Biennale Venezia 2021
VENICE, 22.05–21.11 2021
Common Water – The Alps | Rolling Stones | Migrating Landscapes
With focus on three elements, water, stone and vegetation the contributions by the Chair of Günther Vogt and VOGT Landscape Architects raise the issue of accelerated transformation processes of today’s landscapes as a result of the changing environmental conditions and addresses the question, what these changes mean for the coexistence of societies.
Digital Bamboo
The Digital Bamboo pavilion explores the innovative combination of a naturally grown material with digital fabrication. Bamboo is an excellent sustainable building material, because of its rapid growth and very low weight-to-strength ratio. Customized computational tools were developed to design the ultra-lightweight structure, whose bespoke connections were manufactured using 3D printing technology. The structure covers more than 40 sqm with a total weight of only 200 kgs. The Digital Bamboo pavilion showcases a filigree and engaging architecture that surpasses the standardized space frame vocabulary.
The Digital Bamboo Pavilion is designed by students of the external page Master in Advanced Studies in Architecture and Digital Fabrication 2019-2020 at the ETH Zurich and is based on research at the chair of Digital Building Technologies.
Worlds of Planetary Urbanization
The collaborative project by the Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, the Lectureship of Sociology and the Urban Theory Lab-Chicago proposes a radical rethinking of our understanding of the contemporary urban world. This project explores interdependencies—between agglomerations and hinterlands; political-economic and biogeophysical processes; and local, national and global scales—in order to stimulate reflection on “living together” under conditions of planetary urbanisation.
MAHALLA: Urban Rural Living
[First national Participation of the Republic of Uzbekistan]
Mahallas are a form of urban organisation that is simultaneously a housing solution, a powerful cultural center and a resilient self-governing body. There are currently over 10,000 mahallas in Uzbekistan, each with 150 to 2,000 inhabitants. Due to serious economic pressure, changing habits, and their lack of modern infrastructure, mahallas are slowly being replaced by new forms of housing, even though they remain popular among people seeking an urban-rural lifestyle. At a time when the ecosystem of the anonymous megacity is literally reaching its limits, the need for alternatives is greater than ever. Can the social organization of these neighbourhoods and their various architectural formations as low-rise/high-density structures offer urbanity a sustainable and ecological model?
A part of the research program of the Chair of Architecture and Design, Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein, the research project was commissioned by the Art and Culture Development Foundation under the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Uzbekistan. It was developed in collaboration with Tashkent’s CCA LAB.
COOPERATIVE CONDITIONS. A Primer on Architecture, Finance and Regulation in Zurich
Two decades of low interest rates have turned real estate into global investment. The associated pressure of finance capital on residential properties does not only displace middle-income households out of inner-cities. It also limits architects’ agency to give form to the use value of dwelling and, in consequence, to the way how we live together as a society. It is here that the guiding question of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale—How will we live together?—gains its urgency.
The project – based on a seminar of the MAS GTA, taught in the spring semester 2020 by Anne Kockelkorn, Susanne Schindler and Marie Anne Lerjen – responds to this question with a primer that takes the Zurich case to explain the foundations for successful cooperative housing. In Zurich, too, the pressure of financialized real estate markets is clearly tangible. But Switzerland’s largest city also has a one hundred-year-old tradition of nonprofit housing; the percentage of dwelling units operated as cooperative housing amounts to roughly 18 percent.
Further Participants: How Will We Live Together?
external page NCCR DFAB, Gramazio Kohler Architects
Time, Space, Existence (European Cultural Center)
