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Reporting from the front
By Christian Narkiewicz-Laine
The theme of this year’s 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, “Reporting from the Front,” has created a major international shakeup in the way architectural practitioners collectively view their approach to the work that they do, not just on the global front, but on the local level and to the world-wide communities that architects serve.
The Chilean architect, Alejandro Aravena, Director of this year’s Biennale, argues for a greater and very real connection between architecture and civil society and an “architecture that makes a difference” in the ordinary lives of everyday people.
Thus, Mr. Aravena expressed his hope that this year’s Biennale might “offer a new point-of-view,” like the one of the German archaeologist, Maria Reiche has on the ladder.
Given the complexity and variety of challenges that architecture has to respond to, architecture should be about listening to those that were able to gain some perspective and consequently are in the position to share some knowledge and experiences with those of us standing on the ground.
“We believe, explains Mr. Aravena, “that the advancement of architecture is not a goal in itself but a way to improve people’s quality of life. Given that life ranges from very basic physical needs to the most intangible dimensions of the human condition, consequently, improving the quality of the built environment is an endeavor that has to tackle many fronts: from guaranteeing very concrete, down-to-earth living standards to interpreting and fulfilling human desires and respecting the single individual to taking care of the common good; from efficiently hosting daily activities to expanding the frontiers of civilization.”
Mr. Aravena’s proposal is therefore twofold: on the one hand we would like to widen the range of issues to which architecture is expected to respond, adding explicitly to the cultural and artistic dimensions that already belong in our scope, those that are on the social, political, economical and environmental end of the spectrum. On the other hand, we would like to highlight the fact that architecture is called to respond to more than one dimension at a time, integrating a variety of fields instead of choosing one or another.
Avarena’s chosen theme is a wake-up call for architects to initiate an investigation into the role of architecture in the battle to improve the living conditions for all people in all parts of the world—both the developed and the underdeveloped worlds. The aim is to focus on an architecture that works within today’s constraints presented by a lack of resources, and those designs that subvert the status quo to produce architecture for the common good—no matter how small or great the consequences or the success.
Very much in keeping with Mr. Aravena’s selected Biennale theme, the group of Italian architects who gathered together to serve on the jury for this year’s International Architecture Awards share in the Chilean architect’s same vision and mirror his same sentiment: A call for a more sensitive, rational, bold approach to design, while offering an emphasis on place, climate, local materials, tradition, and more, a spotlight not just on the architects who design buildings but the people who use, buy, rent, build and clean them.
As the largest and most extensive global architecture
awards program in the world, The International Architecture Awards
honors new skyscrapers, commercial buildings, urban plans, private residences, and real estate projects that achieve a high standard of excellence in design, construction, planning, and sustainability and promote the best practice in all types of real estate development for the private and public sectors, including new skyscrapers, high rises, corporate and institutional buildings, commercial projects, bridges, airports, city planning, restorations and adaptive reuse, community projects, religious and civic buildings, and interiors.
The juried selection is dedicated to the importance of incremental and bottom-up progress; what the north can learn from the south; and the experiences the west can learn from the east; the real value of cooperative or indigenous architecture rather than simply signature projects by the architecture stars of the profession.
In the last decade, there has been a shift in the architectural paradigm from design as the manifestation of a formal style, but rather as an instrument of self-government and of humanist civilization and how new buildings and urban planning projects demonstrate the ability of humans to become masters of their own destinies.
The best new architecture in action as an instrument of social and political life, which challenges us to assess the public consequences of private actions at a more fundamental level. Architecture, after all, is the most political of all the arts.
Here, the buildings and urban planning projects selected by this year’s jury also reflect the larger shifts in a discipline still dealing with the aftereffects of the 2008 financial crisis and eager to move past two decades of venerating a few celebrity architects at the expense of younger or more obscure figures without wealthy clients or teams of publicists.
