Most participants to this year's Venice Architecture Biennale responded in intriguing ways to the brief set by curator and director Alejandro Aravena – "Reporting from the Front". Quite a few projects on display at the architectural event suggest indeed that there may be ways to improve the conditions of specific countries and communities in clever ways, even with low budgets. Sadly, though, you can't say the same about the British Pavilion.
Jack Self, Shumi Bose and Finn Williams – a team of curators selected after an open call from the British Council – tackle in the pavilion a vast subject, housing in Britain.
If you live and work in places such as London or if, as a tourist, you have briefly shared a room in a hostel with people looking for jobs and accomodation in London, you will know that the housing issue is not just a problem, but a constant obsession, and it is not rare ending up talking for hours with a stranger about mortgages, obnoxious landlords, tiny rooms, (im)possible flatmates, distances from underground and train stations and such likes. 
Self, Bose and Williams may have dissected the theme from various points of view and perspectives, taking us behind life in tower blocks in housing estates or making us dream about luxury apartments, but they decided to approach the issue with five different architectural responses rather than solutions, planned together with artists, developers, filmmakers, financial institutions and fashion designers.
Entitled "Home Economics", their exhibition is therefore a collaborative proposal divided into five incremental amounts of time – "Hours", "Days", "Months", "Years" and "Decades", all demarcated by floor mats – with each designer involved in the project creating a space in accordance with the time we spend in the home.
Visitors first step into a communal living room (a space curated by Self, Bose and Williams) that people should share with a number of other apartments on their floor.
The room contains modular beds and a glass wardrobe featuring some records, practical tools such as a vacuum cleaner and a few garments by British fashion designer J.W. Anderson (the brochure guiding visitors through the pavilion states the clothes are "curated by J.W. Anderson"…).
The beds hint at the fact that in 2014 the bed overtook the sofa as the most used piece of furniture in British homes and suggest the range of activities we do on mattresses; the clothes represent a common wardrobe shared between households (hence the stains of fluid foundation and sweat around the necklines of some of them…or is it maybe because they were leftovers from catwalk shows?).
The days room consists in two inflatable spheres by young art collective Åyr that offer people with a nomadic lifestyle a small portable retreat complete with Wi-Fi.
The "Months" section by Dogma and Black Square, is a take on the boarding house and offers instead a totemic structure where people can sleep, wash and prepare food. The structure also imagines a new form of rent with flat monthly payments including the use of space and all domestic needs.
At this point some visitors may think that, if this is how life will develop in future, death may truly come as a relief (after all, there are more spatious and even cheerful chapels and tombs in Italian graveyards…), but there are two further spaces to explore.
"Years", by Julia King, suggests a house sold as a shell with no interior fittings, so just a roof over your head, running water, electricity, a toilet and a basin, but nothing else, not even a kitchen sink. In this scenario home improvements are made for the purpose of dwelling rather than profiteering.
The final space by the London/Oslo practice Hesselbrand is a functionless home with a series of adaptable, flexible and useful rooms where different activities may take place.
The installation is accompanied by an audio guide by Will Self (Jack Self's uncle) and by a series of images by photographer Matthieu Lavanchy that look a bit like cool and trendy Instagram pics with conceptual slogans underneath.
Though intentions may have been good, as a whole the full scale 1:1 pods (or sets…) suggest style and conceptualism and do not look desirable at all, especially because some of them (think about Wi-Fi-working spaces or temporary co-housing) already exist.
Besides, the houses/rooms featured in the pavilion look cold, clinical, claustrophobically stark and conceptually depressing, suggesting a future of isolation even in communal shared spaces that offer the people populating them some badly cut cool clothes, a few handbags and records but no books.
There seems to be a sort of disconnection therefore between the main aim of the curators who suggest us that life is changing and architects must design for such changes, and the projects included. The latter do not suggest indeed any kind of concrete solutions to the changes in our collective lives (mass migration is not even mentioned in this context, but the housing emergency exists also for migrants and refugees in the UK…). In a nutshell, the pavilion responds in a banal and vapid way to Aravena's call ending up being the architectural equivalent of the pointless British Pavilion by Sarah Lucas at last year's Art Biennale.
It is only natural to wonder if the conceptual point of view of the three curators prevailed, damaging the more functional and practical aspects of the project because of their personal modus operandi and interests (they all studied architecture, but aren't strictly just architects since they seem to be more focused on writing, teaching and curating). One thing is for certain: J.W. Anderson's clothes looked like a product placement strategy rather than an architectural statement, put there just to attract the attention of the trendiest fashionistas rambling around the Biennale and convince them that, yes, a shared designer wardrobe is much better than no designer clothes.
In conclusion this pavilion represents not radical solutions, but what would happen to Great Britain if it decides to leave Europe – it will become self-referential and shallow especially when compared to other countries. There's just a final note to add: it remains a mystery why the British Council didn't choose something less oppressive and more positive to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, maybe opting for the less fashionable but more clever Turner Prize winners Assemble.
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