An updated guide to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021

One of the most beautiful works in this Biennale. A circular wall made of rough and hostile wooden poles that reproduce those that were erected by the Spanish in the conquered territories to delimit a "parliament": this space will be used to make two populations who have always been in conflict talk to each other: the Mapuche and the Chileans. Specifically, sitting at this table are a Mapuche territorial organization and a Chilean forestry company. Both live in the same territory and both understand that clashes have not solved their problems.

A beautiful pavilion about the most democratic building technique in the United States: the balloon frame. Easy to build, economical and son of a migrant population. A construction system that has always been outside the architectural discourse and that finally finds its due legitimacy. A true architecture for self-determination, a triumph of the do-it-yourself philosophy.

A winning synthesis of the long process the pavilion has undergone in the last two years. "The pavilion speaks of itself, of the very idea of institutions at the Biennale," curator Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli explains. The exhibition is therefore divided into three moments: a theoretical one, with contributions from leading names on the role of institutions, collected in a volume; a practical one, with the impressive renovation of the pavilion by the Russian-Japanese studio KASA, and their poetic design proposal displayed along the walls through illustrations; and an interactive one, with multi-player videogames to play on the ground floor, putting together a physical and digital community.

Together with a team of historians and art students, the curators collected 500 testimonies of life and transformed them into 500 oil paintings representing them. The testimonies are about memories of past and present life in one of Santiago's most emblematic housing settlements: the José Maria Caro, south of Santiago's peri-urban ring road. Through painting, the messages become universal, and we thank the curators for this generous glimpse into community life.

Among the best national pavilions at Arsenale, here the Filipino-Norwegian curatorial team introduces us to a practice of self-building and community construction that happens in the Philippines, which is crucial when villages are swept away by tsunamis and hurricanes, with slow or sometimes absent administrations reacting to emergencies. The wooden library that we see set up in the Arsenale is a project realized within one of these communities that will return to its original village once the Biennale is over. Practices of this type that take place all around the world, including Norway, are taken into consideration within the exhibition.

The house of your dreams. Rainwater rivulets reminiscent of the Roman Domus, herbal teas, vegetable gardens and water tanks on which to sit and relax. An idea of holistic architecture very close to our desire for beauty to be experienced in everyday life and interiors.  

One of the very few pavilions to have talked about digital platforms, platform capitalism and, specifically, platform architecture. By now apps are part of our present and architecture can't help but deal with them. Must see.

Born from a research on ancient olive trees on which it is said that the dove of the end of the Great Flood landed, the exhibition is an emotional and artistic collection of metaphors: silence, explosion, nature. Set up inside the magnificent Magazzini del Sale, it is a comprehensive exhibition that leaves nothing to chance and combines art, architecture, poetry and music. Must see.  

The large and noisy installation that stands out in the pavilion space is curated by Annex, a collective of architects, artists and urban planners. The reflection focuses on the relationship between the Irish landscape and digital infrastructures. In recent decades, in fact, the country has been progressively populated by data centers - the last surge related to Brexit - arriving today to host 25% of these facilities in Europe. Metal frames, cables for data transmission and fans define a pavilion with a strong visual impact, in which the collective's research is developed. Giulia Ricci

The pavilion that any architect can appreciate: a review in the form of libidinous paper and wooden maquettes of over 40 projects built in Flanders. The subject is common Flemish terraced buildings (Wallonia not really included).

This year's great expectation and for the first time at the Biennale (also marked by a mega yacht docked in the Lagoon), the Uzbek pavilion relies on an exceptional curatorial team – a partnership between the Union of Architects of the Republic of Uzbekistan, the Tashkent Institutte of Architecture and Civil Engineering and ETH Zurich – to talk about mahalla-s, the agglomerations of traditional houses and community spaces that can accommodate from 150 up to 2,000 inhabitants and that are at risk of extinction with the new urbanization of the country. The ephemeral installation is made of yellow tubes representing their profiles, together with an audio work that has become a vinyl record that is already a collectors' piece and a photographic work by Bas Princen.

Picked up by the Guardian as the only example of good curating (curiously), the Victoria & Albert Museum's pavilion is an exhibition in classic form that talks about mosques in London as examples of places born from below, relatively spontaneous and communal, bringing back in Venice parts of historic mosques on a 1:1 scale.

