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Norwegian firm Helen & Hard present their experimental cohousing model at the 2021 Venice Biennale

2021-01-26T14:54:00-05:00

While the 2020 Venice Biennale was postponed, many look forward to what 2021 has to offer with the announcement of the event's opening date on May 22.

Carrying on with the theme "How will we live together," Hashim Sarkis, curator of the exhibition, shared, "the world is putting new challenges in front of architecture. I look forward to working with participating architects from around the world to imagine together how we are going to rise to these challenges."

"What We Share - a model for cohousing" Exhibition image render © Helen & Hard

With this in mind, exciting projects and exhibitions make way for their debut at the Biennale. Take the Nordic Pavilion, for example. They've announced the Pavilion's participation in an experimental cohousing project led by Norwegian firm Helen & Hard. The firm's expertise in wood use and experimental housing projects will come to life in their exhibition titled, "What We Share."

Vindmøllebakken co-living project by Helen & Hard. The project was b...

Reviewing from the periphery to the heart of the Venice Biennale; from the Nigerian to the Nordic

2016-05-30T06:41:00-04:00

‘Reporting from the Front’, the theme of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, provokes and stimulates, and with the extensive intensity of the exhibition a useful approach to review and reflect is to move from the periphery, to the heart of the Biennale and back again; in this case stumbling upon Nigeria’s Pavilion on Giudecca island, then to the heart of the Giardini and the Nordic Countries Pavilion.

The Biennale is a phenomenon: it stimulates, it exhausts, and it is addictive. The diversity of architectural production, local and global, expands inside the viewers’ veins and synapses. The backdrop to the Biennale, Venice, is a sublime, architectural drug on its own. Italo Calvino in ‘Invisible Cities’ describes the city beautifully, as multiple cities in one. The Architecture Biennale, is a microcosm of a city within a city, where the new and old connect. In 2014 Koolhaas’s, ‘Fundamentals’, the fourteenth Biennale, was expanded with a longer period and an intensification of the t...