Giardini: The Latest Architecture and News

At this year’s International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the Australian Institute of Architects will present Unsettling Queenstown. Tackling themes of decolonization, the exhibition is a multi-faceted and multi-sensory installation. Creative directors Anthony Coupe, Julian Worrall, Emily Paech, Ali Gumillya Baker, and Sarah Rhode have curated this exhibition as a response to the overarching theme of the Biennale – "The Laboratory of the Future." Moreover, Unsettling Queenstown will encourage audiences to imagine the future and its possibilities.

The project “Ball Theater” has been chosen to represent the French Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. As a response to the world of thought and experiment proposed by Lesley Lokko’s theme of “The Laboratory of the Future”, the French team aims to create a place of celebration and collective experiment by transforming the pavilion into a performance space. The curatorial team is composed of Muoto, an architectural practice founded in Paris by Gilles Delalex and Yves Moreau, in partnership with Georgi Stanishev and Clémence La Sagna for the scenography, associate curator Jos Auzende, and Anna Tardivel for the programming. The pavilion will be open from May 20^th until November 26, 2023.

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In a short film exploring some of the National Participations at this year's Venice Biennale, Monocle Films take a considered look at how different countries have responded to the Biennale theme, Reporting From the Front in both explicit and more indirect ways. Visiting the Austrian Pavilion, the Nordic Pavilion, the Turkish Pavilion, the British Pavilion, the Irish Pavilion, the Australian Pavilion and the Romanian Pavilion, the film studies what discourses are being waged in the compressed geo-political world of the Giardini di Biennale.

Few have ever considered what the Giardini—the park of national pavilions for the Art and Architecture Biennales in Venice—is like during the winter months. In light of the fact that, during their "off-season," the gardens are often left in a state of disrepair, RAAAF—a Dutch multidisciplinary studio based in Amsterdam, alongside architect Marcel Moonen—have proposed a series of installations in an attempt to "reclaim valuable public space" which sits at the heart of an often overcrowded city.

Norwegian architect and Pritzker Laureate Sverre Fehn’s original drawings for the Nordic Pavilion in Venice are to be presented alongside Ferruzzi’s monochromatic photographs of the building in an exhibition at the National Museum of Architecture in Oslo. Venice: Fehn’s Nordic Pavilion documents the incredible task undertaken by Fehn who, at the age of thirty-four, won the competition to design the pavilion and subsequently won international acclaim when the building was completed in 1962.

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