For over 100 years, Venice has been a premiere showcase for the best of contemporary art and architecture, with biennial exhibits featuring stars of the visual and creative worlds.
Although Sigrid Adriaenssens is an engineer rather than a professional artist, she has sent exhibits to both the Venice Biennale and the European Cultural Center Venice Biennale. A professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Form Finding Lab, she uses technology to revive and reimagine traditional craft techniques.
In 2023, she presented an exhibit that combined classic masonry with augmented reality to create a self-supporting vault. Working with the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Adriaenssens collaborated with Italian masons to build the vault in a Venetian garden. The science behind the work was based on a paper Adriaenssens and collaborators wrote in 2020, demonstrating the unique brick pattern that allowed 15th-century architect Filippo Brunelleschi to create Florence’s duomo without any external support.
This year, Adriaenssens and colleagues have sent three exhibits to Venice. Two are based on the ancient paper-cutting art form kirigami. One, in collaboration with professors Elie Bou-Zeid of Princeton and Lucia Stein-Montalvo of Northwestern University, creates an urban canopy that stirs airflow over the streets below. Another, with computer science professor Ryan Adams and graduate student Isabel Moreira de Oliveira, uses steel plates to create patterns of varying depth and texture in floors.
Adriaenssens is also working with Professor Wesam Al Asali of IE University in Segovia, Spain, on an exhibit that creates roof designs that reflect traditional craft techniques from around the Mediterranean, such as basket weaving and masonry vaults. As an engineer, Adriaenssens said she looks for scientific principles underlying traditional crafts. “We study proven craft techniques, distill their underlying mechanical and geometric algorithms, and envisage how we can upscale them to address challenges in the urban environment,” she said.
