2018 Venice Biennale: The Latest Architecture and News

Videos

As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage, we present the completed German Pavilion. To read the initial proposal, refer to our previously published post, “'Unbuilding Walls': German Pavilion at 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale to Probe Architecture of Division and Integration.”

Curated by GRAFT and Marianne Birthler, the German pavilion explores architectures of division and inclusion. In a light-filled space, black panels create division. The initial simplicity of the panels is complicated by their opposite sides, where text and images explicate the impact of wall-building worldwide.

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As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage, we present the completed British Pavilion, which received an honorable mention in the Biennale awards. To read the initial proposal, refer to our previously published post, "Caruso St. John to Transform the British Pavilion Into a Politically Charged Meeting Space at 2018 Venice Biennale”

A joint venture from Caruso St John Architects and artist Marcus Taylor, "Island" creates an elevated public space, offering views of Venice and a unique place for both meeting and reflecting.

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Videos

As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage, we present Freestanding, an exhibition in the Biennale's Central Pavilion. Below, the team describes their contribution in their own words.

As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage, we present the completed Swiss Pavilion. To read the initial proposal, refer to our previously published post, "Swiss Pavilion at 2018 Venice Biennale Celebrates Peculiar Form of Architectural Representation."

Honored by this year’s jury as the winner of the Golden Lion for best national participation, the Swiss Pavilion actively defies conventional representation while exploring a specific point of contact between architecture and society: the house tour.

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As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage, we present the completed United States Pavilion. To read the initial proposal, refer to our previously published posts, “Curators and Theme Announced for US Pavilion at 2018 Venice Biennale” and "Studio Gang, Diller Scofidio + Renfro Among Exhibitors Selected for US Pavilion at 2018 Venice Biennale"

The pavilion representing the United States at this year’s biennale brings together the work of seven different transdisciplinary teams who each prepared an installation addressing the concept of citizenship at a different scale. Entitled Dimensions of Citizenship, the exhibition is intended to challenge the definition and conception of citizenship, examining issues and citing examples on the scale of the citizen, civitas, region, nation, globe, network and cosmos. The pavilion was commissioned on behalf of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.

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As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage, we present the completed Croatian Pavilion. Below, the curatorial team describes the exhibition in their own words.

Cloud Pergola / The Architecture of Hospitality at the Croatian Pavilion is a collaborative site-specific environment conceived by the pavilion curator, Bruno Juričić. as Cloud Pergola is an installation crossing the boundaries of architecture, art, engineering, robotic fabrication, and computational models. The exhibition is structured through an interplay of three interventions: Cloud Drawing by Alisa Andrašek in collaboration with Bruno Juričić, To Still the Eye by Vlatka Horvat, and
Ephemeral Garden by Maja Kuzmanović.

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For the 2018 Venice Biennale, Stefano Boeri Architetti presents Slow Food Freespace, the first Slow Village to be constructed in Sichuan, China. Made in collaboration with Slow Food Movement, speakers Stefano Boeri and Carlo Petrini discussed the project at the event “Across Chinese Cities - The Community.”

For the Slow Food China project, Stefano Boeri Architetti has designed a school, a library and a small museum for the villages involved, free of charge. The program attempts to encourage millions of Chinese farmers to stay in their rural districts, combatting the unprecedented emigration to cities which has grown in the last few years. By offering educational facilities and cultural landmarks to these rural communities, it inspires the preservation of local culture and acknowledges the importance of the agricultural economy.

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As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage, we present the completed Argentinian Pavilion. Below, the curatorial team describes the exhibition in their own words. 

Horizontal Vertigo, Argentinian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2018, delves into the notions of humanity and democratic spirit as proposed by Freespace, by establishing a cross-cutting dialog between geography, place, and architecture.

The exhibition, curated by the architects Javier Mendiondo, Pablo Anzilutti, Francisco Garrido and Federico Cairoli, is an invitation to rethink our territory as a collective construction and discover architecture in its capacity to convey unexpected generosity in every project.

