Venice Biennale of Architecture

We're leaving Dubai South now and heading to Venice.

Wow, wouldn't that be nice? [laughs] Um, and news that a Sharjah-born architect, Dalia Hamadi, is due to represent the UAE in the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale, uh, exploring how design can help us live with water in a hotter world.

Now, if you don't know what the event's about, it's one of the world's biggest and most prestigious architecture exhibitions.

It's held every two years in Venice, and it's really where countries each present their own pavilion, exploring ideas about the built environment.

I do fractional executive work and advisory work in a number of companies within the guitar industry.

But I also get called out to the Venice Biennale of Architecture or the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

I was involved with the first robotic citizen of the world, you know, and UNESCO.

And every time I'm invited to these places, I'm like, they do a panel discussion and there's like a a neuroscientist and a brilliant mathematician.

Many listeners will be familiar with his projects in a variety of countries and contexts, including the faceted Connected House and the acclaimed Restaurant Georges at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

And last year, Jacobin McFarlane represented France at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Brendan, after that breathless and extensive intro, welcome home.

Thank you.

So tell us about it.

Yeah, so initially we got this invitation to develop a performance for the Venice Architecture Biennale.

And so the porch theme actually came along with that invitation.

They had converted the U.S. pavilion into a porch and they were working with, they invited us into this theme around the architectures of generosity.

Her practice asks what we gain when we start to value time, craft and care, and how we can create more harmonious ways of building and living.

She is exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and her work has received some of architecture's highest international honors.

In this episode, we talk about what has shaped her, how she looks for the spirit in all materials, and why we all need to befriend time.

Now to me, listening to Anupama is almost like a philosophical meditation.

And I was a student before they won all the prizes that they get.

Then they created the Venice Biennale of Architecture and They won the Pritzker Prize, which is the highest prize in architecture.

So I was really lucky and they were really, they are really strong in creating a vision.

Valeria Molinari is the founder of Backgammon Beauty, a project positioned at the intersection of art and play.

Let's go back.

I, I will be going back for the Biennale next year, but for me it's, like, magical.

It is like, in a way it is kind of a Disneyland, and I hate using that explanation for a city, but this is like everywhere you look is just wonderful, and I think much like Disneyland, the food's also terrible.

Yeah.

Es is playing this kind of critical role at Homo Faber.

How much of an impact do you think a curator has on how you experience a work of design?

When we went to Venice for the Architecture Biennale, the most recent one, Carlo Ratti was the curator, and I felt like his impact, you could really feel it, and people kept like referring back to him a lot.

Or even when you go to an art exhibition, maybe you don't know the curator by name, but that person really controls, in many ways, like especially if you're like me and you're a geek and you've gotta read everything, how a curator sort of presents information and paces it and like creates a flow of how you experience something is super important.

I'm your host, Georgia Burkes.

Recently, it was announced that Lived In will represent Australia at the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Building on the Housing Atlas of Australia project, Lived In is a collaboration between Kirsten Thompson of Kirsten Thompson Architects and Mariam Ghouche, Leanne Corr, and Louise Wright of Monash Urban Lab.

Drawing on more than a century of Australian multi-residential housing, the exhibition will tell a national story of how we live through drawings, data, photography, film, and residents' own experiences.

Hi, Lucia.

Hi.

So firstly, congratulations to you both and also to your team at Monash University on being selected as the creative directors for Australia's exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale next year.

Your exhibition, which is titled Lived In, draws on this wider research project you've been undertaking to create a housing atlas of Australia, and that's obviously involved quite a broad network of universities, um, documenting instructive examples of multi-residential projects built over the past century.

I don't know why that happens, but it does.

Leading up to this conversation, I also sent you an article about the Venice Architecture Biennale from last year, which was equally rich in jargon.

I think the architects are just as guilty of this as the artists.

But they had this specific experiment to me, which I wrote about, which was to use artificial intelligence to basically summarize each label and put a bullet point at the top.

And in a way it sends a chill down my spine, but in a way it's specifically, like, the machines are coming in here to do the work because the text isn't doing the work.

I mean, uh, as part of the conceit of this intervention into the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Well, I haven't had experience doing that, so I'll just give that caveat.

But I can imagine that it might be something that could be helpful and you might wanna edit it.