Paris studio CARBONDALE’s design of Dolce & Gabbana’s flagship Venice store is an aesthetic love affair between brand and city. 

Eric Carlson of CARBONDALE set out to deliver a uniquely romanticised and luxurious retail experience that embodies the cultural authenticity and traditions that both Dolce & Gabbana and Venice share. Spanning 800-square-metres, the double-storey structure is an alluring harmony between contemporary and neo-Venetian Renaissance styles.

Created for a powerhouse brand renowned for contrasts, it is only fitting that the interior and exterior designs heighten this brand ethos by juxtaposing the old and new. Step inside the grand space and you will find that each room is dressed in different finishes and rich palettes of colour. Eric’s modern designs celebrate and accentuate traditional Venetian craftsmanship techniques.

The regal space boasts 14 rooms, each opulent beyond measure, with features that include intricately patterned inlays, various marbles, semi-precious stone facades, silk damasks, delicate fabric weaves and hand-blown Murano glass by the Seguso family. Hand-carved wooden detailing decks the walls and ceilings while mosaic glass stones dressed in 24-karat gold cover the floors. Designer furniture pieces either cleverly fade into their surroundings or mirror the historical ambience.

Love this space? See more designs by CARBONDALE, here.

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The Bevilacqua family has been in the textile industry since the 1400s.

Today, the Luigi Bevilacqua Company is the last company in Italy to produce velvet in the traditional way, protecting an art form that would otherwise be lost in the age of modern technology.

The company produces velvet in exactly the same way as it would have been produced three or four centuries ago, with its fabrics finding homes in opulent buildings such as the Kremlin and the White House.

Watch the clip above to see the amazing work this company continues to do.

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Experience the romance of this grand and classic Venetian residence.

THE SPACE

The uncharitable may mutter about the vapours, but Venice is still one of the most remarkable cities in the world, and Ca’ Cerchieri is the kind of grand accommodation one dreams of when there. It’s an ample piano nobile, accessible via a lift, but also has a Grand Canal entrance and a charming walled garden. There are three luxurious double bedrooms, all en-suite, as well as another three to four bedrooms – it sleeps 12. Communal areas include three sumptuous living rooms, a loggia with classic Venetian Gothic trifora arches, plus a formal dining room with a fully fitted kitchen. The decor is fitting: Zuber hand-block printed wallpaper and Murano glass chandeliers.

THE LOCATION

The Dorsoduro precinct is one of the richest areas in art – it’s home to the fantastic Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Ca’ Cerchieri is opposite Francois Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi museum of modern art and lies between the Accademia Bridge, the Academy of Fine Arts and the Ca’ Rezzonico museum of 18th century art, which houses important Venetian paintings. It’s also a very authentic area, with plenty of local dining options.

THE EXTRAS

A butler can be hired.

THE SIZE

550 m²

THE COST

From €10  000 per week.

This article was originally featured in IMAGINE. Visit pamgolding.co.za for more luxury listings. For more information about this property, contact Tom Scott on 021 710 1700 or email him via theprivateoffice@pamgolding.co.za.

This luxury chalet in the French Alps is also for hire…

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Enrico Daffonchio is the only SA-based architect exhibiting at the ‘Time Space Existence’ exhibition in Venice this year. Nia Magoulianiti-McGregor tells us why.

“It’s like winning an award or someone you admire patting you on your back,” says architect Enrico Daffonchio about being the only South Africa-based architect exhibiting at the Venice Architecture Biennale’s ‘Time Space Existence’ exhibition this year. “The curators researched each country and decided on my work, which inspires me with confidence.” He was there for the opening in June and tells me, “It was without a doubt the best event I’ve ever been to in my life.”

“It’s a massive exhibition and one of the oldest showcases of art and architecture in the world,” says Daffonchio, who is presenting 14 years of work at the exposition, including his “favourite project” – Arts on Main in Maboneng. Once a cluster of decaying industrial buildings in the heart of Johannesburg, Arts on Main is now a sexy success story of mixed-use spaces in a vibrant, urban neighbourhood. Using the history of each building as a base, he adopted a minimal approach, while bringing “affordable high design” to a younger generation who wanted to reconnect with the streets of the city.

Organised by the Holland-based GlobalArtAffairs Foundation, and running until November, the Biennale is showcasing the work of more than 100 architects from 40 countries with different cultural backgrounds in different stages of their career.

Curator Rene Rietmeyer explains the prevailing rationale: “Architects’ structures have an enormous impact on the way we experience our surroundings, on the way we experience time and space. They influence our daily existence, they leave a mark on the earth from the moment of construction – usually outliving the architects themselves.”

