Podcast: 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale: Curators of the Future of the Built Environment and Design in Design and the City Podcast
This two-part episode is part of Design and the City. A podcast about how to make cities more liveable, reSITE discusses the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. The episode explores the question: “How will we all live together?” Part-oneThis article examines the work of the U.S. Nordic and Luxembourg Pavilion curators. We focus on their use of timber construction to answer the exhibition’s main theme. Part-twoFeatures curator Hashim Sharkis and Greg Lindsay, together with the British and Austrian pavilion coordinators, as they explore accessibility.
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ReSITE – a global non profit working to improve the urban ecosystem – launched the second installment of its Design and the City Podcast in early 2021. Previous guests include Winy Mass and Thomas Heatherwick. Gary Hustwit. The podcast covers a wide range inter-disciplinary topics. Conversations have covered everything from surveillance and security to child-friendly planning to how to combat gentrification in cities.
reSITE interviewed the U.S. pavilion curators Paul Anderson and Leopold Banchini, as well as the Luxembourg curator Sara Noel Costa De Araujo and the Nordic Pavilion exhibitors Siv Helene Stangeland, Reinhard Kropf. They all had a common approach to wood use in their pavilions. The curators explained that their wood-based installations encourage simplicity, humility, flexibility, and familiarity to answer the question “How will we thrive together?” Along with the Biennale’s universal theme.
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Paul Andersen of the U.S. Pavilion and Paul Preissner of U.S. Pavilion looked at wood as a practical and cheap building material. This is despite the fact that more than 90% of American houses are wood-framed. Lukas Feireiss (curator) and Leopold Banchini (curator) paid tribute to Lloyd Kahn. He was an American pioneer who promoted self-build and green construction in America and created new definitions of shelter, application of wood structures, degrowth model and retrospectives about the future of the built world.
Interview with Luxembourg’s pavilion curator focused on the country’s housing crisis. The installation was an ideal solution to the country’s unaffordable housing situation through modular, reversible wood designs. The Nordic Pavilion’s exhibitors and Helen&Hard’s founders are the final guests in the first episode. They discuss a radical approach to crafting livable spaces using shared environments. This allows architects to create communities, and not just physical spaces.
The second episode of Design and the City kicked off with an interview featuring Hashim Sarkis (curator of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale), who discussed the societal consequences of climate change and global political unrest as well as financial inequality and other global crises. Sarkis was accompanied by Greg Lindsay, NewCities Director for Applied Research, to discuss how the union between the digital and urban realms could foster and strengthen new communities.
The episode continues with an interview with the curators of the British pavilion, who explainedtheirplayful and vibrant approachto examine thepolarization of public and private spaces rooted in British culture. The two-part episode ends with an interview with theAustrian Pavilion curators Peter Mrtenbckand HelgeMooshammer. They discuss the impact of digital technologies on contemporary architecture, and transform the pavilion into a platform to “challenge global monopoly exercisedby platform enterprises and the imagination for our future spaces and habits.”