16/05/2025
Terra NON Firma
Padiglione del Libro
The Perimeter of Architecture: Amid the Elements
the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia
We’re honoured to be invited to the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Carlo Ratti. Our project is part of the Book Pavilion in the exhibition “The Perimeter of Architecture: Amid the Elements,” curated by the brilliant Sylvia Lavin, which explores the relationship between books and architecture, paper and Venice. (Please read her beautiful curatorial text below.)
Sylvia challenged us with a set of thought-provoking texts (listed below), asking us to reflect on Venice and Bangkok—the first of 29 cities in Asia once called the Venice of the East—and how both cities grapple with the constant negotiation between land and water. This tension, we believe, has quietly shaped the architecture of each.
We were given two windows of the stunning Book Pavilion, originally designed by James Stirling in 1978-81 and commissioned by the legendary Francesco Dal Co. To evoke unstable ground, we suspended all elements using metal chains, strings, and delicate blue paper models.
In one window, we present a model of Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo—the most purely water-based architecture ever built in Venice, temporarily floating for the inaugural Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980.
In the other, we respond with Bangkok: a soft, amphibian city that adapts rather than resists. Here, pop-up models made from notebook pages form a small, drifting city—an architecture shaped not by solidity, but by rhythm, impermanence, and change.
To reflect the Biennale’s focus on sustainability, our entire installation is light, foldable, and easily transportable—eschewing expensive, heavy shipping. Instead, we devoted our modest budget to something more meaningful: bringing along young architects from our team to experience the Biennale and carry its energy forward.
If you’d like to dive deeper, take a look at our scrap board here: https://www.figma.com/board/qXirEnpFqyhqHCgkY1Bc3V/VBN---TERRA-non-Firma?node-id=0-1&p=f
all(zone)
With team members: Rachaporn Choochuey, Archaraporn Vachirasrisuntree, Aniroot Unjai, Rasarose Kitmungsa, Sirawich Sirichaipan, Thanatcha Tangsakulruanglai, Duangkamol Ponrpattanalertkul, Thanaphat Sangkarom, Aroonrod Supreeyaporn, Francesco Notari, Onno Hesebeck
Graphic Design Consultant: Piyapong Bhumichitra
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Curatorial Statement by Sylvia Lavin:
Amid the Elements is an environmental history of architecture animated by forgotten encounters between building and the elements—earth, water, air, fire and sometimes ether. Beginning in the early modern period, when printed books and buildings first came together, they not only assembled new collectives and circulated ideas with growing constancy but formed a capacious record of how the elements continued to exert their role despite a progressively more synthetic environment. Although most architectural treatises persisted in framing earthly matter as merely peripheral, some books, often those in which architecture is present but not central, documented novel ways of understanding the elements and the world they constructed that were possible precisely because they emerged along the field’s perimeters. Amid the Elements examines this sometimes violent but always remarkable history of architecture as an environmental medium through two parallel interventions in a pavilion designed by James Stirling not coincidentally as a ship wending a cargo of weightless books through a lagoon of trees. Inside the building, a collection of historical books exposes the obscured elemental circumstances that compose and erode life’s sustaining infrastructure. A corresponding gallery of models, visible from outside, draws forth reservoirs of intelligence latent in these material assemblies. Through these exchanges between models and books, Amid the Elements invites the often-unpredictable force of the elemental world to breach architecture’s perimeter.
Amid the Elements draws on Venice as a case study. The city’s survival was substantially buoyed by books, not only because of the knowledge they transmitted but because their manufacture formed an environmental network of production that made Venice a capital of the early modern world. Its elemental systems, stretching from rivers to the West and winds from the East, also gave Venetian paper an azure cast, a color named after the gemstone lapis lazuli and associated with the sky. Renaissance artists favored carta azzurra because it simultaneously suggested and facilitated novel forms of atmospheric perspectives, which grew so self-sustaining that eventually images no longer needed a colored substrate to appear natural. The models of Amid the Elements incorporate carta azzurra and its long denatured but persistently elemental force while the books on display are low-resolution replicas made of recycled matter, not only because the environmental controls within the book pavilion are, ironically, inadequate to the standards set for book conservation today, but because paper production once depended almost entirely on operations of reuse. Through these means, Amid the Elements counters the seemingly immaterial but often toxic and energy-intensive formats through which information now circulates with close attention to architecture’s effects within an ecosystem of relations.
Terra non Firma I
Where land and water constantly flirt, defying fixed boundaries, architecture must become a soft form—light, flexible, and amphibian. In Bangkok, such logic has shaped a way of living with uncertainty. As seas rise and ground shifts globally, this quiet adaptability offers not nostalgia, but a possible blueprint for change.
Over the course of the long modern period, competition and conflict became central to architecture’s epistemology of elemental encounter, a dynamic exemplified by the infrastructures built to manage, contain and control water. From descriptions of Venice as a battleground against its lagoon to claims that dominance in evolutionary struggle improves with distance from life’s origins in the sea and to countless complaints about leaky buildings and rusty pipes, architecture has been deployed against the unpredictable power of aqueous flux. Even when Darwin marveled that coral was neither animal nor mineral but nevertheless able to make land from the ocean and Marx celebrated their ability to labor together for the collective good, antagonism and conquest most often determined the understanding of ecological organization. And yet, as was clear to architects less dominated by modernist forms of competition, the ways in which water combines with and reshapes the elements to produce life-sustaining habitats depend on infinitely complex environmental calculations and adaptive relations that extend beyond belligerence.
Terra non Firma II
Many cities are born of water, yet they respond differently. Venice builds vertically, solidifying muddy ground into permanence while canals work to keep water out. Bangkok lets water in—its land soft, its edges blurred. Built horizontally to float, the city drifts along water that becomes life, rhythm, and quiet resilience.
One of the most persistent fantasies of modern architects has been to produce buildings that float weightless, detached from their elemental surroundings. Techniques of architectural practice became increasingly adept at normalizing this impulse to unmoor buildings until axonometric projection became a format and pilotis standard operating equipment. The desire to erase the ground, however, often achieved through drawing, has frequently been complicit with the desire to possess it. Indeed, an epistemic regime of geometric abstraction propelled territorialization even into once-trackless liquid realms: sounding weights converted the Atlantic Ocean floor into fathom curves and plane tables arrested Saharan sand dunes into fixed contours. As the force of these lines grew ubiquitous, both more present in the form of telegraph poles and railroads and less visible in ocean-floor cables, the distinctions between land and sea, earth and air faded into an unquestioned infrastructural substrate of coordinates. These naturalizations are now blended into the ruled margins of printed matter and standardized layouts of the built environment, often mistaken as inherent features of the world.
Bibliography
Andrea Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architettura, Venezia, 1570.
Bernado Trevisan, Della laguna di Venezia, Venezia, 1715.
Louis Ferdinand comte de Marsilli, Histoire Physique de la Mer, Amsterdam, 1725.
James Reynolds, Reynolds’ Universal Atlas of Astronomy, Geology, Physical Geography, the Vegetable Kingdom, and Natural Philosophy, London, 185?.
Girolamo Maggi, Della fortificatione delle città, Venezia, 1564.
Nicolas-Jacques Conté, “Produits de la machine a graver,” from Description de l’Égypte, 2:2, Paris, 1809–1812.
Matthew Fontaine Maury, The Physical Geography of the Sea, New York, 1855.
Auguste Choisy, Chemin de fer transsaharien, Paris, 1890.
