Resilient Communities. This name chosen by the curator Alessandro Melis for the Italian Pavilion at the upcoming Biennale Architettura 2021 turns the focus of the exhibition, in all its vividly dramatic nature, onto the issue of climate change and the demanding challenges for architecture. In particular, it aims to underscore how climate change is seriously straining the sustainability of the urban, productive, and agricultural system, and to emphasize the critical areas and opportunities in our own present time.
Promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, the project is founded upon the strong conviction that architecture must make a tangible contribution towards improving quality of life by providing adequate responses to the epochal environmental and social changes taking place.
The main objective of the Italian Pavilion will be to cause visitors to reflect in a new way upon the resilience mechanisms of communities, a key priority for interpretation in recovering a new form of interaction between urban space and productive territory, in pursuit of interdisciplinary skills and non-deterministic evolutionary logic, central elements in moments of transition.
“The Italian Pavilion – comments the curator Alessandro Melis – will itself be a resilient community, consisting of 14 “sub-communities” understood as operating workshops, research centres or case studies in accordance with two essential lines: a reflection on the state of the art in the matter of urban resilience in Italy and the world through the showing of works by eminent Italian architects, and a focus on methodologies, innovation, and research with interdisciplinary experiments straddling the ground between architecture, botany, agronomy, biology, art, and medicine”.
And in an wholly new feature, the Padiglione Italia at the Biennale Architettura 2021 will be NZEB. To achieve this goal, removal + integration of the materials of the 2019 Italian Pavilion for the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia has been arranged, in addition to the permanent relocation of everything that will be produced. This will present a unique opportunity not only to exhibit works consistent with the proposal’s objectives, but also an occasion to study the life cycle of a development in a setting of resilience.
