Before the first Exhibit Columbus installation opened to its first accolade last summer, organizers theorized it could boast a global reach.
They were right.
The latest proof has surfaced in Venice, Italy. The city serves as the home of the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the world’s largest art and architecture festival that attracts about half a million people every two years and opened Saturday.
The festival in Venice includes an architectural piece called Alchemy, an Exhibit Columbus work that Columbus native Bailey Stultz, 26, helped shape as a University of Cincinnati masters in architecture student. Stultz was part of the college’s 15-member team, directed by Terry Boling, associate professor of practice in the school’s architecture program.
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“I realize this is something that most architects can only dream of,” Stultz said recently. “It’s been a whirlwind of a time.”
She recently returned from Venice, where she spent three days helping her peers rebuild Alchemy slightly differently than they constructed it in Columbus last year on the grounds of Central Middle School,where it was on display for three months.
The Cincinnati architecture students designed and built a special stamping tool to add symbols derived from Central Middle Schoolers’ drawings to the salvaged wood of the piece.
The work’s floor, constructed of Indiana limestone in the Columbus exhibit, is made of different material in Italy to reflect elements of Cincinnati neighborhoods.
“Shipping limestone would have been very, very costly,” Stultz said.
The just-graduated Stultz, who begins a full-time architectural post with a Philadelphia firm on Friday, hopes viewers of the work over the next six months in Venice appreciate some small things that have been incorporated.
“I just hope they notice all of the amount of detail, as well as the Midwest touch,” Stultz said.
Richard McCoy, one of the founders of Exhibit Columbus, mentioned that one easily could expect international hoopla surrounding one of its pieces.
“Columbus sometimes forgets that it’s always in those international conversations already,” McCoy said. “We thought if we put on an excellent exhibition, then other people naturally would care about it.”
McCoy called one of Alchemy’s biggest attractions its great narrative of the rebirth of Cincinnati and more.
Boling, reached in Venice during last week’s soft opening before the official beginning of the festivities in Italy, still was reeling from all the attention.
“This is totally on a different playing field than what I am accustomed to,” Boling said.
Yet, he emphasized that the initial honor with the installation came with being included in Exhibit Columbus.
“We all have a ridiculous amount of respect for what’s happening in Columbus, Indiana,” Boling said. “And that’s especially so after being a part of its first biennial exhibition. And having a second life for this now is just amazing to all of us.”
Stultz believes the piece lives up to its name for the process of great transformation.
“The whole idea was to take things that were going to be thrown out and return them to something beautiful,” Stultz said. “We were using that as poetic language for taking trash and making it into something to have another life. Our instructor was great in making sure we kept to that theme throughout (the design process).”
In Italy, people were approaching the students and wanting to see the work before it was even completed.
“It’s been a very cool experience for all of us,” Stultz said.
She laughed when someone asked her what on earth she might do to top such success at such an early age at the start of her profession.
“I’m hoping,” she said, “that I’m going to work toward that for the rest of my career.”
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The journey: Designed at the University of Cincinnati, then built for Exhibit Columbus in August. It remained on display in Columbus through November.
A modified version of the piece was just completed at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the world’s largest art and architecture festival.
The Columbus native: Bailey Stultz, a 2010 Columbus North High School graduate who is the daughter of Bill Stultz, the school’s director of bands, and his wife Kelly. She just graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a master’s degree in architecture and plans to begin her career Friday with Kieran Timberlake in Philadelphia.
Materials and more: Each bit of material used was considered salvaged waste. That included re-claimed wood from a demolished church, off-cuts from the architectural limestone industry, and tiles that did not meet a pottery business’ rigorous quality control.
The fabrication and assembly process was planned by the students that designed the project during the spring 2017 semester and was largely carried out by a class studying fabrication techniques during the summer term in professor Terry Boling’s shop. They designed and built a special stamping tool to add symbols derived from Central Middle Schoolers’ drawings to the salvaged wood of the piece.
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Chris Cornelius, the Milwaukee designer of Wiikiaami from Exhibit Columbus and still at home at First Christian Church locally, is part of an 17-member group of indigenous architects representing Canada at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
A video of his local piece is part of the Italian gathering.
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