Britain
Home Economics

The Brits have used the home as their front line. Curated by former Blueprint assistant editor Shumi Bose, architect and writer Jack Self and planner Finn Williams, the exhibition presents five radical new models for domestic life. Designed around incremental amounts of time - hours, days, months, years and decades - the sequential rooms of the British Pavilion have been transformed into five immersive interiors by invited artists, architects and designers.

The entrance to the British Pavilion is concealed behind a large black door

With lifestyles constantly evolving, the exhibition suggests that it is not only a crisis of housing, but also the way we live that is putting immense pressure on the British home. Interesting facts pop up, such as we’re spending more hours looking at screens than we are sleeping, the bed has overtaken the sofa for the first time as the most used piece of furniture in British homes, and private renting in the UK has doubled over the course of the past 10 years. More alarmingly, the price of a typical UK home is forecast to rise by 50 per cent in the next decade and home ownership is now so unaffordable that the average age of a first-time mortgage applicant is 39.

The first room, representing Hours, features daybeds to recline on

‘The housing crisis in the UK is typically thought of as an economic and political problem of a shortage of homes but we also wanted to suggest that it’s not just that there aren’t enough, but that what we’re designing is not appropriate for how much our lives are changing,’ says Self. ‘We felt time spent in the home was really the best way to understand questions of where and how we work, our relationship to privacy, mass migration, social power relations and gender roles in the home.’

The concept for the Months room is based on short-term residences

Visitors to the pavilion are greeted by an over-sized, Number 10-like, black lacquered door, referencing when Queen Elizabeth I ordered everyone to have their own front door for fear of the spread of plague.

Sitting regally at the highest reach of the Giardini, it is illustration alone that an Englishman’s home is his castle. Inside the first room, based on Hours, the curators have created a new, shared domestic environment, with modular day beds and a bizarre transparent communal wardrobe, from which homeowners can share a Henry vacuum cleaner and gender-neutral clothing by fashion designer JW Anderson. The next room, Days, by London-based art collective åyr, features two multicoloured zorbs - ‘a new type of personal and portable space’ - that responds to the proliferation of Airbnb and our increasing addiction to social media.

Decades presents a room defined by spatial conditions rather than function

Pass through Months, a ‘totem’ relating to short-term residences in the context of temporary work contracts and student life by Dogma, to Years, by British-Venezuelan architect Julia King. King has created a stark space stripped of everything except what is required by a mortgage. So all that is left is a roof, running water, electricity, a toilet and sink.

The Days room houses two colourful zorbs that invite visitors to climb inside them

The last room, Decades, by architecture practice Hesselbrand, presents an adaptable, timeless house that is defined by spatial conditions - light and dark, open and closed, wet and dry, soft and hard - rather than predetermined functions such as kitchen, bedroom or bathroom.

Years by Julia King has been designed according to the minimal requirements of a mortgage

It is a conceptual and sometimes challenging show; tongue-in-cheek and playful in places while considering some very serious questions at the same time. It’s also a great format for an architectural overload of a biennale - a clear, easy-to-read installation that leaves you pondering long after you’ve left it. Says Bose: ‘What we’re really thrilled about is that this exhibition is not one of solutions or answers, but one that can instigate conversations, questions and provoke some really big thinking about the houses we live in.’ CSH

Russia
V.D.N.H. Urban Phenomenon

Waiting for the opening of the show outside the Russian Imperial-style Pavilion (1914) designed by Alexey Shchusev, jolly orchestral music played over loudspeakers. Just the right choice — Shostakovich wrote the Festive Overture in 1954 for the opening of the Stone Fountain in the subject of this exhibition: Moscow’s VDNKh Park. Curiously, it’s written here as VDNH although the last letter in Roman script (X in Russian) is normally written phonetically as Kh.

