ARCH+ and Summacumfemmer Büro Juliane Greb have been selected to curate the German pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia for their concept Open for Maintenance / Wegen Umbau geöffnet. Commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of Housing, Urban Development, and Building, the pavilion is dedicated to exploring matters of care, repair, and maintenance. The concept also aims to shed light on contemporary debates over the existing building stock and the social practice of maintaining urban fabric. The 18th International Architecture Exhibition will be held from May 20th until November 26th, 2023.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the squatters' movement in Berlin made an important contribution to the maintenance of the urban fabric and toward developing a more cautious approach to urban renewal and the conservation of communities. The curators of the exhibition recognize this precedent as it demonstrates that ecological sustainability is inextricably linked to the social question. The curators aim to apply the same principles of squatting and maintaining to the German Pavilion. Rather than dismantling the previous intervention, Maria Eichhorn’s "Relocating a Structure," the new exhibition will incorporate this into the Pavilion's new design. By working with the Pavilion “as found,” the concept emphasizes the discursive, material, and economic aspects of sustainability. The Pavilion’s exhibition itself will be realized entirely with leftover material from last year’s Biennale.
The German contribution understands the concept of The Laboratory of the Future in a multifaceted way, with on-site workshops and one-on-one interventions aiming to collect, catalog, and process the used material from the Biennale Arte 2022, supported by Concular, a circular construction platform. In addition to the question of resources, Open for Maintenance deals with questions of social and spatial inclusion in Venice. For the entire duration of the Biennale Architettura, activist groups will have the opportunity to engage critically with the format of the Biennale and with architecture as a discipline through a series of workshops featuring interventions within the Pavilion and well as the urban space of Venice.
The Goethe-Institut will act as the German Pavilion’s programming partner, addressing further aspects of the curatorial concept through its program series "Performing Architecture". The curatorial team was selected by a jury chaired by Peter Cachola Schmal, Director of Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM), and includes Anne Femmer, Franziska Gödicke, Juliane Greb, Christian Hiller, Melissa Koch, Petter Krag, Anh-Linh Ngo, and Florian Summa. ARCH+ is an architecture and urbanism journal dedicated to the reflection and communication of architecture and urban developments in society.
The curatorial team around ARCH+ focuses on transforming the building sector in light of the social, political, and economic challenges we are facing today. Transformation and sustainability, in an overarching sense, are extremely relevant topics, especially in the building industry. This urgency is reflected in the intensive cooperation of so many exhibiting nations and local initiatives in Venice. - Parliamentary State Secretary and MP Cansel Kiziltepe
In response to Lesley Lokko’s overarching theme – The Laboratory of the Future, many other countries have announced their exhibition projects focused on similar themes of maintaining and enhancing the urban fabric. The Turkish Pavilion has chosen the project "Ghost Stories: Carrier Bag Theory of Architecture" to question how architects can transform buildings instead of demolishing or abandoning them; the Bulgarian Pavilion set out to explore the subject of depopulation, school abandonment, and urban decline, while the exhibition at the Japanese Pavilion, titled "Architecture - A Place To Be Loved," centers around the post-pandemic reality of faceless developments affecting cities worldwide.
Editor's Note: This is an update of an article originally published on July 12, 2022.
