Garage Dallegret hosts François Dallegret's visionary imagination between design, plastic arts, architecture and technology. The drawings, the objects and the ephemera exposed describe an imaginative practice of the futurity that brings down the disciplinary limits between human body and object, subjectivity and urban context, reality and imagination.

www.spaziopunch.com

The radical character – from radix – of his projects shape a habitus that rethinks the relationship between space and object through a playful tone outside the logics of exploitation and production. Through his body, Dallegret performs with objects and environments, among pages and sketches of the projects. A metropolitan posture, in bars and clubs, and a technological euphoria, that looks to the future, act as counterpoints to this corporeality. The highly-technological automobiles, a space city sent on Mars and the mechanical objects are extensions of the body to reach whatever is beyond itself and beyond the present time. The drawings and works shown in Spazio Punch’s former brewery express this sensory expansion through the machine. A different perceptual space is achieved with a retro futuristic taste. The exhibition’s setting, conceived by Supervoid (Benjamin Gallegos Gabilondo and Marco Provinciali), fluidly opens the space to enable the heterogeneity of François Dallegret’s experimentations and inventions.

Drawings and multiples made for New York Moma and some dysfunctional objects like La chaise enceinte (1965) inhabit the exhibition, appearing here and there, at random with no hierarchy. The materials, supports and the different scales follow a narrative held by the spirit of the compositions and it runs the whole length of the two sides of the building. Atomix (1968), an educational model of atomic structures – 6000 freely moving precision steel spheres – has a dialogue with the six architectural drawings for A Home Is Not a House (1965). The former ones were sketched for the homonymous article by Reyner Banham in Art in America where the critic and the artist figure out architecture at the crossroads of proto-ecology and ultra- technology. In the same article, Un-house-Transportable standard-of- living package. The Environment-Bubble’s project depicts an inflatable bubble that adapts to the environment: Dallagret and Banham naked are sitting around a “totem robot”. The image serves as a counterpoint to Anatomy of a Dwelling, a standardized American house reduced to a net of pipes and cables between sky and earth. KIIK, a metal object shaped like a pill, intends to ease body distresses and mind obsessions, further, it helps to give up “bad or good” habits such as to quit smoking or to start drinking. Among the human amplification devices, the IntroConversoMatic, a device designed for Bizarre magazine – also known as NNMA (Network Neutrality Measurement Agent) – is a wearable machine made of an audio system, a monitor, a microphone, a keyboard and a transmitter/receiver/transducer. It protects the user’s mental integrity and aims to write, to listen, to see and even to have an introspective conversation with oneself. Well in advance of artificial intelligence, Littératuromatic (1963), on its side, produces literature. Le Drug is a pharmacy-discothèque in Montréal and includes a restaurant in a basement, a fashion boutique, a gallery, but you also can find anything from matchsticks to posters. Among other leisure places conceived by Dallegret we find: New Penelope, a club built in Montreal (1966-1967); Palais Metro (Montreal 1967), and West Village (Kansas City 1972). Eat & Drink, a fast-food, bar and club designed in 1972 for the World Trade Center of New York, remodels the type of space previously formalized in New Penelope and remains a particular ambitious project. This genealogy is reintroduced in Garage Dallegret exhibition with New New Penelope, a space conceived by Supervoid in order to gather together the audience, take a rest and share a convivial alternative perception of the show. Standing above the constellation of inventions, Wheely, a new futuristic device, is placed on a higher position since it articulates the exhibit architectural trajectories. It is an echo of the automobile immobile Tubula (1968) and it’s been specially created for our Venetian venue.

As the first Italian monographic exhibition of the artist and architect, Garage Dallegret means to dialogue with the reflections displayed
in The Laboratory of the Future by Lesley Looks, curator of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. At the crossroads between imagination as a planning device and architectural design as a perception of how to be in the world, François Dallegret’s experimentation is the answer that Spazio Punch offers to the need for a narrative concerning visions and practices of the futurity. The exhibition will be also a platform to develop projects through open calls for local designers, artists and architects.