The park is a Soviet showpiece, a vast, formal garden of grand pavilions for the USSR’s republics and various scientific, agricultural and industrial sectors, in the distinct neoclassical Stalinist style (later modernist ones were added). At Venice we first encounter a golden wall of socialist realism, triumphant figures massed under great flags, while the adjacent projection zips through graphics and statistics explaining VDNKh. Next, an all-black room filled with white copies of sculptures adorning its pavilions, such as the Meat Pavilion’s man and chained bull.

A 360-degree panorama transports visitors to Moscow’s VDNKh Park

Stairs lead up to a 360-degree diorama taking us into the park itself. We pass a vast wall-mounted work of pavilion models on a motherboard-like base (though excluding the Vostock and Buran spacecraft that VDNKh would acquire). Finally, we can sit, in a study with books and plans and extraordinary drawings by Alexey Rezvy, a St Petersburg student who will surely give Pablo Bronstein competition for his draughtsmanship, neoclassical mastery and imagination.

This super-slick update on VDNKh’s patriotic achievement airbrushes out the current decay behind its facades and skips details like the golden cannabis plants in its Friendship of Peoples Fountain, but it doesn’t exaggerate the feeling of celebration still there. It may seem like neo-Soviet revivalist propaganda as much as the ‘urban phenomenon’ the Russians bill it as, but it is simply stunning. HW

Nordic
In Therapy

The wooden pyramid that almost fills the Nordic Pavilion, home of Norway, Sweden and Finland, is an eye-opener, but unusually for Venice it’s a classically considered response to its surrounding building. Sverre Fehn, the giant of Norwegian architecture, designed the pavilion in 1959 as a rectangular volume open on two sides, spanned by thin parallel beams of concrete with crushed marble, through which three trees grew, and a solid, truncated quarter-pyramid of concrete steps beside it, facing an exterior tree reaching through the roof edge. (That tree became diseased and a new planting now grows towards the roof).

Visitors climb up a wooden pyramid at the Nordic pavilion to collect information leaflets on projects

The new wooden pyramid of Swedish pine responds to the concrete one outside, with the same step height, and enclosing the interior trees. Its steps become seating terraces, shelves for literature, and invite people to climb up so that their heads actually disappear into Fehn’s concrete lamellas.

Around it, five so-called ‘rooms’ without walls (referencing Nordic openness) are defined merely by patterned patches of carpet, couches and video screens. The pavilion has become a lounge dominated by the pyramid, but retaining the tranquillity and sense of being outside that Fehn so brilliantly designed.

Visitors climb up a wooden pyramid at the Nordic pavilion to collect information leaflets on projects

Otherwise, In Therapy, curated by David Basulto and James Taylor-Foster, is slightly obtuse. The pyramid references Maslow’s 1954 Hierarchy of Needs (physiological at base, rising up through psychological to self-esteem). Architects were invited to submit projects that address needs (‘foundational’, ‘belonging’, recognition’), but moreover, as Taylor-Foster says, that ‘re-awaken ghosts’ of Nordic tradition while answering the question: how has this project contributed to the current condition of Nordic society? One practice answered the question with ‘It doesn’t’. The projects appear on collectable A5 sheets stacked on the steps. What a fine setting to find and digest such gems! HW

Denmark
Art of many and the right to space

Denmark’s contribution is a jam-packed cabinet of curiosities with more than 130 multifaceted projects by some 70 architects. Cancer centres, psychiatric hospitals and urban hospices jostle for space with non-profit housing, affordable homes and holistic, co-operative strategies on a network of scaffolding that guides visitors through, up and around their light-filled pavilion. The aim of the exhibition is to portray the ways in which Danish architects create architecture that benefits the whole community and not just the selected elite.

A scaffolding structure in the Danish pavilion houses dozens of models that illustrate a community-first approach to design

With themes such as ‘designing life’, ‘procommunity’ and ‘beyond luxury’, this is a down-to- earth showcase depicting the Danes’ trademark humanistic approach to design, that centres on quality of life, elevating the everyday and designing around people. ‘Danish architecture is not primarily characterised by prestigious projects and architectural beacons towering above the anonymity of standardised, mass-produced buildings. Danish architecture is… art for a large audience,’ explain curators Boris Brorman Jensen and Kristoffer Lindhardt Weiss.

