Venice Architecture Biennale: Reporting from the front line

Nadia Al Barwani. (Courtesy: Nadia Al Barwani)

The Venice Architecture Biennale is currently underway and each month, the UAE sends a team of interns to man our national pavilion. The Art Blog has teamed up with the National Pavilion of the UAE and asked each intern to send us a report on another pavilion that they particularly enjoyed.

Here Nadia Albarwani talks about the German Pavilion:

Germany’s national pavilion is titled Making Heimat. Germany, Arrival Country. It is a true response to the theme of the entire biennale Reporting from the front as outlined by the general curator Alejandro Aravena.

Germany has been at the front of the media very frequently in 2016 for its open policy in the ­­welcoming of refugees. The fact that over a million refugees arrived in Germany during 2015 with similar expectations for this year, the need for housing is urgent, but just as urgent is the need for new ideas and reliable approaches to integration. The exhibition consists of three parts: the first part surveys physical refugee shelters - the actual solutions that have been built to cope with the acute need. The second part seeks to define the conditions that must be present in an ‘arrival city’ in order to turn refugees into immigrants. The third part of the exhibition is the spatial design, which serves to underline the German ideologies of having open doors. ­­Upon entering the German pavillion, one may notice that unlike the other pavillions, it has multiple doorways. Some of which are lined with green steel structural beams - an architectural element associated with modern construction and speed.

In an effort to visualise the German policy and views towards the refugee crisis the design team removed the bricks from the pavilion, creating four large openings in the walls and effectively converting it into an open house. Over 48 tonnes of brick were removed from the landmark-protected walls and are on display sitting both inside and outside the pavilion. The pavilion is open. Germany is open.

Displayed within the pavilion are visual representations of the bricks that have been removed and that are awaiting to be reinstalled again at the closing of the biennale. The curators of the pavilion - Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) – have gathered projects for refugees and migrants that are already finished or still underway since October 2015 and have displayed them as a variety of housing types and structure.

The idea of the arrival city was developed in close collaboration with Doug Saunders, author of Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World. DAM intends the theses to address the following question: what conditions must be met in Arrival Cities, from an urban planning and architectural perspective, for immigrants to integrate successfully into Germany?

These immigrants must be given the chance to make Germany into their second home. This is what the title of the exhibition is meant to convey: Making Heimat implies that the stay in Germany will be a permanent one.

Nadia AlBarwani is an architecture student at the American University of Sharjah. Born and raised in Scotland and now living in Oman, she wishes to one day have her own firm and focus on designing architecture to better suit the cultural needs and every-day life of people living in the Middle East.

Instagram: @n_aaadia and @veniceinterns

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