The Second Bicycle Architecture Biennale launched in Amsterdam this June, featuring an array of cutting-edge bicycle infrastructural projects from around the world. But how useful are they for citizens not blessed with a bike friendly city?
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Last June saw the opening of the Second Bicycle Biennale in Amsterdam, a showcase of various innovative bicycle infrastructural projects from Europe and around the world. Initiated by the BYCS foundation, and curated by NEXT Architecture, this edition was introduced at Amsterdam’s WeMakeThe.City festival, before going on tour across Europe, making stops at several major exhibitions and events, including Velo-City in Ireland, Arena Oslo, as well as events in Rome and Gent.
The biennale featured fifteen projects in total, selected for their success in extending beyond functional design solutions and tackling wider urban problems. While this allows for quite a wide berth, several themes emerge from the entries. To start with, many of the projects are defined by their relationship to pre-existing car and rail infrastructure. For instance, one involves the creative repurposing of an old highway in Auckland and another involves renovation of an old railway in Queens, New York, while a project in Barcelona has successfully overcome the impediment created by a particularly tricky section of the city’s motorway network.
Seeking synergy
In a similar vein, several projects have clearly been selected for their success in binding together previously disparate parts of the city. This goes for the Auckland and Queens projects, as well as a striking bridge in the small Dutch town of Purmerend, and another bridge in Cologne, Germany which has helped to turn its surrounding area into a new city centre.
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Meanwhile, there’s a very obvious focus on projects that seek to synergise with the key nodes of a city’s wider infrastructure, including a skyway that maps onto a bus rapid transit line in the Chinese city of Xiamen, a bike path that follows Berlin’s elevated U1 metro line, as well as projects in Copenhagen, Utrecht and The Hague which all adeptly insert themselves into the rapid passenger flows of these cities’ respective central train stations.
Sensitive, Stealthy, Smooth
If there were a golden thread observable from all these themes, it probably comes from the seeming assumption that the desired bicycle-centred city of the future is best achieved by way of solutions that are sensitive, stealthy and smoothly plugged into the pre-existing urban fabric. This is definitely an uncontroversial and sensible approach, and by no means the wrong one, but it would be great if a future edition also focused on some more bottom-up interventions. Coming as they do from Amsterdam, it cannot have escaped the founders of the Biennale that their own city’s incredibly bike-friendly atmosphere comes thanks to decades of grassroots activism from previous generations, rather than being delivered through top-down urban planning.
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More grassroots, wider geography
Covering some more grassroots projects ought to also address another issue with the Biennale, that most of its successful entries are located in North and Western Europe, with four projects from The Netherlands, three from Germany, two from Belgium and one from Denmark.
Given these places are at the forefront of the move to a more bicycle-oriented urban environment, this narrow geography is to be expected. But the many cities where conditions aren’t suited to cutting edge infrastructure surely could do with some more practicable inspiration from other places that are similarly hamstrung.
To be fair to the Biennale, it’s beyond their stated scope to intervene in the various complex political situations that prevent bicycle infrastructure from being realised. But avoiding this aspect will necessarily limit its capacity for meaningful change.
How is public space influenced by Germany’s past division into two separate states? This question is examined by the German contribution to this year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture, where Marianne Birthler, former Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records, and Graft Architekten are the curators of the “Unbuilding Walls” project.
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It surely is a contrast-rich team that curated the German pavilion for the Biennale of Architecture in Venice, being made up of the politician Marianne Birthler and the three heads of the Graft architectural office, namely Lars Krückeberg, Wolfram Putz and Thomas Willemeit. Graft stands for modern architecture made in Los Angeles, Berlin and Peking, and Marianne Birthler embodies the critical voice of socialism: once an East German civil rights activist, she later went on to administer the Stasi files for many years. For their “Unbuilding Walls” Biennale project, the four investigated a special type of freespace – namely the empty spaces left behind following the fall of the Wall between the two Germanys.
The Wall had to disappear quickly
28 years have passed since Germany’s Reunification, the same length of time that the Wall existed, from 1961 until 1989. Accordingly the exhibition features 28 construction projects that provide an impression of what the former death strip looks like today. The zigzag border that cut Berlin into two was some 160 kilometres long and none too narrow: the East German “control strip” was 10 metres wide and the so-called “protective strip” another 500 metres. The vanishing of the Wall left behind a vacuum, a deep wound in need of healing – quite pragmatically initially. As curator Thomas Willemeit explains, “There was no overall strategy, no masterplan, but very obvious tasks straight away: bridges had to be rebuilt, suburban fast train lines reconnected, and then there was the question of reconstruction at certain neuralgic points.”
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In the city it was generally agreed that the Wall had to disappear quickly, at best with the former border being built over as if it had never existed. As Willemeit’s colleague Lars Krückeberg points out: “Everyone wanted to forget. Today, in contrast, if an escape tunnel is found, it’s like the discovery of a new grave in the Valley of the Kings, something that has to be preserved immediately and given listed monument status. This would never have occurred immediately after Reunification, so it’s all been a process. This has been an interesting realisation for us, namely that the culture of remembrance can be very dynamic”.
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In Venice the curators feature Aldo Rossi’s Schuetzenstrasse complex in Berlin as a prominent example of a planned strategy of forgetting in the guise of a conscious reference to tradition and history. The building plot – consisting of a section of Wall-related no-man’s-land with the paltry remains of Gründerzeit buildings as well as a complete block between Schützen, Charlotten, Markgrafen and Zimmer streets – seemed practically predestined for a programmatic project that the Italian Pritzker Prize winner described as a “homage to the typical late-19th-century architecture of Berlin” at the presentation of his design.
On 26th of May the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018 opened its gates to public. Until the 25th of November exhibitions around the loose topic “Freespace” can be visited. Curators of the 16th Biennale, the Irish architects Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, selected the theme to encourage architects working with the human scale. They should explore how “a generosity of spirit and a sense of humanity” can contribute to the built environment.
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Living Space
As always, many exhibitions deal with the topic of mass housing, which in times of urbanisation, rural flight and migration, is still a very current issue. A look back to the past was taken by the V&A Museum in London, which is also present with an exposition. A large piece of the famous brutalist housing project Robin Hood Gardens was transported to Venice. It is now part of the vision “Streets in the Sky” by the architects Alison and Peter Smithson.
This year’s winning exhibition also deals with living space and comes from Switzerland. Four scientific assistants from the ETH Zurich prepared an empty flat in which the proportions are overridden. With “Svizzera 240” they want to protest against the constraint of having a 240 centimetres ceiling height in every modern housing. The otherwise generic and provocative boring apartment increases in size from one side to the other, while also its furniture adapts the proportions.
Large-Scale Space
Other expositions took the topic on a larger scale. Segregation through walls are also a big subject these days. Beside the proposed fortification on Mexico’s border, also the Berlin wall attracts attention this year: It has now been down for longer that it stood. The German contribution “Unbuilding Walls” tells the story of a decade-long division of the country and shows examples like Checkpoint Charlie and the destroyed border village Jahrsau.
The British and the Belgian expositions deal with the role of the European Union. The British pavilion “Island” addresses the Brexit by offering a fantastic view over the other national pavilions, while it is left empty inside. With “Eurotropie”, Belgium reflects the symbolic presence of its capital Brussels for Europe. Both exhibitions offer space for encouraged discussions about the EU.
