Reframing Back//Imperative Confrontations

Venice, Italy

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Reframing Back//Imperative Confrontations

Venice, Italy

Firm

Egyptian Pavilion at the 15th Biennale of Architecture.

Type

Cultural › Pavilion

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2016

SIZE

0 sqft - 1000 sqft

BUDGET

$50K - 100K

The Venice Biennale of Architecture is an integral part of architectural culture. However, this year’s cycle “Reporting from the Front” is more unique, It highlights the capacity and potential of architecture’s role inside communities; “architecture makes the difference”, as Aravena puts it.

The Egyptian pavilion seeks to reveal various successful stories of architecture narrating the difficulties and challenges inside the Egyptian built environment. The works inside the pavilion reveal how architecture is actively creating change in communities. Nowhere are these confrontations more evident than in the urban context, and nowhere more so than in Egyptian cities. In this context, urban space became not just a backdrop but an instrumental foreground and an actor in the continuous and dynamic processes of change. The exhibition’s goal is to re-frame and position in a global forum what we think are examples of a successful architectural and urban conflict resolution where architects, through their work, were the mediators of change, this mediation took the form of built projects, or even research proposals & mappings that attempted to highlight existing problems.

The works presented can be broken down into two large categories – mapping investigations and (built-up projects and experimental proposals). The mapping projects attempt to survey existing conditions with applied analytical lenses, evident in their representational outputs. As with recent mapping efforts in other contexts, here, representation is viewed as a tool to think and present new information. It also entails the same potential shortcomings of mapping exercises when data is poorly researched and could advance a skewed perspective, or completely misinform. The exhibition contains a various investigations about the Egyptian urban condition including sprawl, informal urbanism, desert vernacular architecture, coastal cities, and 19th– and 20th-century heritage buildings which have been all part of the parallel dynamics of growth in Egyptian context for the past half a century.

This pavilion is in no way a comprehensive survey of all initiatives and works that have been produced during the last period in Egypt. it is, however, an attempt to introduce to a large audience the work of those individuals and collectives, students and professionals, who over the course of the past decade, have been searching for new operating models in Egypt and engaging in architecture as a field of critical intellectual inquiry. The works presented here demonstrates the interest of a wide range of actors - government, universities, research centers, independent practitioners - in the Egyptian urban condition marking the occasion to bring forth all these perspectives and approaches in one space and to reflect on the nature of the knowledge produced in the past decade. It is at the same time an opportunity to evaluate its potential for action and transformation.