Alison Brooks Architects Venice, Home Ground Exhibition Italy, ABA Show 2021
‘Home Ground’, La Biennale di Venezia 2021
24 May 2021
Biennale Architettura 2021
‘Home Ground’
Alison Brooks Architects is exhibiting at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia,
curated by Hashim Sarkis.
Photos © Gerda Studio
Alison Brooks Architects’ ‘Home Ground’, La Biennale di Venezia 2021
Despite being announced in 2020, the Biennale theme ‘How will we live together?’ feels even more relevant in an emerging post-Covid19 context. Divides and inequalities have been brought into sharper focus. But the crisis has also brought local and global communities together with renewed purpose: to find new and more sustainable ways of living together.
Alison Brooks Architects is presenting an intricate look at the potential of housing to operate as productive, social, and inclusive civic building. We hope our installation will contribute to a critical global conversation.
‘Home Ground’ is situated in the Arsenale, one of the exhibition venues of the Biennale Architettura 2021. The installation responds to the question ‘How will we live together?’ with a monumental table into which sixteen architectural models are cast as a participatory ‘conversation piece’.
The installation explores how housing defines the way we live together in cities; as households, and by shaping collective ground. It combines models of Alison Brooks Architects’ current housing projects from locations across the world. The installation reflects upon the nature of ground floor communal spaces in housing architecture as both thresholds to the private realm of the home and gathering spaces, where new communities can form.
‘Home Ground’ expresses the ten housing projects as a collective, in two ways: as ground-based civic terrain above which the inhabited volumes of each building hover to create an ephemeral veil. The table’s earth-bound arcades, halls, commons, forums and workspaces ground each building.
These shared spaces suggest a condition of reciprocity between the private realms of housing and their public context. By casting them into the surface of a table, Alison Brooks Architects invites the Biennale Architettura’s global audience to coalesce momentarily and begin new conversations. Can we reconceive housing as civic buildings that offer a more generous, complex and poetic framework for living together?
Bringing the practice’s disparate projects together in this installation, our aim is not to create the ‘ideal city’, but rather to reflect the contingencies and complexities that shaped each project.
“21st century housing is also where people work, create and communicate. We believe there is a need to rethink the architecture of housing as civic infrastructure that enables human potential. It must nurture day-to-day personal experience and creative work, but also support collective public life within a new ecological framework. ‘Home Ground’ is a reflection on the role of housing architecture and its enabling role for all urban communities: where we can learn, create and thrive.”
— Alison Brooks
Project Team
Alison Brooks
Ceri Edmunds
Antonio Callejon
Juliana Rocha
Max Mika
Liam Denhamer
Fabrication
Base Models
With the additional support of
British Council
Alison Brooks Architects has also contributed to Future Assembly, an exhibition within the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, located in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. Future Assembly is a collaboration between Studio Other Spaces and six co-designers.
The installation ‘The Umbrella Islands’ is inspired by Alison’s annual pilgrimage to the Umbrella Islands of Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada.
join the conversation — #BiennaleArchittetura2021
Home Ground, Alison Brooks Architects at Venice Biennale 2021 images / information received May 2021
Location: Giardini della Biennale, Castello 1260, 30122 Venezia, Italia
Installation by Alison Brooks Architects at 16th International Architecture Exhibition
photo © Luke Hayes
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