Craft and Conquest: The 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, May 28-November 27, 2016

Curated by Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale (May 28-November 27, 2016) focused on architectures that addressed large-scale problems using vernacular techniques.[1] If the implicit theme of the 2013 Venice Art Biennale had been “outsider art,” characterized by Daily Telegraph critic Alistair Sooke as both “visionary” and “homespun,” the similarly unstated theme of this 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale can be understood as outsider architecture. Aravena’s Architecture Biennale foregrounded the outsider in two senses. Rather than a capital-intensive architecture of improbable forms and futuristic substances, set in cosmopolitan cities of the developed West, Aravena’s exhibition emphasized natural materials and labor-intensive techniques common to the Global South. What went unspoken, however, was the relationship between architecture’s insiders and its outsiders, between capital and labor, between the developed world and its other.