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BorderLINE wins competition: Andor Wesselényi-Garay and Marcel Ferencz curate the Hungarian Pavilion on the 12th Venice Biennale of Architecture. Their main topic is the role of the line in the architecture: the Hungarian Pavilion, one of the oldest in its kind, is going to get a site-specific installation during the Biennial, 29 August – 21 November 2010.

Andor Wesselényi-Garay – Marcel Ferencz: BorderLINE Concept

(i) The Hungarian Pavilion aims to lead back the visitors to the very origin of architecture and the first intellectual experience of our human existence. It is a borderline-project in the widest sense of the meaning. The phenomenon of Borderline refers to the split personality of an architect between different possible techniques as it refers to the position of our country, as it also refers to the juxtaposition of line and space, drawing and architecture.

The line is proto architecture, that becomes architecture in the Hungarian Pavilion.

(ii) The Hungarian Pavilion does not locate an exhibition in its traditional sense but an installation that defines the preliminary state of architecture. This preliminary state is defined and caused by lines. This bunch of lines does not create architecture yet, but still, the installation as a whole can create a space within the space. So appears this space as the diagram of creation, a preliminary state of a design object that situated on the borderline between graphic instinct and architecture, between space and void, between forms and volumes.

(iii) The installation of the Hungarian Pavilion concentrates on the hidden – although very existing - possibilities of the line.
Architects do not build houses, architects do not create spaces, usually cannot do more than drawing lines. Lines with computer, lines with pencil or pen, lines written into space, lines that sometimes do not even create space because of the fact that most of the times they appear on a flat, 2d surface.

(iv) The line is a universal origin for architects to express themselves, an origin which existence is so often forgotten.
The line is a universal spring and also the result for children to express their creativity.
A line is a unifying borderline between a child and an architect.

(v) Considering the digital age, the line - and the ethos that is represented by it - also can be neglected as obsolete from the aspect of the virtual. The line as such so becomes the borderline between the non-definable element of a computer image and the pure, personal and uncompromised trace of the pencil. Despite these different techniques, and the seemingly altering interpretations of the line, the common denominator of its existence is two folded. On top of its purely visual appearance it is still a constitutive element for the plan without a house can never be built.
The installation in the Hungarian Pavilion is an experiment to set the line free from its planar existence and to redefine the line as a physical entity. The lines are made out of ropes hanging from the ceiling and stretched to the floor or by unsharpened pencils.

(vi) In the first room the line becomes the body. The visitors should pass a forest of line, whilst they feel the tactile sense of the thin ropes on their skin, hair, and face. Wandering through this forest hanging from above, the visitors lose their sense of space, get lost in the body of lines experiencing a type of loneliness that they hardly ever felt before. This forest of lines is a sculpture of idea, the idea of tactile space.
-In the next, long cross-space the line becomes a façade. In sharp contrast with this highly artificial façade, children’s drawings are exhibited. These drawings represent only the preliminary gestures, the joy of leaving sings on the paper. These drawings are followed by short analysis written by a psychologist.
-The façade-like surface also defines an extra narrow space behind. From here the apsis opens. In this curved walled room the line becomes finally the space.
-The short opposite walls of the long room serve as projecting screens for films that show different hand drawing techniques of Hungarian architects.
-In the last room the line reacts upon of the conflict of origin. The conflict of origin is represented by a giant sculpt that is built of pencils. The title of this object is 1024 x 768 referring the number of pencils that it was built of. This conceptual screen of pencils reflects upon the conflict that spans between differing ideas of the line’s origin.
-In the last room an acrylic box is exhibited. The box is filled with the pencil sharpening of the giant pencil-screen. In the middle of the pencil sharpening a real monitor stands. The installation does not intend to give a readymade answer to the visitors, and it does not want to solve the conflicts of origin, but it seriously intends to conceptualize the tension between competing techniques preferred by different generations of architects. One can interpret this last object as the emerging of the new, or as technology gets buried by tradition. In the former case the acrylic box is a cradle, in the latter it is a casket.

-Leaving the pavilion, in the last rotunda the visitors can leave their own architectural signs on the wall.

(vii) If the line is the origin of architecture, then the point becomes the origin of line. But this little, almost invisible trace of the pencil, just one digit cannot be defined in architecture, although it is the part of architecture. To illustrate this point, the sound of metronomes is constantly heard from loudspeakers in the Pavilion.