A reflection on the inexorable privatization of public spaces in the UK, and the loss of community spaces such as the traditional pub due to Covid. The pavilion, very scenic, uses the Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch as a metaphor, a bit tortuouse, of the sense that today the privatized public space plays. A middle way between hell and heaven.

Inaugurated in very difficult days for Israel, the pavilion touches on a universal theme in a clear and touching way: the contradictory relationship with animals and with the agricultural land of the so-called "land of milk and honey", the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the holy and promised land and the highly contested territory of Israel and Palestine.

"In the infinite house you do not enter, you are always inside it". With a very simple and evocative setting, the infinite house is a collage of projects – realized and not – of social houses in Argentina (but that could belong to any other country) and that represent collective living.    

A succession of spectacular displays that ideally start from the human scale to reach the solar system and beyond. An accumulation of projects and researches signed by the contemporary intellectual protagonists of the architecture world: to be seen with patience since they are not always supported by easy communication. "The sense of community is eroding in the face of growing individualism, which in turn leads to further isolation, but new forms of interaction between individuals and between individuals and other species are compensating for some of this loneliness," reads the introduction.

The pavilion is converted into an international incubator of radical thinking where the school of the future (chock-full of behavioral rules) is imagined: an open, welcoming space with a carpet of hay, where you can linger in a placid paper room complete with electric outlets.

A very common and anonymous Japanese wooden house is dismantled, its parts catalogued, and sent to Venice for the Bennale. The reconstruction is bumpy due to Covid's difficulties and reinterpreted in an creative way, bringing with it this important message: "Your actions are not yours alone. Each of them, no matter how trivial, is the result of countless cumulative actions born out of our relationships with each other. Therefore, it is absurd to claim that our actions belong exclusively to ourselves."

The United Arab Emirates decide to abandon cement and ask themselves what alternative materials could be: they propose salt, an ancient building material used for example in the city of Siwa in Egypt. Salt is not extracted from the ground (a process that is not sustainable from an environmental point of view) but crystallized as it happens in the salt pans called sabkhah. The project is a research carried out by scientists from three universities: New York University Abu Dhabi, University of Tokyo and the American University of Sharjah.

What is the life of Romanian expats in Europe? A journey into the lives of ordinary people: a rapper, a communication manager, a farmer, in European countries like Spain. In 2007, in fact, 3.4 million people left the country, while the country's immigration quadrupled. What are the urban implications of this process? All told by Away, a reportage by Teleleu, by the curatorial project Fading Borders and by the research Shrinking Cities Romania.

The cultural institution in Moscow directed by Teresa Iarocci Mavica and Leonid Mikhelson entrusts its contribution to the Venice Biennale to Joseph Grima, who organized an exhibition-workshop-temporary residence called "Non-Extractive Architecture: On Designing without Depletion". The spaces of the Foundation, recently renovated, now host carpentry workshops, exhibition rooms and mobile libraries for residents invited to participate, under the banner of self-building, sharing of knowledge and, above all, reuse and recycling in architecture. The residency will last six months, while the exhibition and research project is ongoing throughout the year.

Entirely entrusted to Michele De Lucchi who does not betray the expectations. On display a path of wooden models to suggest visions of a future architecture dictated by order, harmony and beauty.

Taiwanese architects Divooe Zein Architects have been realizing for almost twenty years the utopia that many are only facing now. At the Palazzo delle Prigioni one of the best installations of the Biennale 2021. On display is the work of the studio, which takes a holistic approach that considers nature, art, music, science and architecture. The model in the second room is of their studio made with construction techniques they invented specifically. The space is intentionally very dark, to stimulate our animal instinct and slow down the pace.

This exhibition at the Biennale public restrooms could have fulfilled its full potential if the captions had been applied in the interior doors of the individual restrooms. That being said, sensitive issues emerge here, such as regulations, ecosystems related to water access. You're bound to see it, and it is connected to another exhibit on bathrooms as protest space set up at the Arsenale's Central Pavilion titled "Your Restroom is a Battleground."

Many believed there was no exhibit. The door was supposed to open via a QR code, but it was always closed. Interestingly, it is the architecture of the pavilion itself that is on display, covered by a green screen that investigates the distorted presence of architecture in films, documentaries and the virtual world in general. Although it is little, it is still brilliant.