Smash hit

The old industrial school was indeed a Scary House for many former pupils. There is a sense of confinement and release: the installation closes in on you at one end but opens out at the other. This is interesting, intuitive design, and even O’Donnell and Tuomey have some trouble finding the right words to explain it. “We thought that if we played with perspective we could make a tangled space. We put a twist on it,” says Tuomey. “We got all these island shapes, all these associations. And it brings you into a more contemplative view of the landscape.”

However, this was not a project conceived in a vacuum. At one end of the thinking was Letterfrack itself: at the other the space it is displayed in. “We had no idea how we would do it until we saw the space,” says Tuomey. O’Donnell adds: “We wanted the Venice building to be a part of what we were doing, rather as the Letterfrack project is about responding to the old.”

As well as the Open Frame and the Scary House, the room contains “Standing Panels”, an angled triptych of architectural drawings derived from the sawtooth geometry of the roof of the college’s bench room, where furniture is made. There is also a vertically mounted wooden model of the project, braced between floor and roof beams in such a way as to play off the existing Venetian structure. Finally, there is something wholly rural Ireland: a modern interpretation of the settle bench, made by students at the college. Visitors use it to sit and read. It demonstrates what the college is all about.

There is also more of Letterfrack here in Venice than you might first imagine. The builders who put it together are the same ones who worked on O’Donnell and Tuomey’s college buildings, so you know you are looking at the real thing.

Generally, with a piece of work such as this, you find things that irk you. Architects often do not make good exhibition designers and vice versa. Here, there is nothing I would want to add or take away or even amend. Real, emotionally charged and informative architecture in an architecture exhibition? You’d be surprised how uncommon that is.

The British have chosen to ignore the Metamorph theme, perhaps on the grounds that any building is, by its nature, a transformation of something. Peter Cook, the retired academic and late-developing architect who curates the pavilion, has got the designer Morag Myerscough to plaster the Edwardian façade with an eyeball-searing plastic pop mural. He has then thrown nine utterly different Brit architects into it, including himself, to fight like ferrets in a sack.

It’s rather like a crowded end-of-year student show, but the mural is the best part: photos of all the architects looking like a troupe of vaudeville entertainers.

Elswehere, I liked Denmark’s pavilion for asking its architects to imagine impossibly ambitious projects for a utopian future, such as using all the water frozen in Greenland to relieve Africa and fix climate change. Neat. Architects come up with all kinds of attention-grabbing tricks. The Anglo-German Sauerbruch Hutton scores a hit with its 3-D installation, which makes you feel you are sitting in a hologram.

So what does the biennale tell us overall? Away from the cities and the icons and into rurbanian make-do-and-mend, to judge by the projects that tackle in-between places. Germany shows the way. One immense panorama, snaking in and out of its rooms, shows just such a characterless, sub-everything environment — lifted by lots of small-scale architectural interventions. It makes sense. We have all had it up to here with landmarks. Time to give the ordinary a twist.

The 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale continues until November 7.

www.labiennale.org/en/architecture