Copy
How will we live together?” the original statement of curator Hashim Sarkis, called upon architects “
to imagine spaces in which we can generously live
together”. Relevant today more than ever, with the current worldwide circumstances, the theme of the Biennale is in fact the focus of interest of the global scene.
After having discussed “
How will we live together?” in 2019 with Hashim Sarkis in Venice, ArchDaily had the chance to open the debate once more and re-examine the question of the Architecture Biennale. In a two-part interview, the architect tackles the theme, the Biennale, the present situation, and the future.
Copy
As director of the 2016 Venice Biennale, Alejandro Aravena has sought to shift the very grounds of architecture. Rather than an inward-looking interrogation of the profession s shortcomings, as Rem Koolhaas undertook in 2014, the Chilean Pritzker Prize-winner asks us to gaze in the opposite direction to the vast swathes of the built horizon that traditionally lay beyond the profession s purview: urban slums, denatured megacities, conflict zones, environmentally compromised ports, rural villages far off the grid. We believe that the advancement of architecture is not a goal in itself but a way to improve people’s quality of life, states Aravena in his introduction to event. In other words, his biennale does not ask what architecture