Offering a dynamic snapshot of Danish architecture and the challenges architects face today, projects include a floating residence hall made of shipping containers by Kim Loudrup and BIG for students, refugees and people in urgent need of a home; a renovation project of an existing residential building by AI that involves the residents in activating green, outdoor spaces; a green school in Stockholm by 3XN characterised by open learning spaces for hands-on learning; and an urban hospice by NORD Architects that challenges boundaries and taboos around death.

A scaffolding structure in the Danish pavilion houses dozens of models that illustrate a community-first approach to design

An insightful, informative exhibition, there is much to learn from each project without being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the work on show. An adjacent room is dedicated to a video installation by Jan Gehl, the standard bearer for sustainable urban planning that reorientates the city towards people.

Say Jensen and Weiss: ‘The issue at stake here is the right to space, especially the right to space for the public, for the many. Everyday battles are not about architectural style but about impact, methods and societal consequences, about pushing the boundaries and insisting on continuing to take small but decisive steps to improve quality of life.’ CSH

Brazil
Juntos

Last summer Brazil made a big hit in Milan with its open, net-strung pavilion at the Expo, but here it exhibits in a heritage pavilion, a 1954 modernist bunker by Venetian architect Amerigo Marchesin. The show is called Juntos (meaning ‘together’), curated by Washington Fajardo, president of the Rio World Heritage Institute, who addresses urban issues in Brazil. These have always been tied up with Brazil’s socio-political history (democracy only since the Eighties, mass protests boiling up again in 2013) and the until recently unspoken elephant-in-the-room, black poverty. Given such a heavy context, Juntos does not shy from the issues but offers a communitybased response that strikes a note of optimism.

15 community-driven projects form the heart of the Brazilian pavilion

The show starts with a photo gallery. A colourful, organic house encrusted with stones and tiles, built by sugar workers, is shown next to a Lina Bo Bardi residence, and although very different they share a tropical beauty. The city is sampled - in São Paulo, a squatted office skyscraper, Mendes da Rocha’s Portuguese Language Museum - beside a wall-sized birds-eye view of protests filling Rio’s streets.

That’s the context. The second room is the action - 15 projects that connect with community, from a linear park under electricity pylons in Rio to an activist magazine from Belo Horizonte. Wall videos and an unfeasibly long table show them off. Brazilian architecture is shown not just engaging community, but moving on from its modernist legacy, which actually looms over the table as a heavy concrete bridge, piercing the room but going nowhere. HW

Belgium
Bravoure

In contrast to the information overload of many national pavilions, Belgium once again shows a beautifully simple display, with ideas and concepts condensed down into a clear series of triptychs. Curators architecten de vylder vinck taillieu, interior architect Doorzon and photographer Filip Dujardin have chosen 13 projects from 13 Flemish architects that demonstrate how periods of economic scarcity can lead to craftsmanship. Full-size fragments of these projects are replicated in the gallery — from haystack wall constructions to mundane air ducts and guttering — along with the surreal photographs of Dujardin.

The Belgians’ minimal show focuses on craftsmanship in the face of economic scarcity

A project by Eagles of Architecture, for example, converts a 19th-century house in Antwerp into separate units by using bare metal stud frames and standard colour plasterboard panels to differentiate between the old and the new. Each easily readable intervention in the house’s rococo setting has a technical logic to it: pink for fire resistance, green for waterproofing, blue for acoustics.

 Another project, by architecten Els Claessens en Tania Vandenbussche, uses corrugated sheets and smears of mortar on the brick facade to create a sense of roughness suitable for the building’s use by scouts, while De Smet Vermeulen architects combine acoustic panels and fluorescent lighting tubes to create bird-like ceiling panels in a day-care centre in Antwerp. Each representation explores imaginative opportunities for building, while showing that even mundane detail deserves thought and attention. The Belgians show there is craftsmanship in the everyday. CSH