Wael Al Awar and Kenichi Teramoto, United Arab Emirates pavilion, ‘Wetland’. Photo: Federico Torra
The Venice Architecture Biennale, perhaps the most important architectural celebration in the world, focuses this year on the consequences of construction. It tries to encompass buildings and destruction in equal measure, and also the needs of communities, plants, and immigrants. The curator of the seventeenth Biennale, Harshim Sarkis, a Lebanese architect working from offices in Boston and Beirut, current director of the MIT architecture school, could not have hit the nail better when, half a year before the pandemic, he came up with the title ‘How will we live together?’ Twice postponed by a health emergency and finally inaugurated a year later, to remain open from May to November 2021, the exhibition echoes Sarkis’s initial intention to present not any particular path, but a spirit of everyone building hand in hand. The collective dimension of architecture is reflected in the selection of 112 participants, along with the work of raising 61 national pavilions and organizing 17 collateral events. Everything is based on promoting coexistence among living things, residues, and technology...
La Biennale di Venezia: Awards of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition
