‘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 theme. Alejandro Aravena’s ‘Reporting from the Front’ attempts to take the Biennale into a wider architectural world by reflecting on the changing social and environmental times. That changes with the social to the fore result in many different architectures, from all parts of the world are represented, and without careful editing overdose inevitable. My first Venice Architectural Biennale fix was in 1985, and I was mesmerized by ‘Machines’, an architectural installation by a young energetic tutor from Cranbook, Daniel Libeskind. It raised questions: Was this architecture? Was the author an architect? Questions that in a different asked with a different slant today.

Starting at a geographical periphery of the Biennale, these questions reverberated in an atmospheric crumbling old beer factory on the Giudecca with the Nigerian Pavilion by artist-architect Ola-Dele Kuku. I was taken back to that second Biennale with his beautifully made piece, ‘Opera Domestica’. Ola-Dele had worked in Milan with Libeskind in the eighties; and his representational pieces have now travelled much further than Libeskind, continuing to explore structural and political representation and communication with light, braille, and neon. His latest work, ‘Africa is not a Country’ raises the flawed perception of the vast and remarkable continent by outsiders. Nigeria, the seventh most populous nation, is made up of numerous ethnic and religious groups. Communication and conflict, never far away in the history and future of Nigeria, are explored through Ola-Dele’s exquisite work.

From Africa to Europe and at the heart of the Giardini Biennale site is an architectural masterpiece, the Nordic Pavilion by Sverre Fehn. The 2016 curators have provocatively enclosed the famous trees growing out of the building, with a seventeen-ton ziggurat of Swedish pine. The steep, heavy axe-marked steps of the pyramid reflect the similar concrete Fehn steps outside and give a rare opportunity to commune with the incredibly light slender concrete beamed roof above.

The structure also creates a great theatre for debates and events, reflecting on the position and problems of architecture in Nordic countries. The exhibition title ‘In Therapy’ is carried further into the pavilion with Freudian couches for visitors to hear, insiders and outsiders, views on the Nordic architectural problems, the curators seem to be suggesting that the problems in the Nordic countries are psychological rather than social, an interesting take.

This is the start of a journey next to a spiral into the BRAC countries, and the architectural issues of a quarter of the world’s population; with building in Brazil, swimming in Australia, slowing down in China, and ‘What is happening?’ in Russia.