Feels Like Summer: The Situated Exuberance of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale If architecture doesn’t serve feelings, it serves a psychosis. —Rhael “LionHeart” Cape, from the video installation Those With Walls for Windows A joyous refuge from Venice’s blazing sun, this year’s Biennale invited us to celebrate architecture’s disciplinary breadth. Nestled within the city’s intimate residential streets — though gated behind guarded turnstiles — a room awaiting us at the entrance of the Arsenale was completely enveloped in a vivid, yet serene, blue. Expecting black text on white walls, we were completely entranced by its meditative atmosphere. This vestibule physically and mentally prepared us to be fully engaged in what lay ahead by relieving any assumptions about the exhibition we had formed based on headlines and hearsay. Portraying the “Blue Hour” of photography, it symbolized a beautiful moment of transition highlighting color contrasts otherwise invisible, just as the Biennale aimed to bring light to the stories and people sidelined by the discipline. Curated by Lesley Lokko, The Laboratory of the Future served as a platform for highlighting the critical global issues of decolonization and decarbonization. Lokko went beyond the established narratives of the Western canon with a special focus on Africa and the African diaspora. Many current faculty and alumni from Yale were invited to participate in the main exhibition as well as the national pavilions. Given the large number of school affiliates, this review focuses on some of the most essential themes: decolonization, African architecture, place-specificity, and housing. Ana María Durán Calisto, Daniel Rose (1951) Visiting Assistant Professor and principal of Estudio A0, together with Waorani artist Manuela Omari Ima and YSoA students from her research seminar “Agroecological Urban Constellations of Pre-Columbian Amazonia,” exhibited embroidered drawings depicting “ancient Amazonian agroecological urbanisms.” The work, titled Surfacing — The Civilised Agroecological Forests of Amazonia, was also accompanied by a soundscape completed in collaboration with the Tiwino and Tepapare Waorani communes. The drawings challenged Eurocentric methods of cartography using their materiality and representational techniques, while reevaluating conventions of urban planning in light of recent discoveries using LiDAR. Mabel O. Wilson, Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor, in partnership with J. Meejin Yoon and Eric Höweler, exhibited unknown, unknown: A Space of Memory. The project honored contributions of the unnamed members of the enslaved community who constructed, labored, and lived at the University of Virginia from 1817 to 1865. Largely left out of archival ledgers, wills, and letters, they were identified by the dehumanizing descriptor “unknown.” The installation evoked the alienation enslaved laborers faced with a rhythmic hymn that repeated “unknown, unknown,” while a projection split across staggered fabric surfaces recalled the domestic labor of Black women. Visitors were invited to walk inside and become immersed within the projected fragments of archival material. In Africa Conservation Effort/All-Africa Protoport (ACE/AAP), Visiting Professor Olalekan Jeyifous painted a different future for Africa, one in which the “imperialist infrastructures” that exploited the people and resources of the continent were deconstructed. The project, in line with Afrofuturism, imagined a thriving Africa at the forefront of renewable energy, biodiverse agricultural technologies, and advanced transportation infrastructure.
Fall 2023
The exhibition, installed as a waiting lounge for the fictional All-Africa Protoport transit link, included drawings and models of these infrastructural nodes, along with AI-generated images illustrating their use. The Central Pavilion focused on the work of major African architects including Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor Francis Kéré and alumnus Issa Diabaté (MArch ’95). Kéré Architecture’s contribution, Counteract, examined the past, present, and future of West Africa and the larger continent. His work celebrated the environmentally conscious buildings of Sudano-Sahelian architecture, using drawings and photographs to depict its characteristic construction and climatic mechanisms. In contrast, the present was represented through images from Burkina Faso, Kéré’s birthplace, where short-term mass-produced solutions have displaced sustainable long-term approaches. The studio also imagined an architectural prototype incorporating contemporary needs through a vernacular approach that is “familiar and new.” Living Differently: Architecture, Scale and the New Core, the installation by Koffi & Diabaté Architectes, focused on the village of Ebrah, near Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire, as the firm’s “vision for the African city of tomorrow.” Audrey Tseng Fischer (MArch ’22), of Adjaye Associates, participated in the research for the film Lost Knowledge Systems, which recounted African narratives that have been left out of the collective architectural memory. Through the lens of the materials earth, timber, thatch, and stone, the film described how precolonial African states had their own contextual “architectural morphology, iconography, and construction methodology.” Highlighting the rich cultural production based on “placemaking, identity, memory, and meaning,” the film demonstrated that designers need not rely on the Western canon for architectural inspiration. Samar Halloum (MArch ’22) participated as research and design lead for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) National Pavilion, Aridly Abundant. Curator Faysal Tabbarah and his team explored how the aridity of the UAE’s deserts disguise an abundance of productive materials, resources, and landscapes. Halloum represented this concept in a drawing that introduced the installation, based on her research conducted while traveling in the Hajar Mountains. The exhibition demonstrated how local or nonindustrial materials can be used for a variety of purposes, revealing a strategy that challenges mainstream and mass-produced supply chains. For example, oddly shaped rocks from Venetian quarries were combined with 3D scanning and printing techniques that outperformed lengthy and energyconsuming conventional construction processes. The Korean pavilion, 2086: Together How, investigated the negative externalities of material progress. In Migrating Futures, critic David Eugin Moon of N H D M studied the precarious living environments of migrant workers in South Korea. The firm provided intricate drawings of these domestic spaces reflecting the migrant workers’ sense of belonging and ideas of home while highlighting their diverse aspirations beyond the labor they performed. Dominiq Oti (MArch ’22) was selected as a participant in “The Biennale College Architettura 2023,” a new
