding. Starting from an attempt to characterise building additions in Israel, by both global and local parameters, and moving towards practical and theoretical suggestions to view adding-on as a tool in planning.
The growth of urban populations and the decreasing amount of available land worldwide have led to the widely acknowledged understanding that cities must grow inwards, denser and higher rather than continue to spread outwards. As a component of condensation and compression processes, building additions have become increasingly prevalent in human habitats. Once a rare and seemingly insignificant phenomenon, such additions are now widely apparent in most urban and non-urban environments, where they have become a significant part of contemporary architectural activity.
Building additions respond to a specific need; they emerge at a particular point in time, and can only relate to that moment; they reflect an emerging need (or wish), one that the original plan did not, or could not, anticipate. As such, they demonstrate the paradox that lies at the core of the notion of planning and suggests a different observation over it. Concerning the fact that something will happen after our work is done, viewing planning as a link in a chain can allow for more flexibility and tolerance in the architectural process.
This raises a suggestion for an architecture of the present: What is planned today profoundly embodies the concepts, beliefs, mentality and culture of a certain time - the present, in its vast sense. This state-of-mind bears a call for an overall inclusion of contemporary challenges in the process of planning. In our complex and multi-layered reality, planning must relate to pressing issues of environment, social responsibility and sensitivity to historical context. Implementing these ideas in practice could open up the possibility for an architecture along a continuum: an architecture that allows for a cultural and historical continuum of a place.
Exhibition website: www.labiennale-israeli-pavilion.org
Curators: Michal Cederbaum, Arc. Nitzan Kalush Chechick
Co-curator: Arc. Liran Chechick
Production: Ilan Wizgan, Arad Turgeman
Co-producer: Yeala Shaviv
Exhibition design:
Arc. Liran Chechick
Arc. Nitzan Kalush Chechick
Graphic design: Koby Levy and Michal Sahar
Sponsors: Ramat Gan Municipality, Doris and Mori Arkin, SIND Biometric Soulutions