Villa Frankenstein' British Pavilion

RESEARCH BACKGROUND MUF Architecture Art (the architectural practice of Melanie Dodd) was commissioned by the British Council to curate the British Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. The curatorial impetus took its departure from John Ruskin's 'The Stones of Venice', and more generally from the British preoccupation with Venice and the different ways in which they have taken the city home. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION Villa Frankenstein crossed the Giardini fence in order to bring Venice and some of its preoccupations inside the Pavilion with the premise that observation is proposition. The Stadium of Close Looking, a scale model of part of the 2012 London Olympic Stadium, was both an invitation to look and an emblem of the value of looking. The pavilion also featured a living salt-marsh ecosystem from the Venice Lagoon, a project by Wolfgang Scheppe drawing on Ruskin's original notebooks and photographs of Venice taken by its inhabitants, examinations of recent Italian feminism, of the city's still extant artisan culture, and of the ambitions of the Biennale. All these projects proposed looking at detail as a form of strategic thinking, one that serves as an alternative to the pseudo-objectivity of the master-plan. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE The Venice Architecture Biennale is the leading international architecture exhibition, and an invitation to curate the British Pavilion is a significant honour and reflection of the international reputation of MUF Architecture Art. The exhibition produced a two-part publication, "Villa Frankenstein: Close Looking" and "Villa Frankenstein: La Laguna di Venezia."