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Here’s what to see at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale

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Here’s what to see at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale

The U.S. Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia AMERICAN FRAMING (Photo courtesy Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner)

Well, it’s finally time. After the COVID-19 pandemic put the world on pause in 2020, so too was the Venice Architecture Biennale delayed. At the time, festival curator and dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning Hashim Sarkis admitted the difficulty in staging a large international event during a pandemic, especially when Italy was an infection hotspot early on, but also expressed confidence that the extra year would give exhibitors time to refine their projects.

(If you’re interested in AN’s recent interview with Sarkis, he delves deeper into how COVID did, and ultimately didn’t, affect the Biennale’s staging and the projects going on display.)

The 17th edition of the Biennale now opens this Saturday, May 22, and runs through November 21, 2021. This year’s theme, How Will We Live Together?, takes on particular poignancy given the circumstances; radical futures envisioning closely-knit warrens or co-living spaces pre-pandemic have been thrown off-kilter by recent events. Still, plenty of installations and pavilions are direct responses to the turmoil of the last year but even the ones that aren’t are still worth checking out. This year, there will be 61 national pavilions and 17 collateral events scheduled.

Below are just a few of this year’s highlights, and if you aren’t able to travel to Venice (or don’t feel comfortable) to see the show in person, many of the projects and films this year will be accompanied by online components. Available here, Biennale Pavilions is the show’s official platform for viewing the event’s content online.

The U.S. Pavilion, AMERICAN FRAMING

Much ink has already been spilled over AMERICAN FRAMING, the homage to American timber construction co-curated by University of Illinois Chicago School of Architecture professors Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner. Now that photos of the installation are available, it’s clear that the team went all out. A four-story stick-frame house has been erected on the festival grounds, joining newly commissioned classic American wooden furniture, six pieces rendered in blocky cuts, from Ania Jaworska and Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelley of Norman Kelley. New photos from Daniel Shea and Chris Strong depict such frames going up and in context across America, as well the men and women who installed them.

installation shot from the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale showing off a three-story timber framed house
The U.S. Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia, AMERICAN FRAMING (Photo courtesy Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner)

In splaying out the stripped skeleton of a home, Preissner and Andersen have created more of a sensory experience driven by light and shadow; there’s more than a passing similarity to Foster + Partner’s 2018 Vatican City Pavilion, which used its open-air structure to attempt to evoke a religious experience.

A timber model of a three-story stick-frame home
Model 01: Snow Warehouse, 25” x 50” x 22 1/2”, designed by University of Illinois Chicago participating students for the United States Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia. (Photo courtesy Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner)
wooden furniture in slats
Six new pieces of installation-specific wood furniture (two of each) were designed for the show by the Chicago and New Orleans-based Norman Kelley. (Photo courtesy Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner)

Grassroots Institution and Carbon’s Cultural Footprint from RUR Architecture

Reiser + Umemoto co-founder Jesse Reiser is bringing two ten-minute films to the Biennale, both direct responses to what Reiser felt were tepid answers to the problems facing the world in 2020. In Grassroots Institution, Reiser will mimic a public service announcement to discuss how architecture can recontextualize the American Constitution and build out new service frameworks. In Carbon’s Cultural Footprint, Reiser will closely examine New York’s Seagram Building and the contributions of its embattled designers, Phillip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe (while advocating for “death of the artist,” as it were).

The poster for Carbon’s Cultural Footprint (Courtesy RUR Architecture)“Regrettably, the baby of architecture is too often thrown out with the bathwater of social injustice,” said Reiser in a press release. “What we see today is a terrifying form of cultural revolution, where mediocrity is fully justified as a symbol of social good. It takes years to create an architect, and an architecture. Our publics deserve better.”

The Thai Pavilion, Elephant

Does the Biennale theme only apply to living with other humans, or does it encompass all of nature? If that’s your line of thinking, check out this year’s Thai Pavilion, curated by Apiradee Kasemsook and designed Boonserm Premtada of Bangkok Project Studio. Actually two separate structures—one on the Biennale grounds and the other in Surin, Thailand—Elephant explores the culture of the Kuy, a Thai ethnic group that lives alongside elephants. Accordingly, the pavilion itself is a house both for a human family with free space for an elephant. The Kuy had lived in Surin alongside elephants for centuries, but decades of deforestation had forced both the humans and elephants out and into nearby cities. Now, a new government initiative is attempting to restore Surin sustainably and bring the Kuy back.


The Canadian Pavilion, Impostor Cities

Canada is finally hitting back at film and television industries for passing off its cities as New York, London, or even Tokyo (it’s just cheaper to film north of the border). In Imposter Cities, the team will wrap its pavilion in green screens and project iconic Canadian buildings across them, raising the question of how we ultimately view important architecture; in person, or through someone else’s lens?

