La Biennale di Venezia - The 17th International Architectural Biennale
National Pavilions - U.S.A. - Germany - Great Britain - Japan - Russia - Spain
Giardini - Part 1
After having skipped a year due to Covid-19, this year the 17th International Architectural Biennale, presided by Roberto Cicutto and curated by Hashim Sarkis, until November 21, boasts 61 national pavilions in the Giardini, at the Arsenale and in the historic center of Venice. Three countries will be taking part for the first time: Grenada, Iraq and Uzbekistan.
Giacomo Ardesio 
https://www.labiennale.org/en/
United States of America
Pavilion
American Framing
American Framing elevates the profile of one of the country's most potentially influential contributions to architecture, which for a variety of reasons, is one of the most overlooked. The exhibition presents the subject of wood framing in a collection of works. A full scale installation forms a new facade for the historic U.S. pavilion - a half-section of a wood framed house through which visitors enter, the open-air structure expresses the sublime and profound aesthetic power of a structural method that underlies most buildings in the United States.
Commissioner: Paul Preissner - Curators: Paul Andersen - Paul Preissner
Participants: Ania Jaworska - Norman/Kelley - Daniel Shea - Chris Strong - The University of Illionois at Chicago School of Architecture
The pavilion's interior explores wood framing's history and culture. Commissioned photographs address, the labour, industry, and materials of softwood construction. Scale model present important building common forms, and the potential of exaggerating some of the system's typical part and qualities.
The works tell a story of an American architectural project that is bored with tradition and accepting a relaxed idea of craft in pursuit of something new.
Germany
Pavilion
2038 - The New Serenity
2038 The New Serenity, looks back from the future, trying to understand how we managed to get off one more time, with a black eye. How we achieved a state of 'New Serenity'. As in One Thousand and One Nights, where Sultana Scheherazade keeps designing worlds of co-existence to escape death. An endless scenario-universe of joints, interstices, and storylines. Pretty much what Buckminster Fuller called 'the future'.
Commissioner: Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community
Curators: Arno Brandlhuber - Olaf Grawert - Nikolaus Hirsh - Christopher Roth
co-curator Christopher Roth and co-participant Angelika Hinterbrandner
Today in the year 2038, we have mastered the great crises. It was close, but we made it. The global economic and ecological disasters of the 2020s brought people, states, institutions and companies together, they committed themselves to fundamental rights and jointly created viable, adaptable systems and legal frameworks on a planetary basis, giving decentralised, local structures the space to maintain and create highly diverse models of co-existing.
Great Britain
Pavilion
The Garden of Privatised Delights
The Garden of Privatised Delights calls for new models of privately owned public space in cities across the U.K. It challenges the polarisation of private and public, which often leads to divisions within society. Instead it asks how architects can work with the public to invent new frameworks to improve use, access, and ownership of Britain's public spaces.
Commissioner: Sevra Davis, director of Architecture, Design and Fashion at the British Council - Curators: Manijeh Verghese - Madeleine Kessler - Unscene Architecture Participants: Unscene Architecture - The Decorators - Built Works - Studio Polpo - Public Works -vPPR
"Could the pub be more than a place for drinking and become a versatile centre for civic action?"
The global pandemic and recent lockdowns have both highlighted the importance of accessible public spaces and also the inequalities within society. To explore how to redress this imbalance, the British Pavilion is transformed into a series of immersive spaces under treat like the youth centre, and inaccessible enclaves like the garden square, each overlaid with proposals for how they can be re-programmed, revitalised and opened up.
Japan
Pavilion
Co-ownership of Action: Trajectories of Elements
The Japanese pavilion is exhibiting a wooden house of a type common in Japan. One consequence of the country's declining population - a harbinger for the rest of the world? - is a shocking large number of houses that, having exceeded their life expectancy, simply await demolition. One such house was moved to Venice and once there, the house did not retain its original form. Having been dismantled to fit into containers for shipping, its various elements found new uses in the exihibition - as display walls, as benches, as projection screens, and so on. Reassembling the fragmented house on-site into diverse configurations will give these elements new life.
Commissioner: The Japan Foundation - Curator: Kozo Kadowaki - Participants: Jo Nagasaka - Ryoko Iwase - Toshikatsu Kiuchi - Taichi Sunayama - Daisuke Motogi - Rikako Nagashima
Many elements will inevitably be lost in the course and dismantling, shipping, and reassembling the house in Venice. The architects and artisans from Japan who will travel to Venice to revive and rebuild the house will compensate for the missing elements with new or locally obtained materials.
Russia
Pavilion
Open!
The Russian pavilion needs urgent work. At the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, it is open albeit under construction, both as an architectural structure and an institution.
How will we live together? - at the time of global crisis? We propose to rebuild the pavilion as an institution on a new and more solid basis by taking this project beyond the horizon of this edition of the exhibition. In response to the outbreak of Covid-19 and the postponement of the 2020 Biennale, the Russian pavilion migrated entirely online, organically morphing into a digital platform called Open? and serving as an online journal for new contents and collaborations, while also building an archive of materials for Biennales to come.
Commissioner: Teresa larocci Mavica - Curator: Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli - Participants: Kasa Kovaleva and Sato Architects - Mikhail Maximov - Lion & Unicorn - Ilia Mazo - Yuliya Kozhemyako - Electric Red - Pavel Milyakov, aka Buttechino - Vladmir Rannev
In 2021 the Russian pavilion recalibrate its research focus by situating itself within the fluid, indeterminate space between the physical and digital realms. The project consists of three main components: the showcase of an almost empty pavilion, underlining the building's - architectural and institutional - renovation; a gamer station that reflects on the political potential of digital gaming environments; a book featuring twenty-eight commissioned texts, examining alternative ways of thinking about and acting within - cultural - institutions. The overarching goal is to explore how different realms - the physical, the digital and everything in between - can serve as testing ground for institution - making and other models of being together.
curator - Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli
The Gamer Installation
Giacomo Ardesio
Curatorial Team with
Erica Petrillo - Vladimir Nadein - Elizaveta Dorrer - Dasha Nasonova
Spain
Pavilion
Uncertainty
Certainty defines realities in which any kind of reflection or further study seems unnecessary. Uncertainty comes within the opportunity to generate processes that define those with a changing or unknown nature.
Uncertainty, the project for the Spanish pavilion, presents a selection of several actions that hybridise and expand the competence of architecture to face new social demands, blurring imposed disciplinary and conceptual boundaries that have ended up becoming principles, thus creating open concepts from realities previously perceived as antagonistic.
Commissioner: MITMA - AECID - AC/E - Curators: Domingo Gonzalez - Sofia Pinero - Andrzej Gwizdala - Fernando Herrera
The central room becomes a volume made of hundreds of heterogeneous
individuals floating in space who, regardless of their physical and
conceptual distance, interact to build a single a recognisable body.
"Can we fathom our individual uncertainties into working collective solutions?"
Memory Latticework - 2017
Ana Mombiedro - Sara Sangregorio - Alicia Gutierrez
Playing with Space and Light - Madrid - 2017
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