THE AUSTRALIAN PAVILION sits like a black monolith overlooking the Giardini canal in Venice’s Biennale Gardens. Designed by Melbourne architects Denton Corker Marshall (DCM), it replaces the tent-like, white and ‘temporary’ structure devised by Philip Cox in 1988, a pylon-and-drape shape that has since been rolled out everywhere from Darling Harbour to Uluru.
The only national pavilion to be built in Venice this century, DCM’s black box sits among 20th-century bijoux by the likes of Gerrit Rietveld and Alvar Aalto. Its only ‘Australian-ness’ is its very evident otherness.
Inside, accessed via ramp and terrace, sits an almost perfectly formed white box. The idea is to intrigue and entice on the outside, reveal and elaborate inside. It’s like a gigantic, modernist Russian doll.
“Inside, almost anything goes,” says John Denton, a…
