Greetings from an apartment
Little Italy / Giudecca Social Housing (IACP)
May 25-30, 2018 / 16th Venice Architecture Biennale
Greetings from an apartment is part of Unsent Postcard, a fine-art small-format paper project curated by Giorgia Scognamiglio and Lorenzo Zandri.
Greetings from an apartment is a specific selection of postcards depicting high quality and meaningful social housing projects almost unknown and “unseen” with a main focus on Gino Valle’s Giudecca complex. With their similarities and differences, the selected case studies offer a glimpse of designated cities from another point of view, related to local answers to the housing demand.
Heritage cities like Venice or London have relied on tourism market for many years and Architecture has always represented an attractive force. However, main attention has been given to mainstream and iconic buildings and cities have been started to be mostly known for a few glamour sites.
At the same time, referring to the specific case of Gino Valle’s project, less “notorious” but equally important masterpieces, have frequently fallen into oblivion or have gained intermittent attention over the years despite their significant impact, as in the case of Bofill’s project “Les Espaces d’Abraxas”. Nevertheless, housing projects often represent a symbolic architecture with a strong sense of place, reflecting the real complexity and identity of the neighborhood and the city they belong to.
As a result, the Unfolding Pavilion exhibition in La Giudecca complex represents the ideal event to introduce Unsent Postcard purpose and invite people (in particular professional experts in the field of architecture, city planning and making) to visit and discover cities, architectures and places with an attentive eye, by choosing to prioritize meaningful architectural projects and reverting to the days of pen pals and “old-fashioned” postcards in order to take the time to reflect on what they are visiting.
Following the temporary nature of the Unfolding Pavilion, the Gino Valle’s selection will be available only for this event, encouraging visitors to take advantages of a short but intense moment and decide to have a printed memory of this unique experience inside a social housing apartment and put on paper their first impressions.
The selected postcards have been showed on bespoke plywood shelves arranged following a simplified version of Valle’s C-shaped plan in order to reinforce the strong connection with the place where Unfolding Pavilion exhibition took place this year in conjunction with the opening of the 16th Architecture Venice Biennale.
Greetings from an apartment is part of Unsent Postcard, a fine-art small-format paper project, designed and curated by Giorgia Scognamiglio and Lorenzo Zandri, which aims at celebrating significant, intriguing and rare architectures through the recovery of an unused medium of communication, the postcard.
Mainly underrated now, the postcard has represented a powerful way to describe and spread the image of cities for many years, documenting the historical urban changes roughly from the ‘20s to ‘80s. Opting for speed and mainstream “instagrammable” places, today’s travelers have almost lost the ability and the time to deeply understand the identity of the places they visit.
Unsent Postcard presents alternative narratives of spaces and invites visitors to leave the touristic beaten tracks and recuperate the experience of selecting the most appropriate image and condensing their impressions in a few sentences on paper.
