To be in Venice for this year’s Architectural Biennale is to face an inevitable irony. The exhibition, with the theme Reporting from the Front, invited architects to focus on the world’s most urgent problems—poverty, mass migration, environmental degradation, housing, social inequities of every sort. As you dive into sobering territory—and into a remarkable range of architectural responses to that critical thesis—there is no getting around the fact that, yes, you are in Venice, a sumptuous place where the gilded facades of Renaissance palazzos glitter along the Grand Canal, the gardens are fragrant with star jasmine, and where, as day turns to night and you leave the Biennale’s exhibits behind, you are going to have a wonderful evening somewhere in that magical city.

But if you can navigate the distance between the setting and the subject—between privilege and the realities that underpin the Biennale, as curated by the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena—there are riches of another sort in many of the exhibits in Venice’s Giardini and the Arsenale.