program at the Biennale that provides a space for young students, teachers, and professionals to engage and explore common themes of decolonization and decarbonization. Reverberating throughout the exhibition was an optimism for what the future might hold. For example, Surfacing and Counteract envisioned more environmentally conscious urbanisms, while Lost Knowledge Systems and Aridly Abundant drew on our collective memory to propose place and culturally specific designs. Lokko went beyond critiques claiming that the Biennale lacked architectural representation, delving into the very essence of architecture’s contemporary concerns. Bringing to surface and tackling the issues that lie
behind the built forms we create, the exhibition encouraged us to imagine the transformative possibilities that arise from shifting the foundational principles that have shaped our discipline and profession. With a kaleidoscope of ideas, speculations, and narratives, Lokko presented an expanded definition of architecture to the world. Aptly expressed as “an agent of change,” the exhibition inspired us to pursue change expectantly and sincerely. The 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture, titled The Laboratory of the Future and curated by Lesley Lokko, is on view from May 20 to November 26, 2023. — Joshua Tan (MArch ’22) and Timothy Wong (MArch ’22)
News from the Yale Urban Design Workshop It’s been a busy period for the Yale Urban Design Workshop (YUDW). Building upon 30 years of planning, advocacy, and action in the Dwight neighborhood of New Haven, YUDW has embarked on a new project, “Dwight Healthy and Just,” which seeks to address long-standing environmental and health concerns in the area.
A proposal for affordable housing that emerged as part of a collaboration between Housing Clinic students and Neighborhood Housing Services in New Haven.
An air-quality monitoring network, funded by the EPA’s Environmental Justice Small Grants Program, will be deployed to provide a dataset that can be used by the community as a basis for ongoing and future planning efforts, and which will be made available through a new online gateway dedicated to neighborhood health and planning. The information gathered through this process, as well as through a series of public charrette-style activities, open houses, and walking tours, will inform a revision to the original Dwight plan that YUDW helped the neighborhood publish in 1996. In addition, YUDW will be collaborating with the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health to examine cooling strategies in Dwight, with the goal of mitigating summer heat for low-income residents who are disproportionately affected. This part of the project has been funded separately by a grant from the Climate Impact Innovation Fund of the Yale Planetary Solutions Project and will deploy bicycle-mounted heat sensors as well as place sensors in households to create a detailed heat map of the neighborhood. The resulting primary data will provide another input to the new Dwight plan, contributing to the development and siting of specific strategies and project proposals for improving the health of area residents in relation to both urban heat and air quality. The YUDW is also working with Niantic Main Street, a downtown revitalization organization, on a Main Street Plan for the waterfront of East Lyme, Connecticut. The YUDW will revise a plan originally published in 1997. A renewed set of principles will outline several ways to transform the town through strengthening its connection to the waterfront, creating walking and cycling routes, and building on the distinctive identity of its retail environment, all with the ambition to preserve and enhance Niantic’s unique character. The plan will include more detailed schemes for the development of an old police station by the water’s edge and for the conversion of a recently closed local cinema complex into a flexible workspace and theater venue. In Norwich, Connecticut, the YUDW is working with Castle Church to design a public space on Broadway. Nestled between Castle
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Church and the old Del Hoff Hotel, the site, Jubilee Park, is newly framed by a colorful 50-by-50-foot mural painted by artist Ben Keller that features two important Black historical figures — James Lindsay Smith and Sarah Harris Fayerweather. The completion of the mural signaled the conversion of the site from a disused patch of land to a welcoming, celebratory space where the community can gather. The hope is that this public space will serve as an anchor for the downtown district and inspire further improvements to this part of Norwich. Back in New Haven, the YUDW is continuing work on the adaptive reuse of a Queen Anne Revival house, on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, into a daycare center and affordable homes for local teachers, as well as on a master plan for the Elm City Montessori School. Exterior stabilization work began this summer. The second iteration of the clinic “Housing Connecticut: Developing Healthy and Just Neighborhoods,” organized by the YUDW, will take place in the Fall 2023 semester at Yale University. The workshop pairs graduate students from the School of Architecture, Law School, and School of Management with nonprofit developers to produce proposals for affordable housing. Last year the clinic resulted in three projects: a reimagining of local vernacular housing in Newhallville, an inventive ADU model on Division Street, and an ambitious mixed-use project in Fairhaven. Offered in collaboration with the Department of Housing and Commissioner Seila Mosquera-Bruno, and supported by a grant from the SNF Fund for the Integration of Theory and Practice, the projects emerging from the clinic have the potential to progress into the pilot phase, where they would be implemented with support from the YUDW. One of the initial three projects, including eight units of affordable housing, is now moving toward final design and construction. Last semester the YUDW was pleased to welcome Matthew Rosen as Assistant Director. He holds a master’s in Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a BS in Architecture with Honors from the University at Buffalo. He will coordinate several of the YUDW’s projects, in addition to teaching at the School of Architecture.
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