For his part, Daffonchio describes architecture as a way of perceiving time and space. “It’s a sequence of spaces and side spaces arousing a specific emotion in a well considered area; a space can be calming, exciting, sexy or cold. It’s a series of states of consciousness.”

Urban strategist Alice Cabaret from Propertuity, the company that developed Arts on Main and the greater Maboneng Precinct, says that Maboneng fits into the ‘Time, Space, Existence’ theme in various ways: It acknowledges ‘Time’ by regarding the entire development as a “correlation of temporalities”, with heritage buildings being converted for futuristic development.

‘Space’ addresses the link between inner-city high-rises and residential suburbs, while the transformation of the area also creates new socio-spatial dynamics.

The idea of ‘Existence’ is addressed by the development “bringing back to life a formerly vacant part of the city, while creating a strong identity relating to the democratic transformation of the city,” Cabaret explains.

“Our Maboneng work represents almost half of our output,” Daffonchio tells me, “and the exhibition shares the cultural aspects of these projects, which act as a counterweight to our high-end residential and commercial work.”

“The Venice Biennale is a great platform to communicate our ideas to a very broad international audience, while also serving as a fantastic opportunity to meet and engage with the best in the professional and academic spheres,” he says.

What makes his work stand out? “Attention to detail and taking the time to understand the client’s goals.”

TIME SPACE EXISTENCE runs until 23 November 2014 at the Palazzo Bembo in Venice. Find out more info at www.labiennale.org

 

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Five of South Africa’s talented young architects are currently showing their projects at the Young Architects in Africa exhibition, part of the 14th Venice Architectural Biennale that runs until 30 August. 

The exhibition is an initiative of France’s AS Architecture-Studio’s Italy-based CA’ASI project to drive conversation between architecture, contemporary art and the public. Following the success of their New Chinese Architecture in 2010 and New Arab Architecture in 2012 projects, Young Architects in Africa shows the results of a competition launched to find the continent’s most innovative and talented architects, and help them achieve international recognition. In their view, African architecture’s dynamic qualities and sustainable possibilities present many lessons and challenges to the rest of the world.

The five shortlisted South African architects were selected after a panel of international experts reviewed 194 projects from 26 Africa countries. Making us proud super proud was Jozi’s Architects of Justice (see our article about their SEED Library here), which tied as overall winners with Namibia’s Wasserfall Munting Architects and Urko Sanchez from Kenya. BeattyVermeiren (see their latest project in the upcoming VISI 73), Tsai Design Studio (see his Moyo’s project here), Jack Olwethu from CORC and Dan MacGregor complete the local contingent. 

After its Venice stint, the Young Architects from Africa exhibition will move on to France’s Arc en Rêve Centre for Architecture in Bordeaux and the Academy of Architecture in Paris, before touring certain cultural establishments in Africa.

architecture-studio.fr

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With just two weeks to go until the end of the inspiring six-month-long Venice Biennale, Liani van der Westhuizen shares some of her highlights.

The International Art Exhibition at the 55th Venice Biennale must be one of the most talked-about events on the global contemporary art calendar. But with hundreds and hundreds of exhibitions to see (88 national participations where on show this year), even the most devoted art lover will grow tired. Here are eight must-sees.

Read VISI’s article about the South African pavilion here.

Find out about the major award that Zanele Muholi won. 

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South Africa has triumphantly returned to the most acclaimed art show in the world, the Venice Biennale. Entitled Imaginary Fact and featuring 17 artists, the exhibition is snugly installed in an old army building. Inside though, it’s all contemporary Mzansi, explains curator Brenton Maart. VISI has five boxed catalogues to give away.

How have you put together this exhibition?

The exhibition is SA’s reintroduction into the Venice Biennale because we had an almost 20-year absence (with the exception of 2011’s controversial debacle). What we wanted to do is map what has been happening in contemporary SA art, which is why we decided on a big group show.

Who is “we”?

The Grahamstown National Arts Festival, of which I am the head of the visual arts committee. Government released an open tender and the festival submitted a proposal that was successful. We only had three months to put the exhibition together!

What is the guiding concept?

Up until the early 1990s, SA’s contemporary fine art was very focused on struggle art. After 1994 we had a kind of euphoria, with explorations of identity in terms of gender, race and sexuality. Now what is happening, which is what we are showing here, is a renewed focus on the records of the past and how to use those records to comment on the present. Artists are using things like audio records, photographs, newspaper articles, government archives and books to make contemporary work. In South Africa it is a very defined movement, which we will see when we look back at the present in 100 years time. The movement is also seen in Asian and South American countries that have gone through some type of radical colonial or political violence, followed by a period of independence and now post-independence.