Based upon an idea by Augusto Maurandi with Alessandra Ponte
Exhibition design Supervoid
Graphic design Alessandro Gori
Editorial Advisor Alessia Prati
Scientific Advisory Board Liliana Albertazzi and Mario Lupano
Logistics & Production Marta Girardin and Hstudio
Digital Fabrication Fablab Venezia
With the support of Extreme Printing

The WHEELY (by Tony Edgeworth)

The WHEELY, a new object by François Dallegret (GARAGE DALLEGRET) is a two-wheeled non-bicycle, an autonomous gyroscopic conveyance. Its ancestor is an earlier work known as the Tubula that was built from cylindrical ductwork and tractor-sized inner tubes. The WHEELY generates its own motion, and has no obvious directionality. The body, mounted on parallel wheels, suggests movement without specific purpose, for traveling in vicious cycles.The WHEELY radically pares back Dallegret’s conceptual automobiles of the early 1960s, dispensing with astro-baroque styling, or any styling at all, to achieve the bare minimum of wheeled vehicle design. There is no allowance for a driver, passenger, or cargo. Its image implies the swiftness and danger of a knife in motion, and a radical aerodynamism. The wheels themselves are bare, sleek, smooth, and possibly buoyant neoprene air sacs, which are rimless and self-supporting when pneumatically activated. The WHEELY is a pure example of Virtual Object Manufacture, in other words, hypothetical. Dallegret's process of object making involves not only problem-solving, but problem creation. It is a rigorous and disciplined quest for an objective, whether that objective is functional or dysfunctional. The objective of the WHEELY is conjecture: What if an object embodied a 'race-ability' untethered to human (or animal) will, subject only to its own auto-mechanical caprice?

April 2023

Tony Edgeworth creates work in varied media including books, prints, and sound recordings, with an emphasis on collaboration.

Refuge is not a shelter 50 years later A home is not a house

A house as much as a shelter is welcome to fulfill minimum human needs. We are proud, if not we feel lucky to have one over our heads, but yet, are they enough to feel at home, to identify them as refuge from external harm?

The question about the meaning of home arose in 1965. In those days, it was still a sneaky question floating in a no man’s land between shining hope in technology and shady experience of mankind. Today this alternative tipped into general distrust. Even the planet doesn’t seem to be able to forever host us, therefore, tracking the idea of a home appears more than a bit too ambitious. François Dallegret took note and restricted henceforth his query. Urgency catches up with wondering. So the different titles he envisioned to a today’s counterpart give an account of the new pondering: “Dead end”, “In/out”, “Oui/non”. Finally to the pessimistic first one and to the basic dialectics inferred in the other two, he preferred to emphasize the continuity of his request. Home modestly becomes shelter polarising house and refuge.

And to grasp the opportunity given by the 2023 Venice Biennale’s main topic, “The laboratory of the future”, the show hold in Spazio Punch at Giudecca appeared to be the perfect place to set the new Environment- structure. Since times went by, the former perfect transparent demi sphere, also known as the Bubble, became a very wild garage, solely signified by the automatic opening of its up-and-over garage door. controlled by a photoelectric cell. Obviously, the installation crosses reference with Tati’s screw ball comedy, Mon oncle, but no need to say his hare-brained ideas long-time reflected on the French born Dallegret.

Indeed, a part from front and back doors in frenzy activity, the realm of calm, peace an beauty of the previous Bubble switched to an urgency room where the resting area is typified by a conveyor belt, stretching and extending,ready to be rooted out in a hurry. As for the former hypothetical home fireplace and the leisure devices, they’ve been replaced by a single neon tube, conspicuously standing in the middle of the room. Admittedly, all these items remain standard industrial objects from a catalog, yet, the refuge installation neither is a shelter nor a “transportable standard-of-living package”. The outside atmosphere, ignored before, summons the living matter into the Nature’s ,fact: through the presence of a powerful ventilator, we shall rather confide that the stampede is approaching.

Perhaps not necessary is either to call out the differences between the American context in the 60’ and the very variegated history of the Giudecca Island. Varying from being an aristocratic refuge to becoming first an industrial site, secondly a rough neighbourhood and returning today to bear a prosperous residential zone reputation, Giudecca plurality imposes its own dialectics. In this context, the irony of the first drawings conveying a message turns into cumulation of illusion distress.

What is a home? What is a shelter? Social Sciences should keep deepen this questions. What about the other way around? What is a house? What is a shelter? The questioning was relevant for the architecture critic Reyner Banham as much as for the young future architect, François Dallegret, wondering if there would be a place for architecture in the technological world. Now a days is doubtless true the house or the shelter constructions subject more to the detriment of the environment and to the political solutions to the immigration conflict than to architectural theory.

“The form follows function” as architectural lynchpin or The modulor as universal rule for the “Unité d’habitation” seem highly overrated.
Though, architects, users, follow Dallegret’s lead : Take it easy or run!

Liliana Albertazzi 2023