VENICE, Italy, Aug 29, (AFP): Rwanda, a first-time presence at the Venice architectural Biennale, is shining the spotlight on the use of traditional techniques and materials in design and architecture.
The strategy is seen as an essential way to safeguard traditional culture and national identity in the nation traumatised by the 1994 genocide.
Rwanda’s modest exhibition at the Biennale opening Sunday shows how centuries-old weaving techniques and natural fibres can be used to create necklaces or shoes, how ash and cow dung can decorate modern walls and how alternatives to paper can be used in handmade books.
“Today, before we throw away vegetable fibres we have to think again,” Josephie Malonza of the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology told a seminar Saturday at Rwanda’s pavilion.
The featured speaker at the seminar, prominent Burkina Faso architect Francis Kere, accused the North of “putting us under pressure by saying that what we have is primitive.”
Africans have alternatives to air-conditioning, and mud is a material that is perfectly adapted to the African situation, he said. “There’s no insurance (against damage or destruction). People just band together and in seven days they will rebuild” a mud structure ruined by rain, Kere said.
While Rwanda wants to preserve natural building techniques, Czech architect Martin Rajnis wants to import them from poor countries, picking up ideas from travels to the “third and even the fourth world, among the native people untouched by civilisation.”

Dubbed
Rajnis has developed a vision dubbed Natural Architecture based on the natural world of indigenous peoples, plants and animals.
He masterminded the Czech and Slovak pavilion, which draws the visitor in under a canopy of randomly arranged pine planks.
Inside is an installation entirely in unfinished wood taking the visitor along walkways and past multi-layered creations, some twisting into spirals, others formed into cones and domes inspired by natural forms.
Claiming that “architecture is undergoing a crisis,” Rajnis says modern buildings “no longer satisfy people. It is necessary to start to create differently: instead of design and aesthetics to take inspiration from the deeper laws of nature.”
Light years away from natural building materials is the acrylic meshwork fitted with microprocessors and sensors that the Biennale visitor will find at Canada’s pavilion.
The highly interactive installation is a futuristic artificial forest in which visitors can touch the shimmering, lightweight structures, which respond by changing shape and position.
The project titled “Hylozoic Ground” after an ancient belief that all matter has life is geared towards “responsive architecture” — the next wave for smart buildings.
Fifty-three countries have pavilions at this year’s Biennale, which runs until Nov 21.
Meanwhile, urban planners bracing for the influx of ever more millions into finite territories should look to Singapore as a “model compact city,” says architect Khoo Peng Beng.

Startling
Khoo, lead curator of Singapore’s pavilion at the Venice architectural Biennale, opens his argument with some startling figures to demonstrate the compactness of the tiny island state off the Malaysian peninsula.
It is planning for a maximum population of 6.5 million in 20 years, which is 1,000th of the current world total of 6.5 billion.
Yet 1,000 times the land area of Singapore would occupy only 0.5 percent of the total world land mass, equivalent to about twice the size of Italy, Khoo said.
Maps at the exhibit shrink China and the United States to the tiny spaces they would occupy if they had the same density as Singapore, which has a land area of just 710 square kilometres (275 square miles).
The exhibition titled “1,000 Singapores: A Model of a Compact City” stresses the advantages of compactness such as minimising energy consumption, streamlining transportation and reducing the carbon footprint.
“Architecture, social systems, transport systems, waste management and so on are working hand in hand in a meta-project,” Khoo told AFP, describing Singapore’s evolution as a “very slow process of self-invention, as an island, a country, a city.”
One of the world’s richest cities and widely acclaimed as among the most “liveable”, Singapore has avoided the congested feeling of places like Hong Kong and Tokyo until recent years.
Increasing numbers of immigrants and guest workers jostle for space with the locals, and tourism is surging thanks to two new massive casino resorts that opened a few months ago.
Car ownership has also spiked even though Singapore is one of the costliest places in the world to own a vehicle.

And flash floods that wreaked havoc in June and July raised questions over whether the nation was equipped to handle the side effects of rapid urbanisation.
Back in Venice, Khoo said: “There is a heroic quality in thinking about the environment in that architecture can save the world, save the people, save the country.”
He said Singaore wanted to “invite people to reflect on how human settlement can be,” adding: “We do not have to continue to occupy a lot of land.”
French architect Dominique Perrault is sanguine about the future, viewing even urban sprawl as an opportunity rather than a scourge.
The challenge will be in managing the available space, he told AFP.
“We are in a finite world, which is completely new compared with a time like for example that of Christopher Columbus,” said Perrault, who is in charge of France’s pavilion at Venice’s architectural Biennale this year.
“But even in this finite world there is still a lot of space that is available to us, which needs to be respected, protected and managed,” he said.

Providing
The French pavilion, under the banner “Metropolis?”, offers floor-to-ceiling videos providing bird’s-eye views of the expanding French cities of Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and Nantes to show the “breadth of the void’s presence... the full scope of new territories and the possibilities they offer.”
Perrault, 57, known for his love of right angles and his signature creation, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, said: “With ‘Metropolis?’ we have put the spotlight on the presence of the void, that is, these spaces that are made up of roads, squares, rivers and so on.”
Evoking “the arrival of (father of psychiatry Sigmund) Freud into architecture,” he said: “There is a kind of unconscious world that begins to appear because we are in a situation that forces us to become aware that we are in a physical world which has a limit, which I find very exciting.”

The recipient of top honours such as the Equerre d’Argent and the Grand Prix Nationale d’Architecture urged a more modest role for the architect, moving away from that of creating “extraordinary, emblematic buildings” to one of “sheltering and protecting human groupings.”
Defending a much criticised urban renewal plan advocated by President Nicolas Sarkozy to improve transport links and housing in the greater Paris area, Perrault said he was “very optimistic” of its prospects, adding: “The idea of a greater territory is something that is indisputable, inevitable.”
Like it or not, “a massive transformation of European territory is under way,” he said, adding: “Little by little we will see in Europe, instead of a grid of cities, as we were saying just five years ago, a grid of metropolises.”
His prediction: “In about 10 years, everything will have changed.”
Ever positive, Perrault also predicts: “The car, once it stops stinking and making noise, will transform the planet. Our relationship with the car will be more peaceful.”