What are the highlights?

The highlight is the whole exhibition and how each piece responds to the curatorial concept and the other works on show. The feedback we have received about the curatorial concept has been phenomenal. I am loath to single anyone out, however, from a personal and art lover’s perspective, there are two key highlights for me. The first is the entire collection of Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases. All 200 works are just pinned up on the wall to give a rough feeling of the archive, which is her life’s project. The other highlight is, of course, Wim Botha who has made his first figurative work in 15 years – his last being the life-size sculpture of Christ carved out of Bibles.

What happens to the exhibition after the Biennale?

We have had fantastic feedback and a number of invitations from museums, internationally. Of course, it would be great to show the exhibition in South Africa, too.

Imaginary Fact shows in Venice until 24 November, imaginaryfact.co.za

Get the new VISI 67 and enter to win one of five boxed copies of the Imaginary Fact catalogue.

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The Velodrome, Aquatic Centre, Gardens by the Bay, the Red Museum and more… We take a whistle-stop tour through the architecture 2012 highs and lows, in South Africa and the world.

Although 2012 was an Olympic year, there was relatively little noise around the new London sport facilities – nothing comparable to, for example, the display of wonders for the Beijing 2008 Summer Games. It is probably the result of a pragmatic approach, emphasising long-term use and economical design rather than mind- (and budget-) blowing extravagances. Nonetheless two buildings stand out, though rather opposed in their design: Hopkins Architects’s toned-down Velodrome and Zaha Hadid’s typically fluid Aquatic Centre.

Maybe the British Olympic park was shadowed by another monumental infrastructure, which – as far as I have read – has wowed every critic and visitor when it opened last year: the Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. It comprises gigantic hi-tech tropical gardens by the sea, punctuated by the awesome Supertrees, as well as series of cooled conservatories by Willkinson Eyre, which were elected Building of the Year 2012 by the World Architecture Festival jury.

Another Building of the Year 2012 title was bestowed on our very own Red Location Museum by Jo Noero in Port Elizabeth, this time by Icon Magazine. Jo is the hero of the year for SA architecture, as he was also the only African invited to participate in the International Architecture Exhibition, the main programme at the Venice Biennale. His practice Noero Wolff Architects also recently split into Noero Architects, and Wolff Architects. This means twice as much to look forward to for us, really. (Two other South African architects, Johann Slee and Pieter Mathews, participated in the Traces of the Century and Future Steps exhibition.)

A few other local realisations attracted international attention: the much talked about Babylonstoren and its neo-romantic gardens in the Cape Winelands; the fab prefab Westcliffe pavilion by GASS Architecture Studio; and the small-cost, big-hearted New Jerusalem Children’s Home in Midrand.

As for the good-byes, 2012 was marked by the loss of two architectural geniuses. Oscar Niemeyer died aged 104. If the body gave up, his visionary and joyful mind was at work until his last days. Oscar was the last modern master, who dreamt and realised the utopian city of Brazilia and nearly 600 buildings over the world. He was a convinced communist who built indulging bourgeois abodes, a modernist who surrendered functionalist principles to his love of “free and sensual curves. The curves we find in mountains, in the waves of the sea, in the body of the woman we love.” He inscribed them like a poet in elegant shapes of white concrete.

We also mourn the passing og radical paper architect Lebbeus Woods. Although he only completed one building, in the last year of his life, he leaves behind an extraordinary collection of intricate drawings and models, a body of work made of alternative universes. His post-apocalyptic visions sought new ways of experiencing spaces and cities. His quest, for himself and thinkers around him, was for discomfort – a challenging position in which the mind cannot be at rest. He has been a huge inspiration, cult even, to many avant-garde architects. Like a character from the worlds he created, he passed away in Manhattan while around him the hurricane was taking over the metropolis, the streets flooding and the lights going out. His voice still lives in cyberspace, on the blog he started a few years ago.

Finally, for those who attended the ArchitectureZA 2012 conference in Cape Town and specifically Rahul Mehrotra’s lecture remain, in retrospect, a highlight of the year. One of these events that sticks with you for a while, and maybe even changes you a little.

Marine Leblond is an architect and urbanist. Trained in France, she worked in London and Paris before stopping in Cape Town seven years ago.

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Jo Noero’s Red Museum in Port Elizabeth has been named global Building of the Year 2012 by Icon magazine in London, writes Charl Blignaut.

An art gallery in a Port Elizabeth township was named the best building in the world this year at a glittering ceremony in London [last] week.

It beat the likes of the spectacular, curved Olympic Velodrome in London and the critically acclaimed Lyric Theatre in Belfast to win Building of the Year 2012 at the inaugural Icon Awards for architecture.

