Caruso St John and Thomas Demand’s biennale exhibit creates ‘the artificial memory of an event twice displaced’

The 2010 Venice Biennale, which runs from 29 August until 21 November, is curated by Kazuyo Sejima of Japanese practice SANAA. Forty-three architects, artists and engineers have been invited to exhibit, including Herzog & de Meuron, OMA, Toyo Ito, Cecil Balmond, Olafur Eliasson, Wim Wenders and Atelier Bow-Wow. Exhibitors are asked to consider the theme People Meet in Architecture.

UK-based contributors are Florian Beigel and Philip Christou of ARU/Architecture Research Unit; Tony Fretton Architects in collaboration with artist and designer Mark Pimlott; Serpentine Gallery co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist; the late Cedric Price; artist Cerith Wyn Evans; and Caruso St John Architects, in collaboration with Berlin-based artist Thomas Demand, who have collaborated on an installation which itself draws from a joint project for the city of Zurich.

Adam Caruso writes: This is a full scale fragment of a project being undertaken by Thomas Demand and Caruso St John in Zurich. It is the artificial memory of an event twice displaced.

The project has been organised by the City of Zurich and is located at Escher Wyss Platz, an important and unusually messy part of the city’s transport infrastructure. The project coincides with the restoration of the 1960s Hardbrücke road viaduct, and the construction of a new tram line. Escher Wyss Platz is in Zurich West, a former industrial area undergoing dramatic transformation with substantial new commercial developments, new cultural institutions, and new inhabitants.

The project locates two modest buildings under the road viaduct. They appear as archaeological fragments of a street that stood there previously, or as structures carefully tailored to fit the precise topography of the heavy concrete structure of the Hardbrücke. The image for these buildings refers to the ‘Stubborn Nail’, a story from Chongqing of private owners who held out against all odds in their small house while developers demolished the city around them. For what, in the end, was demolished in China, the City of Zurich has generously found a place.

On their new site, the two buildings will contain a Chinese restaurant and a kiosk. They will be constructed of painted prefabricated timber inside and out. The milled surface of the timber will lend the construction an abstract quality that avoids any sense of ‘hand crafting’.

The cycle that began in Chongqing in 2007, a victory for individual rights over the interests of big business and big government, is repeated in Zurich in 2010. The ‘Stubborn Nail’ must face one last battle in a City of Zurich referendum planned for the 26th September.