It’s done! Andrew, Mel, and Patrick finished the family tree in the early hours of the morning. Simon and Henry, with their ingenious clip-together system, had finished at a much more reasonable hour. Here’s a quick description of the installation:

The overall theme of the Biennale, set by Commissioner David Chipperfield, is ‘Common Ground’. He points in two directions – to the city, the field where architects operate, and to the common conditions of professional architectural practice.

The installation presents four architectural designs – two each from Simon and Andrew. Responding to Chipperfield’s provocation, these projects are shown on the plinth contextualized within Simon and Andrew’s professional “family trees”. It shows who they worked for and with, and who those architects worked for, and so on, through many prominent local architects and firms back to the earliest days of architectural practice in New Zealand. All threaded through a “village” of paper models of iconic Kiwi buildings, it also shows various international connections made by travelling Kiwi architects.

On the walls, two projects by Simon are dispersed into a cloud of 550 drawings, models and slides. Showing the intimate connections that occur within the practice of designing, hand drawings and photos of paper models transition to drawings and models in digital media, linking the two projects in a continuum of design practice. The walls and plinth show the flow of time and influence in architectural practice – at the scale of a nation and at the intimate scale of the design of projects.

Anyway, it’s great to be finished. We’d come with the capacity, in the event of disaster, to rebuild from scratch up to about 60% of the installation. Fortunately all those back-ups and spare parts all stayed in their boxes. Tomorrow, we get to spend some time looking around the other exhibits. We’ve had previews while visiting friends working in the exhibition halls at the Arsenale, but it will be great to see everything finished.