When City Press contacted him [last] week, winning designer Jo Noero of Cape Town’s Noero Architects, said: “I didn’t even go to London because I really wasn’t expecting it.”

This is just one of a number of awards Jo has won for his work on the country’s most-lauded cultural centre.

The project – that began with a museum and will include an arts and craft school, a conference centre, and 250 houses for locals – aims to keep memory alive in unique ways.

So, forming the centrepiece of the design and part of the entrance to the new gallery is an old tin shack. It points to an extraordinarily rich history that Jo tapped into to create his iconic work.

Jo said: “Shacks were built here as early as 1902 and people are still living in (them). We had this shack declared a national monument. It hasn’t been restored.

“We’ve left it in a decrepit state on purpose. We want people to see it as it was lived in. It gets constant maintenance, though. If there’s a leak it gets patched with plastic. It’s a living monument.”

The Red Location settlement dates to the turn of the 20th century.

Noero explained: “There was a British concentration camp in Uitenhage that housed mainly women and children. At the end of the Boer War, it was dismantled and brought to Port Elizabeth, where it was reassembled to be used as a barracks by the British army.

“When they moved out, families were moved in. This became the first formally settled location for black urban families in Port Elizabeth. The artist, George Pemba, was born here and so was ANC leader Raymond Mhlaba. Govan Mbeki lived here, and playwright and actor Winston Ntshona lives up the road.”

Red Location was a crucial site of black resistance during apartheid. The first underground Umkhonto we Sizwe cell was formed here and the railway station witnessed the first anti-pass law resistance campaign.

Noero said: “In the early 1990s, Mhlaba and Mbeki mooted the idea of building a special place in Red Location to serve as a space to keep memory alive. 

“It was decided to build a cultural centre and a competition was held in 1998. My firm won that. We’ve been working on the site ever since, and we are going to be here for another 10 to 15 years.”

The museum has documented the lives of the two young men who were living in the now world-famous shack.

“They were born here and their father and mother lived in this shack for 35 or 40 years. The parents are dead now. One of the brothers was in jail and came out again. They will be getting one of the new houses we’re building,” said Jo.

The first artwork to hang in the new gallery is also world famous after making its debut in Italy earlier this year. Jo was invited to show it at La Biennale di Venezia – the 13th International Architecture ­Exhibition. 

Jo said: “I did a 9m-long drawing of the Red Location project alongside a huge tapestry by a nearby women’s arts group that is a reworking of Picasso’s Guernica.

“Their Guernica is about HIV/Aids. It lists the names of their friends who have died and incorporates grey hospital blankets. Today it hangs in the gallery,” he said.

Jo described the project as his life’s work. “I love working at Red Location because the people have got so much strength. Despite the hardships, they just get on with it.”

First published in City Press on Sunday 9 December 2012. Be sure to follow City Press @city_press and Charl Blignaut @sa_poptart on Twitter.

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Cape Town’s Jo Noero is the only African showing on the main exhibition of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale. Other South Africans, Johann Slee and Pieter Mathews are also showing on one of the fringe exhibitions.

Curated by architect Sir David Chipperfield, Jo is showing alongside the likes of Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster and Herzog & De Meuron. The 13th biennale runs until 25 November.

Titled Common Ground / Different Worlds, Jo’s work comprises a 9,4 by 3,5m hand-drawn plan of the Red Location Precinct and a 7,8ı by 3,5m tapestry reinterpretation of Picasso’s Guernica by the Keiskamma Trust.

“Common ground is almost always necessary for transformation, translation and expression in art and architecture,” explains Jo. The hand-drawn plan of Red Location Precinct, a historic shack settlement in Port Elizabeth illustrates a new cultural centre in a part of the city that was devastated by apartheid spatial planning.

“Culture and its manifestations of production, performance and exchange were selected as the core development ideas for the precinct. In doing so, new ways of thinking about city making and architecture in South Africa have been opened up,” says Jo. “The drawing examines the various components of the precinct and traces the movements of people over time. The plan elucidates common ground in city making and architecture, despite the differences in terms of site and context – Red Location is a shack settlement and is largely occupied by very poor people.”

The Keiskamma Trust that made the tapestry is a cooperative of 50 women from the Eastern Cape of South Africa. The women reinterpreted Picasso’s famous work to express the impact of HIV/Aids on South Africa. “The work shows that good art can achieve common ground between different cultures. It also shows how an idea can survive translation and become a potent expression in a different context,” Jo expounds.

The connection between the drawing and the tapestry is the common ground between architect and artists: making good work.

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