The Irish Pavilion, Entanglement

Rather than examine physical space, the Irish Pavilion this year is looking into digital architecture. Data infrastructure and the human-cyberspace interface currently rule the world, whether you know it or not. Every website you visit logs cookies, and cameras track the movement of billions of people daily. But this information doesn’t exist on a purely theoretical level, it needs physical infrastructure to run, and Entanglement will highlight the scale, complexity, and real-world material impacts of such machinery. Dublin, in particular, hosts 25 percent of all European server space.

The Japanese Pavilion, Co-ownership of Action: Trajectories of Elements

Japan is famous for its innovative single-family houses that regularly grace Dezeen or Designboom, and that’s for one simple reason: When a family moves, their home is torn down and a new structure is built from the ground up, lending the next architect plenty of room to experiment. This year’s Japan Pavilion is a turn towards sustainability, as curator Kadowaki Kozo tasked his team with disassembling a wooden house in Japan, shipping it to Venice, and rebuilding it in different spatial configurations with new materials, extending the life of a building that would have normally been demolished.

SOM’s Life Beyond Earth

Rendering of a moon city made of triangular structures with the earth hanging above
Habitat modules looming over the rim of Shackleton Crater, part of Life Beyond Earth (Courtesy SOM)

How will we live together in the future? If you ask Elon Musk, the answer is on Mars, but looking a little more near-term, SOM and the European Space Agency are betting on the moon. In Life Beyond Earth, SOM’s Moon Village concept will be on display in Venice’s Arsenale, demonstrating how mankind could eventually establish a long-term lunar colony. Envisioned as a self-sufficient research station, the base could eventually provide fuel and support for rockets making their way to Mars.

The Spanish Pavilion, Uncertainty

the spanish pavilion, showing paper stacks being used to create walls
The Spanish Pavilion, Uncertainty (Fernando Maquieira)

What makes this year’s Spain Pavilion, Uncertainty, special? Instead of hiring one curator, the Spanish government held an open-call competition for young designers to head the project, ultimately hiring four architects, Sofía Piñero, Domingo J. González, Andrzej Gwizdala, and Fernando Herrera (all close to 30, according to a press release from pavilion organizers). Now, 34 of the 466 entries received will go on display, showing off myriad visions of how architecture can adapt to serve a society in constant flux.

The Russian Federation Pavilion, Open!

Similar to the Irish Pavilion, Russia’s contribution to this year’s programming will also examine the intersection of the real and the digital (and inextricable nature of the two), but, unlike all of the other entries, has been running since May of 2020.

At the time, the curation team announced that, with the physical show delayed, it would make its work wholly available online. The actual project itself is the (physical) renovation of the 1914 Russian Federation Pavilion designed by Alexey Shchusev, and audiences can explore a 3D-rendition of the space online as a commentary on the intersection between architecture and video games.

“Given the seriousness of the wider context of the pandemic and the resulting global economic crisis,” reads the original press release from the Russian team, “it is impossible to simply resume the project as if nothing had happened. Caught amid this uncertainty are all the young artists and cultural activists whom we invited to work on the Pavilion. Going digital ensures the continuation of their projects.”

As the digital portion of the pavilion ran over the last year, it became an editorial outlet for writings on the value of cultural institutions and their potential futures. The Russian team will keep their website going for future editions of the Biennale.

Striatus at the Time Space Existence exhibition

Zaha Hadid Architects, the Block Research Group at ETH Zurich, and incremental3D, with support from building material company Holcim, are debuting Striatus, a 3D-printed concrete bridge without external supports. Striatus is being built in the the Marinaressa Gardens as part of the Time Space Existence exhibition, and the reinforcement-free, parametrically designed is touted as requiring much less material than comparable bridges (and can be reinstalled elsewhere later).

The British Pavilion, The Garden of Privatised Delights

a gazebo at the 17th venice architecture biennale
Inside The Garden of Privatised Delights (Cristiano Corte)

Inspired by the famous Hieronymus Bosch painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and curated by Unscene Architecture’s Manijeh Verghese and Madeleine Kessler, The Garden of Privatised Delights is a cheeky riff on the encroaching privatization of public space. As the pandemic has only highlighted the importance of public space, corporations continue to tighten their grasps over them, creating a situation where parks, plazas, bars, and even bathrooms are crammed with tracking technology intended to help squeeze more money from visitors. The British Pavilion this year plays up that contrast and the absurdity, creating facsimiles of typical British institutions like the pub for visitors to linger in.

The Finnish Pavilion, New Standards

inside the long hall of the finnish pavilion depicting prefabricated timber housing
Inside the Finnish Pavilion (Ugo Carmen)

Housed in the Alvar Aalto-designed Finnish Pavilion, this year’s installation, New Standards, bears more than a passing resemblance to AMERICAN FRAMING, though without the full-scale mockup. Curated by Laura Berger, Philip Tidwell and Kristo Vesikansa, the exhibition is instead a case study on Puutalo Oy, a mid-century manufacturer of prefabricated timber houses that, at one point, was the largest prefab home provider in the world. In addressing the refugee crisis after WWII, Puutalo Oy tapped Finland’s abundant timber to provide well-built, low-cost housing constructed from wood.

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