Venice Biennale: How Will We Live Together [Part 1]

Design and the City

The postponed 17th Venice Architecture Biennale asked its 112 participants to consider the question, “How will we live together?”. A question originally posed in 2019 by curator and architect, Hashim Sarkis far before our collective 2020 experience. He originally asked participants “to imagine spaces in which we can generously live together” Answers from 46 countries materialized into the exhibition of 2021. After a year spent living apart, the theme is both hauntingly fitting and reifies our disconnection.

This special two-part Design and the City episode covering the long-awaited event. It has signaled something, a community eager to reconnect and a deeper understanding of just how interwoven we are with our spaces spanning the full spectrum of human existence. The exhibition explores that spectrum across five scales: Among Diverse Beings, As New Households, As Emerging Communities, Across Borders, and, As One Planet.

In this episode we’ll hear from the U.S. pavilion curators, Paul Anderson and Paul Preissner; exhibitors Lukas Feireiss and Leopold Banchini; curator from Luxembourg, Sara Noel Costa De Araujo; and finally exhibitors for the Nordic Pavilion, Siv Helene Stangeland, and Reinhard Kropf–all whose work shares a common thread: wood.

These wood-based installations make cases for their egalitarian and democratic nature. They offer a particular simplicity, humility, flexibility, and familiarity coupled with considerate retrospectives, to not only answer the pressing question, “How will we live together?” but “how will we thrive together?”

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Design and the City, is a podcast produced by reSITE about the ways we can use design to make cities more livable and lovable. reSITE is a global non-profit and platform connecting people and ideas to improve the urban environment. We work at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, politics, culture, and economics, acting as a catalyst for social action and innovative leadership. We encourage the exchange of ideas about making cities more livable, competitive, resilient, inclusive, mobile, and designed with humans in mind to protect and public space, architecture, and sustainable development in cities.

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Design and the City is a reSITE production. reSITE is a global non-profit connecting people and ideas to improve the urban environment. This episode was directed and produced by myself, Alexandra Siebenthal, and Radka Ondrackova with support from Martin Barry, Anna Stava, Nikkolas Zellers, and Weronika Koleda as well as Nano Energies and the Czech Ministry of Culture. It was edited by LittleBig Studio.