2016 Venice Architecture Biennale shines spotlight on users of buildings

Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, director of this year’s global showcase, forgoes the flashy steel and glass for structures of brick, wood and rammed earth and a theme of fighting inequality

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The project Dou Pavilion was made by Chinese architect Jingxiang Zhu for China's pavilion during the opening of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice on May 25, 2016. Photo: Agence France-Presse

Published: 1:16pm, 4 Jun 2016Updated: 1:15pm, 4 Jun 2016

The 48-year-old Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena calls his dense, earnest and grass-roots edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale “Reporting From the Front”. The show, which runs until November, collects work from a range of architects operating on the forward lines of what Aravena calls “battles” against inequality, crushing poverty and environmental crisis and puts it on display with the informality of a journalistic sketch.

Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena at the opening of the 15th Venice international architecture biennale. Photo: AFP

An equally good title would be “The Borrowers”. The stars of this biennale – both in Aravena’s main exhibition and the various national pavilions that complement it – are those in debt, in many senses of that word.

They borrow money; running through this biennale is a multifaceted critique of global real-estate speculation and its effects on domestic life.

They borrow ideas from other architects, from pools of collective knowledge or from the past. And they borrow the kinds of spaces common to the sharing economy: the back seat for the Uber ride, the bedroom for the Airbnb stay.

The emphasis is very much, as biennale president Paolo Baratta points out, on the “demand” (as opposed to supply) side of the architectural equation. This biennale shines a spotlight not just on the architects who design buildings but the people who use, buy, rent, build and clean them.