The international architecture exhibition produced every two years in Venice is a sprawling, humid, one-stop shopping experience. When done right, it’s also exhilarating. Though the strategy of showcasing architecture’s freshest ideas through national pavilions and exhibition galleries has had its drawbacks in the Architecture Biennale’s 30-year history, high-quality submissions help make this year’s show feel curated. The recurring threads of sustainability, adaptive reuse, and traditional building methods — while planning for an uncertain future — give the show an underlying coherence.
This year’s director, Kazuyo Sejima of the Japanese firm SANAA, chose a remarkably enigmatic theme for the Biennale — People Meet in Architecture — which may alienate the audience and architects, but by virtue of its vagueness makes almost every project feel tangentially related to it. Is Sejima celebrating the way architecture provides the place for human exchange, or is she urging architects to refocus their energies on people, rather than architecture’s competing priorities of economic development, environmental sustainability, and technological innovation?
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