ELEMENTAL Builds at the Biennale
ELEMENTAL, the Chilean practice of Pritzker Prize-winning architect Alejandro Araveno, has three pieces on display during the six-month run of the Venice Architecture Biennale: an installation in the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective., curated by Carlo Ratti, and two contributions, with the cement company Holcim, to the European Cultural Centre's Time Space Existence exhibition.
The three pieces are united by one question: “To build or not to build?” It is spelled out in the Arsenale's Corderie building, on a sign embedded within a carefully balanced construction made from crowd control barriers (image above), while a more traditional exhibit at ECC's Palazzo Mora explicitly asks the same question with its wall text. Elsewhere, at Giardini della Marinaressa, the question is implied in a full-size variation of one of ELEMENTAL's Basic Services Units (USB)—aka incremental housing, in which dwellings are half-built and residents complete them over time based on their needs, budget, abilities, and other factors. The prototype in the garden stands out for its patterned, porous concrete walls:
The ELEMENTAL and Holcim collaboration is described in a short 90-second film:
ELEMENTAL and Holcim's room at the Time Space Existence exhibition at Palazzo Mora consists of models showing Aravena's incremental housing built with the Biochar panels:
Back at the Arsenale, ELEMENTAL's From Belongings to Belonging is strange by comparison: chaotic instead of ordered, referencing “Narcos” rather than cement companies, and asking visitors to make dramatic mental leaps to envision what housing in the future would actually look like:
