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Architecture is a creative media that analyzes what is, while imagining what could and should be. Located in Los Angeles’ Art District, A+D Museum's current exhibit, The Architectural Imagination, is a showcase of re-imagining and rebuilding the outdated industrial urbanscape of Detroit... View full entry
An exhibition of Scottish architecture held as part of a major festival in Italy is to be staged for the first time in Scotland.
Prospect North, one of three architecture exhibitions being staged in Oban, was first shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
It explores the stories of 15 Scots communities who have used design and architecture to make a difference.
— bbc news
Read more articles on Scottish projects and featured firms:Former juror Rory Olcayto breaks down the 2016 Stirling Prize nomineesRIBA 2016 Stirling Prize Shortlist announced: includes Herzog & de Meuron, Wilkinson EyreEdinburgh's maker-architects: a visit to GRASArchitects react to shocking EU... View full entry
Robert Urquhart visited BIG's 2016 Serpentine Pavilion and the new Summer Houses. Olaf Design Ninja_ approved "Adeyemi's is very architectural and tectonic. still modern while taking on that neo classical stuff. and Leibingers is nice too...." Plus, Nicholas Korody published 'The Permanent... View full entry
On a recent afternoon, the historian Robert Jan van Pelt was standing in a quiet room at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, explaining the significance of an unassuming steel-mesh column that visitors to this sprawling survey of global design might walk right past.
“This is one of the most deadly things so far created,” Mr. van Pelt said. And it was the handiwork, he noted, of an architect.
— the New York Times
"The column — painted, like everything else in the room, a pristine white — is a reproduction of one of the eight chutes used to lower Zyklon B poison pellets into gas chambers at Auschwitz."For more from the 2016 Venice Biennale, check out these links:Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: a... View full entry
In the glorious luxury of Venice, without discomfort or guilt, you are “slumming it,” setting the world to rights. What you miss, mostly, is art’s perversity, its eccentricity, even its sense for evil. Culture condemned to being morally elevating is culture with feet of clay. — art agenda
I must admit that I avoided the Biennale and its reportings as they have served to the conformity of the buzzwords and romancing with the rather superficial "care."Nick Currie for art agenda tears into the Venice Architecture Biennale vis a vis its older cousin, the art biennale. "What kind of... View full entry
The criticisms generated by productions as significant as the Venice Biennale reveal just as much—if not more—about the central ecology of the event as its official material. Evidenced by the gradient of oppositions representing the national pavilions (and even a handful of Aravena’s... View full entry
The 2016 Venice Biennale challenged, through its theme, architects to engage with the pressing concerns of the world, issues that affect the majority of the world population, whether it is safety and security, the quality and quantity of housing or the cost and scarcity of materials. It raises the... View full entry
Andrea Dietz spent four days in Venice reporting on the Biennale's opening for us, and brought back her reflections on the hallowed event—in all its chaotic, problematic, inspiring, messy glory—to discuss with us on the podcast. Amidst the fray, one thing came out clearly: the map is not the... View full entry
Reporting from the Front seeks to also explore which forces—political, institutional or other—drive the architecture that goes “beyond the banal and self-harming”. The 2016 Venice Biennale calls for entries that not only exist in and of themselves, but that are a part of a larger social... View full entry
This year's Biennale has tried to raise fundamental issues around the role of the architect through social and economic issues. Challenges of social inequality, housing, urbanisation, are found across the world but perhaps they are nowhere more apparent than in the cities of Brazil.The Curator of... View full entry
This biennale was not perfect. None are. And frankly I wonder whether Venice can ever be a fit venue for a serious interrogation of issues more profound than the Campari or Aperol conundrum. The vernissage is, at heart, a schmoozey, boozey networking knees-up in which the architectural great and good cheek-kiss their way down Via Garibaldi occasionally glancing in a pavilion. Arevena knew this all too well when he set out to give the festival some bite. — Architecture Foundation
Architecture Foundation Deputy Director/Turncoats founder Phineas Harper gives his two cents on critics' self-righteous reactions to the Venice Biennale.Find more Archinect coverage on the 2016 Venice Biennale in News and Features. View full entry
Much will be published over the coming days about the Biennale's national pavilion winners—Spain’s “Unfinished” (with the Golden Lion) and Japan’s “en: Art of Nexus” and Peru’s “Our Amazon Frontline” (with special mentions). It is a phenomenon that conceals the terrain... View full entry
Aravena’s main show, though full of timely and meaningful projects, doesn’t succeed terribly well strictly as an exhibition — as a sensory and visual experience on its own terms...
In part this weakness may be explained by the quick time frame; it also seems to flow from Aravena’s generous sensibility, his interest in opening his arms wide to the architecture of the moment and featuring a range of voices usually not heard in Venice. In that sense a desire for inclusion is his Achilles’ heel.
— Christopher Hawthorne | Los Angeles Times
"Some architects — some architects left out of the show, that is — complained in Venice that what Aravena has produced is little more than a politically correct biennale [...] Yet the tone is more tolerant and curious than strident or doctrinaire. Ultimately the PC charge is a caricature, a... View full entry
Alejandro Aravena’s brief for the Fifteenth International Architecture Exhibition at the 2016 Venice Biennale calls for projects that “are scrutinizing the horizon looking for new fields of action, facing issues like segregation, inequalities, peripheries, access to sanitation, natural... View full entry
Decided at Dinner (When Digestion Begins)The theme of this year’s Nordic Countries’ Pavilion, “In Therapy: Nordic Countries Face to Face,” captures a quality underpinning this year’s Biennale positioning and consistent across its many contributions. Finland, Norway, and Sweden, by... View full entry
