The question: “How Will We Live Together?” The answers: Pavilions that resemble science-fair projects, conflict-resolution sites and flights of fancy.

 It was perhaps inevitable that many of the questions asked of Hashim Sarkis, the curator the 17th International Architecture Biennale, during the event’s media preview, were about the pandemic.

After all, the exhibition, which opened in May and runs through Nov. 21, got bumped by a year, and various restrictions remain in place, limiting travel to Venice.

And after a bizarre 15 months that blurred the boundaries between the office and home, and challenged the very theme of the Biennale’s main exhibition — “How Will We Live Together?” — it was only natural for journalists to ask, “in a persistent and anxious way,” as Sarkis put it at the news conference, “how the pandemic changed architecture and how architecture is responding.”

Although the exhibition had been planned before the coronavirus swept the world, Sarkis, a Lebanese architect and dean of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that it spoke to a series of longstanding global issues — climate change, mass migration, political polarization and increasing social, economic and racial inequalities — that had contributed to the virus’s global spread...

The New York Times: Solving the World’s Problems at the Venice Architecture Biennale