What Does It Look Like from the Front? A lecture by Anna Bronovitskaya

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Anna Bronovitskaya’s report from the Architecture Biennale in Venice.

The 15^th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice will be open to the public until 27 November 2016. This year’s curator Alejandro Aravena has called on the participants to focus on humanity’s current inability to tackle the huge influx of migrants to the cities, which has put the world on the brink of a crisis. Be it for the war, natural disasters or dysfunctional economies, the world’s urban population is growing at the rate of 1 million people a day. What could architects do for those who have had to leave their homes? How could they help the newcomers and the cities adapt to the new reality? How do we minimize the negative effects of mass construction on nature and historical cityscapes? Where do we find harmony in this world of chaos?

Reporting from the Front (such is the exhibition’s title) has turned out predictably jumbled. However, it is precisely due to its diversity that the biennale offers an overview of the possible future developments in architecture—and not all of them are straightforwardly social.

ABOUT THE LECTURER

Anna Bronovitskaya is an architectural historian, director of research at Moscow’s Institute of Modernism. In 2015 she became one of the founders of the Institute of Modernism—an independent institution that researches Soviet architecture of the 1960s to 1980s. Since 1993, she has been lecturing at MARCHI. From 2011 to 2013, Bronovitskaya was head of the DOCOMOMO Russian section. She is also the author of multiple publications on 20th century architecture.