The Unfrozen crew hit the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale with all the furious energy our 100th episode deserved. A rollicking roundup of robots, pans, picks, porches and pavilions, with special guest interviews: Michele Champagne, Kate Wagner, Marisa Moran Jahn, Bekim Ramku, Rafi Segal, Jeanne Gang, and Mark Cavagnero. And finally, while Rome picked a pontiff, we had our own mini-conclave in Venice and humbly offered up our picks for the 20th Biennale curator. Join us for this extra special centenary episode.
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Intro/Outro: “Bounder of Adventure,” by The Cooper Vane
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Discussed:
- Olly Wainwright: Can robots make the perfect Aperol spritz? – Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 review | Architecture | The Guardian
- Rowan Moore: Venice Architecture Biennale review: ‘a hot mess of pretension’ | The Observer
- The New York Architecture Review crew: Nicolas, Chloe and Sammy
- International Exhibition in the Arsenale
o Robots, hemp, bio-concrete, 8-point font with AI-assisted summaries
o Kate Crawford and Vladan Joier’s megascale text: Calculating Empires
o Bjarke Ingels Group’s entry: Ancient Future, with Bhutanese carvers paced by an ABB robot
o Christopher Hawthorne’s Speaker’s Corner
o Shades of Rem Koolhaas’ 2014 Fundamentals edition
- Kate Wagner’s review:
o Dated techno-optimism
o Cannibalism of architecture by art and exhibition design
- National Pavilions:
o Austria: “Agency for Better Living”
o Canada: “Picoplanktonics” by The Living Room Collective
o Denmark: “Build of Site”
o Estonia: “Let Me Warm You”
o Romania: “Human Scale”
o Saudi Arabia: “The Um Slaim School: An Architecture of Connection”
o Slovenia: “Master Builders”
o South Korea: “Little Toad, Little Toad”, but mainly this cat
o Spain: “Internalities: Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium”
o UAE: “Pressure Cooker”
o USA: “Porch: An Architecture of Generosity”
§ Curators:
· Peter MacKeith, Fay Jones School of Architecture, University of Arkansas
· Rod Bigelow, Executive Director, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art
· Marlon Blackwell, Marlon Blackwell Architects
· Susan Chin, Design Connects
§ Shades of the timber-themed 2021 exhibit, but with a twist
§ Interview with Mark Cavagnero, Mark Cavagnero Associates, on participation in Porch and his work updating the original 1969 design of the Oakland Museum of California by Kevin Roche and Dan Kiley
o Uzbekistan: A Matter of Radiance
- Interview with collaborators on Art-Tek Tulltorja, conversion of former brick works into a tech hub and community center, Pristina, Kosovo:
o Rafi Segal, Associate Professor, Architecture & Urbanism, MIT
o Marisa Moran Jahn, Director, Integrated Design,Parsons School of Design
o Bekim Ramku, OUD+ Architects
o Nol Binakaj, OUD+ Architects
- Interview with Jeanne Gang, amidst a Bio-Blitz powered by the iNaturalist app and featuring a “disco ball for bees”
- Unfrozen’s nominations for 2027 Biennale curator:
o Carolyn Whitzman, Senior Housing Researcher, Schoolof Cities, University of Toronto and author of Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis
o Diane Longboat, Senior Manager, StrategicInitiatives, Center for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto
§ See: Sweat lodge at the Center
o Patrick Bellew, Chief Sustainability Officer, Surbana Jurong (Atelier Ten)
§ Gardens by the Bay cooling system,powered by incinerated tree trimming waste
o Peter Barber, Peter Barber Architects
o Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture
- Stafford Beer: “The purpose of the system is what it does.”
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