PLANT Architect Inc.’s installation WALKING LINGERING WALKING is on display at Palazzo Bembo in Venice, Italy, as part of Common Ground: 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. Curated by the GlobalArt Affairs Foundation’s Karlyn De Jongh and Sarah Gold in collaboration with artist Rene Rietmeyer, Traces of Centuries and Future Steps features PLANT Architect Inc.’s installation alongside the works of internationally renowned architects Arata Isozaki and Piero Lissoni.
WALKING LINGERING WALKING is an installation that depicts and interprets PLANT’s built work, experimenting with, and challenging the ways in which people perceive and move through space. The installation is an exploration of the representation of built spaces as experienced through time, using cinematic film strips and individual detail views to portray the routes around, and character of, the sites. The physical engagement of these elements initiates the revelation of site, space, history, and ecologies, enhancing community ritual and creating loci for gathering.
The installation choreographs the visitor’s experience of two of PLANT’s projects: the Nathan Phillips Square Podium Roof Garden at Toronto City Hall and the Dublin Grounds of Remembrance in Dublin, Ohio. The journey of images unfolds within the space as a set of slow, walking sequences that include views of both the city (Toronto) and the natural landscape (Dublin). Intertwined and continuous, this visual commentary celebrates the spaces and paces between moments of punctuation, and it challenges how we depict these experiences outside of the spaces themselves. Like the depicted sites, the installation must be walked to be understood. This collective experience of walking creates common ground—a physical and intellectual platform on which to share, discover, and interact.
