Padiglione Venezia

An imminent future made of light, culture, beauty, harmony and space contract.

These are the concepts that the Padiglione Venezia at the Giardini highlights at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition. The project, curated by Giovanna Zabotti in coordination with commissioner Maurizio Carlin, will lead through an experimental continuum of places and spaces, visionary places and everyday reality all together. The Biennale, a free space for experimentation, provocation, thought, becomes a breeding ground for questions: What is the city? Why do we live together? New stations, different places in the broadest sense of the word.

The protagonist of this edition is architect Michele De Lucchi, and his Earth Stations, seen as non-places, stations from which to depart, with destination Earth, visionary images intended to nourish the static fantasy of architecture. Re-designing space is bound to changing needs, we need to create places where living is learning itself, because knowledge alone is no longer enough today, but it is key to know how to use what we know… and where to search for it.

That goes through the rethinking of society, as we follow the suggestions of journalist Emilio Casalini, because the foundations of good coexistence rest on making better conditions for well-being, autonomy and fairness. The 1st space is that of co-habitation: social and spatial contract. The 2nd is the complexity of the change under way. The 3rd is architecture as a mean to create order, harmony, beauty that overcomes friction and therefore accelerates glocal economy. The 4th space is the vision of possible suggestions. Space and territory become a unified ground for reinvention: inside cities, outside cities, between cities, an unbroken place. External beauty generates inner beauty. And vice versa.

Alongside the main exhibition, the Padiglione Venezia will also host an initiative backed by Mayor Luigi Brugnaro and fostered by the City of Venice: “Artefici del nostro tempo” (Creators of our time). This is a competition where young artists are invited to answer the question: How will we live together?, the main theme of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition.