From your home to Mars: Venice conspires to save the planet

Special Envoy to VeniceWith the industrialization of the 19th century, the world's population began a process of super-exponential growth that continues to this day. According to the UN, the global population will reach 8 billion people in 2022, but growth is now slowing. More pessimistic predictions are beginning to emerge about radical population declines in the 2060s or 2080s. What will happen if the population begins to decline as rapidly as it has grown so far? How will we survive the catastrophe? Architects Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, along with designer Patricia Urquiola, propose a solution for a possible future with one of the first large installations on display at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, which opened its doors to journalists and professionals this Wednesday. For Colomina, Wigley, and Urquiola, who have collaborated with several scientists, the solution lies in acting like bacteria, due to their ability to spread rapidly and, at the same time, self-control. "It's a way for us to collaborate with each other and create a different future," says Colomina. "When bacteria group together into beautiful shapes, they do so because they don't have many resources, and perhaps humans, when we don't have many resources, can create something beautiful," says Wigley.

The curator of this edition of the biennial is the Italian architect and engineer Carlo RattiHe is the first Italian commissioner in twenty-five years, and his project is entitled Intelligents. Ratti has organized the first open call for projects. The result is an exhibition with a vast amount of information, featuring some 250 projects from approximately 750 participants. One of the pillars of the thesis is that it is no longer enough to mitigate the effects of climate change; rather, the situation demands an architecture of "adaptation," which he proposes as the fruit of a dialogue between different minds, generations of architects, and professionals from different disciplines beyond architecture. For Ratti, this attitude means "a radical change in our practice" to rethink "the built environment." The situation is very serious: the first installation on display consists of a room full of air conditioning units, dark and very hot, reminding us that cooling an interior contributes to increasing the temperature outside.

After the installation by Colomina, Wigley, and Urquiola, the tour continues with proposals related to nature, including Baubotanik, a German university project that transforms living trees into structural elements. Another of the projects on display is a call for optimism: "We're screwed! You can change it," reads the call to participate in House Europe!, the European citizens' initiative to make the renovation and transformation of buildings easier, more affordable, and more social. The forecast is that by 2050, 2 billion square meters of existing space will have been demolished in Europe, the equivalent of "half of Germany's housing stock and more than Paris or Berlin combined." For proponents of renovation, the rubble entails "social, economic, environmental, and cultural problems, as demolition entails the loss of homes, jobs, energy, and history."

A portable nuclear reactor

The energy sources considered in the biennial's exhibition are not only renewable. Pininfarina, newcleo, and Fincantieri present a project for a compact and portable nuclear reactor that, according to the promoters, "recycles nuclear waste and produces clean energy." Furthermore, Ratti does not rule out the possibility of solutions beyond planet Earth. IVAAIU City, for example, proposes the creation of a robotic data center on the Moon. Clouds Architecture Office, meanwhile, proposes an underwater city on Mars with capacity for around 10,000 people. And the Amelia Institute exhibits a prototype of an orbiting greenhouse for growing vegetables in microgravity.

Outside the Arsenale, architect Enric Ruiz-Geli, as curator, presented a garden created by a dozen students from Virginia Tech's Honors College, an initiative included in the biennial's side events inspired by how Venetian authorities carried bees a century ago to pollinate them. Inside the main pavilion, made of wood and recycled plastic, various projects from his studio, Cloud 9, are on display, including the future headquarters of the Me We Foundation in Figueres. This Friday, the mayor of Figueres, Jordi Masquef, will be in Venice to sign the foundation's creation in that same garden. The building is planned to house Ruiz-Geli's archive, which will be open to researchers, an architecture laboratory, and a vocational training center. "In Catalonia, the problem isn't innovation or creativity, but vocational training," warns Enric Ruiz-Geli.