The international architecture exhibition produced every two years in Venice is a sprawling, humid, one-stop shopping experience that brings together designers, urban planners, critics, and enthusiasts from across the globe. When done right, it is also exhilarating. Though the strategy of showcasing architecture’s freshest ideas through national pavilions and exhibition galleries has had its share of drawbacks and logistical hurdles in the Architecture Biennale’s 30-year history, high-quality submissions consistently help make the show feel deeply curated and intellectually engaging. This year, recurring threads of sustainability, adaptive reuse, and traditional building methods—all while planning for an uncertain future—give the massive international exhibition an underlying coherence that ties its disparate elements together.
This year’s director, Kazuyo Sejima of the renowned Japanese architectural firm SANAA, chose a remarkably enigmatic theme for the Biennale: "People Meet in Architecture." At first glance, the title might risk alienating audiences and architects alike who look for technical blueprints or concrete urban solutions, but by virtue of its vagueness, it makes almost every project feel tangentially related to it. The overarching theme immediately begs a series of critical questions: Is Sejima celebrating the way architecture inherently provides the physical place for human exchange, or is she urging architects to refocus their energies squarely on people, rather than getting lost in architecture’s competing priorities of economic development, environmental sustainability, and technological innovation?
These questions are addressed by this year’s pavilions and exhibitions with varying degrees of directness. Most of the exhibitions housed within the voluminous, brick-walled rooms of the historic Arsenale take a wonderfully loose interpretation of the mandate. For instance, Olafur Eliasson’s installation, Your Split Second House, plunges visitors into a pitch-black room featuring pulsing stroboscopic lights. These lights briefly illuminate wildly lashing water hoses that generate a violent, arresting noise, seeming to have no practical agenda other than to completely intrigue and delight visitors who brave the darkness. Nearby, the German climate-engineering practice Transsolar offers Cloudscapes, an installation where condensed air forms artificial clouds that visitors can actually walk into by ascending a series of curving, elevated ramps.
Other responses to Sejima’s mandate take a more psychological approach, encouraging visitors to radically rethink their daily experience of architecture and how they perceive themselves within built environments. One particularly playful and intellectually provocative look into this topic can be found inside the Romanian Pavilion. With a population density in urban Bucharest famously hovering around one person per 1,000 square feet, the Romanian team, led by Tudor Vlasceanu, created an all-white rectangle positioned on a bias deep within the gallery space. This striking geometric insertion represents the exact dimensions of that crowded urban reality. Small circular viewports cut into the sides of the construction give casual visitors a voyeuristic view inside the box, while a hidden door allows one visitor at a time to step inside and experience the interior firsthand. The installation bluntly demonstrates the voyeuristic nature of architecture and the profound way in which buildings without people ultimately feel completely meaningless. When no one stands inside the ark-like structure, the space simply looks like a sterile void; the moment a person steps inside, the space is suddenly transformed into a highbrow peep show, dramatically heightened by the simple, brightly lit, white aesthetic.
It seemed that Sejima’s own firm, SANAA, hoped to elicit a similar reflection on how buildings are actively enlivened by people—and vice versa—with their 13-minute film, If Buildings Could Talk…. But whereas the Romanian Pavilion achieves this crucial goal with brilliant understatement, the 3D treatment directed by celebrated filmmaker Wim Wenders feels a little overwrought, its interpretation of Sejima’s theme a little too explicit to leave room for personal contemplation. The film’s voice-over meticulously explains how SANAA’s famous Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the people moving within it are mutually nourished by each other’s presence. This narration is accompanied by lingering cinematic close-ups of people breathing deeply with their eyes closed. Ultimately, the exhibit serves as a reminder that buildings should ideally be left to do the talking through their spatial design.
By contrast, the display at the Kingdom of Bahrain’s debut pavilion, which deservedly won the prestigious Golden Lion Award, proved far more effective at capturing the tangible interchange between people and architecture. Titled Reclaim, the exhibition examines the severe socioeconomic and cultural consequences of rapid urban development on a tiny country that has historically lived off fishing and pearling in the sea. Installed directly within the exhibition space are three small wood shacks that once served as traditional fishermen’s shelters along the coast. Flat-screen monitors mounted within the shacks display poignant footage of local fishermen lamenting their accelerating loss of connection not only to the sea itself, but to these humble, vernacular structures that once anchored their daily lives.
Across the exhibition grounds, numerous national pavilions reassure visitors that architecture remains the single best tool for ensuring a more sustainable future, primarily through the creation of better, denser urban communities. The U.S. Pavilion, titled Workshopping, takes a modest, pragmatic look at architecture’s problem-solving capacity at a grassroots level. Innovative practices such as Archeworks, which exhibits a mobile agricultural project designed to bring farming into urban food deserts, and cityLAB, which cleverly demonstrates how to make Los Angeles significantly denser by adding small, affordable houses to existing backyards, point out that entrepreneurialism and grassroots experimentation are critical to the long-term sustainability not only of our cities, but of the architecture profession itself. Michael Shapiro, director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and one of the organizers of the U.S. Pavilion alongside 306090, Inc., chose to also bring in a retrospective display of John Portman & Associates’ 40-year-long development of the Peachtree Center in Atlanta. Yet, despite their individual architectural merits, the seven distinct exhibits within the U.S. pavilion occasionally struggled to feel fully cohesive or conceptually linked.
Meanwhile, Vacant NL, the Dutch Pavilion curated by Rietveld Landscape, tackled contemporary resource management by including a picturesque urban blue-foam model balanced precariously on wires strung from the pavilion’s soaring mezzanine level. The exhibition highlights the pressing problem of vacant public buildings throughout the Netherlands, drawing sharp attention to the irony that the Dutch Pavilion itself is actively utilized for only three months out of the entire year. Addressing the deeper intentions behind such interventions, Ole Bouman, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, which organized the show, wrote that "a good building makes something happen beyond the building itself."
That sentiment holds equally true for the Biennale as an institution. This year’s exhibition will undoubtedly extend its lasting influence well beyond the physical confines of the Venetian galleries, leaving behind a humble yet vital reminder that architecture is only ever as relevant, vital, or meaningful as the people and their everyday activities unfolding within it.
