Irish pavilion – venice biennale

Ireland’s Venice Biennale Website Launched

The official website of Ireland’s entry to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2004 – http://venicebiennale.archeire.com – went live today (Friday September 3rd) at Archeire, Irish Architecture Online.

The Venice Biennale is the most prestigious of all architectural exhibitions and will showcase the latest buildings designed by almost 200 of the world’s leading architects. Directed by Kurt W Forster, the theme of this year’s Biennale is metamorphoses.

Ireland’s Commissioner, Shane O’Toole, and Deputy Commissioner, Paul Kelly have selected O’Donnell + Tuomey’s award-winning transformation of the former industrial school at Letterfrack into a furniture college to represent Ireland at the Biennale. Ireland’s participation goes under the banner, Transformation of an Institution.

The Biennale will open to the public on September 12th and will continue until November 7th. It is expected to attract 130,000 visitors. Ireland’s pavilion in Venice’s historic shipyards, the Arsenale, will be inaugurated next Friday (September 10th) with a special performance by the artist, Gerard Mannix Flynn.

Four books have been published to mark Ireland’s participation in the Biennale, including ‘Niente de Dire’, the first Italian translation of Gerard Mannix Flynn’s novel, ‘Nothing to Say’. Written twenty years ago, Nothing to Say was published in a revised edition last year by The Lilliput Press, Dublin. Although a work of fiction, Nothing to Say draws on the author’s experiences of the former industrial school at Letterfrack, St Joseph’s, where he was incarcerated for a time as a boy in the 1960s.

The community-owned Connemara West Centre now occupies the transformed institutuion at Letterfrack. Connemara West is home to a third-level furniture college and a wide range of rural community development services. The Centre’s Furniture Conservation and Restoration Centre has made and donated a unique piece of furniture, a modern settle-bench, to Ireland’s Biennale exhibition. Designed by O’Donnell + Tuomey and based on examples of 19th-century Irish country furniture, the settle-bench incorporates a drop-leg table and a bookshelf.

Supported by the Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism and The Arts Council and benefitting from substantial private sponsorship, this is the third time Ireland has been represented at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Ireland’s commissioners and architects set out for Venice tomorrow (September 4) to complete the final arrangements for next week’s opening. The Biennale will attract 3,500 print, radio and television journalists during the three Press Preview Days (next Thursday, Friday, Saturday, September 9, 10, 11).

http://venicebiennale.archeire.com/