Innovative solutions for life on an overheated earth

What a great effect: in Venice it is cool and rainy these days. A sweater cannot be wrong. But as soon as you enter the first hall of Arsenale, you are in a sauna. Yes, that’s exactly what the climate change feels like – not only in midsummer. With all clever arguments, this “steam hammer” is the ideal start for an architectural biennale. Especially since Carlo Ratti, the chief curator of this 19th edition, no longer only focuses on the most environmentally friendly and sustainable building, but on life and living in a changed and above all overheated world.

Only: The cat bites into the tail in a tour. Because the construction industry is responsible for 40 percent of global CO₂ emissions. Without concrete, there is not much (yet). You would have to stop pulling new houses up immediately. On the other hand, the need for living space has never been so high, especially in the cities, where more than half of the eight billion people of our planet now live.

It is bright red at Munich’s Marienplatz

Anyone who takes a look at the thermal imaging of the city and country immediately realizes where it is burning. At the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin, around Frankfurt Römer and Munich’s Marienplatz, it is bright red, but green in the English garden. That means around ten degrees less. In the German pavilion this is conveyed with impressive graphics. You somehow know all of this and push it aside until you get into the suction of a video projection in the best sense in the main room.

It glides through beautiful cities like Rome and Paris. Then you can see excavators and concrete mixers, steel and glass facades, the temperatures rise uncomfortably, mosquitoes and ants multiply. Exhausted people look towards you. But it can also be cooler again – of course, under plants that spread in petrol stations and bunkers. The voice of Maria Callas sounds, who asks Bellini’s « Casta Diva » for peace and, that is also very topical, sings about the « fire » that may be calmed down in the heart.

In the « stress test », urban summer heat is simulated

Some could be too pathetic, but you can no longer get any further with mere facts. And if you still don’t want to admit it, you can undergo the title -giving « stress test » next door, where urban summer heat is simulated. That requires a certain amount of contance, and you can see it on the colors of the thermal imaging camera, which the body and especially the bright red head participate.

In any case, the visitors no longer stay more than necessary and quickly switch to the « destroy » room of the pavilion, to avoid a cool lagoon breeze under hornbeam to get back to well-being temperatures. And you have to say it: The price-worthy contribution by the architect and landscape architect team led by Nicola Borgmann, head of the Munich architectural gallery, Elisabeth Endres, Gabriele Kiefer and Daniele Santucci is definitely a scattered beyond the Biennale.

More mediation would be desirable

Something of this clarity would also have been desired for the main show of the architect, engineer and renowned university teacher Ratti. The central pavilion in the Giardini is closed due to renovation; In the arsenale, i.e. in the old shipyard, the density of the contributions could not be completely avoided. But in order to show the solutions of a stunning, adaptable nature or its interaction with the technology, it should have been significantly fewer than 750 positions. Instead, more mediation would be desirable. Regardless of whether you are in the area of ​​ »natural », « artificial » or « community intelligence ».

The results are surprisingly aesthetic anyway. Anyone who fears an ugly, only more functional building will be impressed by super -light bricks based on mushroom cultures, of durable pineapple skin and elephant, which turns into struts into an adorable tunnel. Perhaps in the future, people should no longer understand themselves as mastermind and deal with bacteria, well, to learn from them how turboschlelle can arise. And as well as you spontaneously put into a kind of stand-by mode to protect resources.

Encounter with the robot

What role does artificial intelligence play? Sympathetic robots are on the go at the Biennale who answer even the stupidest questions: « Do you speak Bavarian? » – « I Red A Bissl Bairisch ». They even dream, with all human sleeping.

Then it becomes interesting in the craft. The airport of the Bhutanian city of Gelphu, for example, is supposed to traditionally adorn carved ornaments. The craftsmen is missing, this is expensive anyway, so the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels is planning with a robo artist. It drives off the shapes that two real carvers in the sweat of theirs peeled out of the wood in the face of their face, adapted it and will soon get started.

There is no planet B, says chief curator Ratti

A solution could also be in the connection of trees and plastics. Algae and mushrooms have an almost magical potential, you learn. But these are ideas and experiments. You can’t imagine a lot on a large scale, but visions are needed in a time of total upheaval. Because there is no planet B, emphasizes Carlo Ratti. Which does not have to mean that you should refrain from the results of space research.

Why not put an astronaut suit to a house to protect it against the sun’s rays? Or convert wastewater into coffee. In any case, the Lavazza « Canal Water Espresso » outside on the ship basin tastes very good.

Architectural Biennale « Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective », until November 23 in Venice (www.labiennale.org).