Glass Zen Garden for Venice Biennale Taiwan Pavilion 2006This
is the third time for us to participate in the Venice Biennale. The
previous ones have been in the special exhibition of the year 2000 and
representing Denmark in the year 2004. Every time we have brought in
Venice a garden. The “60 Minute Man” / 2000 was an oak garden in an
abandoned barge on top of composted human waste and “Post Industrial
Fleet” / 2004 a bigger strategy of recycling industrial ships and urban
waste in forms of floating gardens.The
You-Yuan glass garden in the Taiwanese Pavilion is a spatial meditation
platform for post urban rehabilitation. The outcome is a mixture of
Taiwanese and Finnish interpretations of being present in the circular
movement in different levels and nothingness. Basically it is a rock
garden with a swing. It is also just a cultivated junkyard – all the
material is recycled to form a temporary collage of meeting of material
streams trusting that also the city must be a compost.The base layer of the garden is out
of crushed glass and the walkways out of sand – the origin of all
glass. The bigger glass rocks are side products of glass industry –
like pearls in mussels. The flat glass ovens are kept hot for 12 years
for glass fabrication after which they will be cooled down for
maintenance. Sometimes it happens that during these 12 years the glass
plasma inside the oven starts to form a stone or a rock under quite
extreme heat and pressure conditions. The clear glass rock is an
accident – no man can make this.The
swing is something that you see in almost every house in Finland. The
family can sit together there and this is where you take a nap in the
summers. The slow rocking rhythm, floating, human body as part of
circular movement is what we all carry in our genetic memory. It is
good to sit in the swing and look at the dark forest.Casagrande Laboratory for Venice Biennale Taiwan Pavilion 2006 is: Antti Antinoja, partner FinlandFrank Chen, design assistant TaiwanMarco Casagrande, architect, principal FinlandMartin Ross, industrial artist AlaskaNikita Chi-Ling Wu, art managerOliver Salminen, futurist FinlandShao-Shien Chang, design assistant TaiwanWei-Chen Weng, design assistant TaiwanThe interviews of the Norwegian and Taiwanese urban farmers in the glass zen garden are produced by 3RW Architects from Norway.