The awarded projects address critical architecture and planning concerns for advanced post- industrial cities and Third World communities alike, in a way to imagine the possibilities for the future restoration and renovation of deteriorating downtown cores, depressed neighborhoods, and humanistic alternatives for derelict neighborhoods. Unlike the previous decades of modernism, this is a new, sensitive humanistic approach to present and future urban development—from mega projects to the design for public housing and buildings for community services.
The best of today’s architecture demonstrates a new International Style that has little to nothing to do with architectural “style,” but more a genuine concern for the society that architecture serves. Unlike the “International Style” of modernism, today’s International Architecture considers much broader issues: pedagogic requirements, topographical conditions, climatic-sensitive design, the size and needs of real communities, multiculturalism, genuine respect for the cultural concerns of city and world inhabitants, the respect for the world’s limited resources, and an advanced thinking toward a real Green Design and ecological sustainability.
These are the critical issues that megacities and developing societies alike face today–from urban slums, denatured megacities, conflict zones, environmentally compromised ports, and rural villages far off the grid.
The best of today’s architecture addresses the harnessing of simple materials, structural ingenuity and unskilled labor to bring architecture to underserved communities in a simple, low-cost, low-impact, and often beautiful way.
These projects awarded by the Italian jury speak about invigorated cities and city centers, the creation of domestic environments and public spaces that restore dignity to a population while offering universal space for the balanced encounter between two apparently irreconcilable worlds. These projects
are at the frontline and have worldwide implications that challenge us in the way we see our world.
It is about sharing results with a broader audience; the work of people who are scrutinizing the horizon looking for new fields of action, facing issues like segregation, inequalities,peripheries, access to sanitation, natural disasters, housing shortage, migration, informality, crime, traffic, waste, pollution and the full participation of the communities that are being served. And simultaneously it is about presenting examples where different dimensions are synthesized, integrating the pragmatic with the existential, pertinence and boldness, creativity and common sense.
From an organizational point-of-view, the jury and the award curators are not just interested in promoting or exhibiting concrete results for critical appraisal. Both want to see into the phenomenology of how these positive examples came about. In other words: what drives the demand for architecture; how are needs and desires identified and expressed; which logical, institutional, legal, political and administrative processes lead to demand for architecture and how they allow architecture to come up with solutions which go beyond the banal and self-harming.
Both jury and curators are more interested in the recognition that architecture is useful in catalyzing the creation of public good.
More and more people in the planet are in search for a decent place to live, work, worship, recreate and become educated and enlightened; the conditions to achieve or fulfill this goal are becoming tougher and tougher by the minute. Any attempt to go beyond business as usual encounters huge resistance in the inertia of reality and any effort to tackle relevant issues has to overcome the increasing complexity of the world.
“It is not easy, as Mr. Aravena rightfully concludes, “to achieve such a level of expansion and synthesis; they are battles that need to be fought. The always menacing scarcity of means, the ruthless constraints, the lack of time and urgencies of all kinds are a constant threat that explain why we so often fall short in delivering quality. The force s that shape the built environment are not necessarily amicable either: the greed and impatience of capital or the single mindedness and conservatism of the bureaucracy tend to produce banal, mediocre and dull built environments. These are the frontlines from which we would like different practitioners to report, sharing success stories and exemplary cases where architecture did, is and will make a difference.”
We want to thank the Jury for the 2016 International Architecture Awards:
Cinzia Anguissola Scacchetti, Scacchetti Associati - Studio di Architettura, Milan, Italy
Claudia Donà, Design Critic and Journalist - Milan, Italy
Francesco Mendini, Atelier Mendini, Milan, Italy
Maurizio Morgantini, Architect, Milan, Italy
Franco Raggi, Franco Raggi Architect, Milan, Italy
Paolo Zanenga, President, the Diotima Society, Milan, Italy
Photographic Credit
Photo from the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale: German archaeologist Maria Reiche studying the Nazca lines. Standing on the ground, the stones did not make any sense; they they were just random gravel. But from the height of the stair those stones became a bird, a jaguar, a tree or a flower.