During the inauguration of the Spanish Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Biennale, we spoke with Spanish architect Atxu Amann, curator of the space, to better understand the ideas and motivations that shape the exhibition called "Becoming." One of the most interesting concepts –and with the aim of avoiding unnecessary waste– is that 2018 budget was mostly applied to remodel the pavilion building itself; then Amann's team "tattooed" its walls with more than 140 projects made by students and young architects.

(Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara) underscore the concept of generosity, which I think is important because we have to give space and time to those who are not yet building or constructing. We have been very lucky. When I was 30 years old I was already building. Here we have young people between the ages of 35-40 who have never built anything.

On one hand, this has made it so that they don’t have visibility, but on the other hand, it has made it so that during this time different architectural themes emerge –other ways of being an architect. (...) So this is the spirit of generosity: this is a Spanish space and we give it to you (the students) so that you show what you are doing.

Today, a new exhibition opened in Venice featuring the work of the global architecture and engineering practice Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). Presented at the European Cultural Centre, "Time Space Existence" is a collateral exhibition of the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture. The show includes work from leading architects, photographers, sculptors, and universities from around the world.

The curators of the 2018 Venice Biennale Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects have announced the winning contributions to the 16th International Architecture Exhibition. Selected with the help of jury members Frank Barkow, Sofia Von Ellrichshausen, Kate Goodwin, Patricia Patkau, and Pier Paolo Tamburelli, the winners of the Golden Lion for Best National Participation went to Switzerland. Meanwhile, in the Freespace exhibition curated by Farrell and McNamara at Venice's Arsenale, Eduardo Souto de Moura will take home the Golden Lion for Best Participant in the International Exhibition.

As part of our 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale coverage, we present the completed Spanish Pavilion. Below, the curatorial team describes the exhibition in their own words.

Becoming, the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2018, seeks to respond to the general theme of the event through the proposals and research being developed in the different learning environments within the country, placing special emphasis on the architect's new multidisciplinary profile.

The exhibition, curated by the architect Atxu Amann, has occupied most of its budget in restoring the building in which it is located, "tattooing" its interior walls to load them with 143 proposals that are unified through 52 relevant concepts to our discipline today.

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The Chinese Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, themed "Building a Future Countryside", is endeavored to explore new technology and ideas to make better of China's rural areas. A digitally-fabricated outdoor pavilion "Cloud Village" has been set up in addition to the national exhibition at the Venetian Arsenale. The Cloud Village has a twisting form which creates a sequence of open and semi-enclosed spaces under its roof. It seeks to convey an abstraction of the everyday life in Chinese countryside where boundaries of private and public realms are not always defined.

The Cloud Village is structurally made possible by the robotic printing technology developed by Philip F. Yuan and his team. Read below for a detailed account of the project from the architects.

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With the opening of the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale comes a look at the first ever contribution by the Holy See, an exhibition that brings together architects to design chapels that, after the Biennale, can be relocated to sites around the globe.

Located in a wooded area on the Venetian island of San Giorgio Maggiore, 10 chapels by architects including Norman Foster, Eduardo Souto de Moura, and Smiljan Radic, are joined by the Asplund Chapel by MAP Architects. This 11th structure serves as a prelude to the other chapels, while reflecting on Gunnar Asplund's 1920 design for the Woodland Chapel.

While 2016's Golden Lion-winning project 'The Unfinished' surveyed architecture after the construction crisis, this year's Spanish pavilion will explore architecture's future through the eyes of researchers.

The 'becoming,' an exhibition curated by Spanish architect Atxu Amann, opens its doors to the works and productions of architecture students developed between 2012 and 2017. According to the curators, "becoming makes an allusion to a vector of the future, with a common educational background in the 'EscuelaS,' which extends to other learning experiences in space and time, in dialogue with other disciplines."

Selected along with nine other architects by the Vatican, Carla Juaçaba has shared images of her proposed chapel design as part of the Venice Architecture Biennial, which marks the city-state's first time participating in the largest architectural event in the world.

The proposed chapel design seeks a harmonious integration between the water and trees that surround Venice, with the nearby vegetation outlining the interior space of the chapel. The space between the treetops - which offers a view of the sky - functions as the ceiling of the chapel.