Australia's radical black box in Venice

Venice's Giardini, the leafy park at the extreme eastern end of the island containing the national pavilions that make up the Biennale, is an architectural menagerie.

An almost perfect display of modern architectural tastes and styles, its structures include the National Romanticism of Hungary, the rigid classicism of Nazi Germany, the minimal classicism of the Scandinavians and the imperial dullness of the perennially difficult British. Like the city is sits in, it has itself become a monument, a preserved landscape. A new building is big news, even if it is not controversial.

The latest addition to the Giardini's architectural landscape, and the first new building for 20 years, is Australia's newly completed pavilion, a blank black box. And it has been controversial. It caused a stir not just because of its stark, blocky form but because of the way the design was selected from Denton Corker Marshall, a large corporate practice based in Melbourne (designers of the Stonehenge visitors' centre). The competition effectively excluded young practices from the process and created resentment in the industry.

Visually, the pavilion is a radical departure from the language of its neighbours, each of which attempts to express something about its respective nation through its architecture.

It is also represents a turnaround from the previous incarnation of the Australian pavilion, a delicate white metal box with a light vaulted roof and a verandah that was designed by architect Philip Cox.

It was a successful structure, initially intended only to be temporary (though it stood for 26 years), one which attempted to reflect what has become a kind of accepted Australian contemporary vernacular: the corrugated-iron, curving roofs, the openness and the front porches associated particularly with the work of the much-admired Australian architect Glenn Murcutt.

So what does the black box mean? I asked the question of the architect John Denton, of Denton Corker Marshall. "The design came out of an attempt to achieve a minimal response," he told me. "The brief called for a white box, specifically not for a mannered space. It wasn't calling for a Daniel Libeskind or a Zaha Hadid. Having been to so many biennales over the last 20 years, they're such a mishmash that we wanted to do something simple, elegant and enigmatic. So the idea was to put a black box around the white box on the side of the canal so people would wonder what it was, what was inside it.

"We've always seen ourselves as urban architects working out of the centre of Melbourne, which is really a European city transposed to Australia. We've never been attracted to the corrugated iron and verandahs. We saw this architecture as Australia coming back to Europe."

And what does it say about Australia? "We've designed a lot of embassies," Denton replies, "and in every one there's this idea that the ambassador should be able to take visitors around the building and use it to tell a story - so we're very used to this idea. But here we had this idea that this was Australia sitting at the edge of the trees."

I asked him to explain this enigmatic statement. "When we designed the Governor Phillip Tower and the Museum of Sydney," he says, "we worked with the artists Fiona Foley and Janet Laurence and they made a work called 'The Edge of the Trees'. It was about how when Phillip [Admiral Arthur Phillip, who established the penal colony which would become Sydney] landed, the indigenous people were watching, concealed from the edge of the trees. We saw this building as the Australians coming to Europe and observing from the edge of the trees."

If that conveys an element of enigmatic detachment, it also addresses the rather peculiar nature of these pavilions. These are buildings that are shut half of the year, coming to life only for the few months of a biennale. This is a building that is able to clam up shut, closing itself off entirely.

When in use, if the artist desires it, a pair of panels can be opened up to reveal windows, one opening to the side like a door, another opening downwards like a drawbridge. The building is cantilevered out over a new canal-side walkway and these two shutters overhang the canal itself, projecting its presence across the water. The door, too, opens this way, its shutter swinging upwards to form a canopy or porch. "When it's shut," says Denton, "there's no apparent way in. It's a black granite box."

The metaphors could be endless, anything from the Kaaba to the monoliths in Kubrick's 2001, but each suggests a mystical object, something which sits oddly in its landscape and which both attracts and conceals. It's an intriguing metaphor, but the pressure is on the artists and the architects who'll show in it to create something inside that might reward that sense of anticipation.

'Wrong Way Time' by Fiona Hall opens Australia's pavilion on May 9 australiacouncil.gov.au

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation