Three Lessons in Architecture, Venice Biennale

Description

Three Lessons in Architecture, Venice Biennale, 1985

Directed by Aldo Rossi, with the purpose of presenting innovative ideas and projects for redeveloping or transforming specific areas of Venice and surroundings. Libeskind won the “Leone di Pietra” for his project of Piazza Palmanova, as well as the “Leone d’Oro” for his “Writing machine”, “Reading machine” and “Memory machine”, exposed at the Biennale under the name of “Three lessons in architecture”.

Elaborately constructed and enigmatic in purpose, Libeskind’s machines are striking and sumptuous manifestations of ideas that were, at the time he made them, of obsessive interest to academics, critics and avant-gardists in architecture and out. Principal among these was the idea that architecture must be read, that is, understood, in the same way as a written text.