Venice Architecture Biennale 2021

By Elisabetta Povoledo Photo Credit: Andrea Avezzù, via La Biennale di Venezia

Solving the World’s Problems at the Venice Architecture Biennale

The question: “How Will We Live Together?” The answers: Pavilions that resemble science-fair projects, conflict-resolution sites and flights of fancy.

VENICE — It was perhaps inevitable that many of the questions asked of Hashim Sarkis, the curator of the 17th International Architecture Biennale, during the event’s media preview, were about the pandemic.

After all, the exhibition, which opened in May and runs through Nov. 21, got bumped by a year, and various restrictions remain in place, limiting travel to Venice.

And after a bizarre 15 months that blurred the boundaries between the office and home, and challenged the very theme of the Biennale’s main exhibition — “How Will We Live Together?” — it was only natural for journalists to ask, “in a persistent and anxious way,” as Sarkis put it at the news conference, “how the pandemic changed architecture and how architecture is responding.”

Although the exhibition had been planned before the coronavirus swept the world, Sarkis, a Lebanese architect and dean of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that it spoke to a series of longstanding global issues — climate change, mass migration, political polarization and increasing social, economic and racial inequalities — that had contributed to the virus’s global spread.

“The pandemic will hopefully go away,” he told reporters in Venice. “But unless we address these causes, we will not be able to move forward.”

Sarkis’s show brings together a plethora of (at times confounding) projects, packed mostly into the exhibition’s two principal sites: one in the shipbuilding yard that for centuries launched Venice as a seafaring powerhouse, the other in the Giardini della Biennale, which also house pavilions where participating countries are presenting their own architectural exhibits that speak to the main theme.

Visitors expecting to see room after room of displays using the traditional language of architecture — scale models, prototypes and drawings — had come to the wrong place.

Instead, many featured projects were more like conceptual flights of fancy than plans for built environments: There were whimsical bird cages, a bust of Nefertiti made in beeswax and a chunky oak table designed to host an interspecies conference. There were projects that would have been at home in a school science fair, like proposals to feed the world with microalgae or to explore the relationship between nature and technology using a robotic arm.

The question of living together is a political issue, as well as a spatial one, Sarkis said, and several projects in the show highlight architecture’s potential in conflict resolution.

“Elemental,” an initiative spearheaded by the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, is a striking structure of tall poles arranged in a circle that evokes a Koyauwe, or a place to parley and resolve conflicts among the Mapuche, an Indigenous population of Chile. It was commissioned by a Mapuche territorial organization as part of a rapprochement process between the group and a forest company in conflict over shared land.

Had it not been for the pandemic, representatives for the two sides would have met at the Biennale — “a neutral territory,” Aravena said — for negotiations inside the structure. It will return to Chile after the Biennale, and talks will be staged there instead, Aravena said.

A more traditional urban planning project comes from EMBT, a Barcelona-based studio, exhibiting scale models for the redevelopment of a neighborhood in Clichy-sous-Bois, near Paris, including plans for collective housing, a market and a subway station. The initiative is part of a broader initiative in Paris that will extend the city’s subway lines to better link the suburbs to the center, “to make them feel more connected,” said Benedetta Tagliabue, a partner at EMBT.

To liven up a drab neighborhood, the architects created a colorful pergola for the station, inspired by the decorative patterns of the various African migrants who live in the area. “The space has to belong to the people,” she said.

The issue of coexistence between people and other life-forms was also explored. Read the full article in The New York Times here.