MIT at the 2023 Venice Biennale

The Venice Architecture Biennale, the world’s largest and most visited exhibition focusing on architecture, is once again featuring work by many MIT faculty, students, and alumni. On view through Nov. 26, the 2023 biennale, curated by Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic, and novelist Lesley Lokko, is showcasing projects responding to the theme of “The Laboratory of Change.”

“This edition of the biennale is truly remarkable. It is profound and accessible at the same time,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and curator of the previous Venice Biennale. “Our students, faculty, and alumni have responded to the speculative theme with innovative projects at a range of scales and in varied media.”

Below are descriptions of MIT-related projects and activities.

• DISTANCE UNKNOWN: RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES OF MIGRATION IN THE AMERICAS 
  • Sarah Williams. Additional team members
  • Project description: On view are visualizations made by the MIT Civic Data Design Lab and the United Nations World Food Program that helped to shape U.S. migration policy. The exhibition is built from a unique dataset collected from 4,998 households surveyed in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. A tapestry woven out of money and constructed by the hands of Central America migrants illustrates that migrants spent $2.2 billion to migrate from Central America in 2021.
• The Consumed City 
  • Carmelo Ignaccolo. Additional team members: Sarah Williams, Emily Levenson (DUSP), Melody Phu (MIT), Leo Saenger (Harvard University), Yuke Zheng (Harvard), Ting Zhang, Dila Ozberkman (architecture and DUSP).
  • “The Consumed City” narrates a spatial investigation of “overtourism” in the historic city of Venice by harnessing granular data on lodging, dining, and shopping. The exhibition presents two large maps and digital animations to showcase the complexity of urban tourism and to reveal the spatial interplay between urban tourism and urban features, such as landmarks, bridges, and street patterns. By leveraging by-product geospatial datasets and advancing visualization techniques, “The Consumed City” acts as a prototype to call for novel policymaking tools in cities “consumed” by “overtourism.”
• Rebuilding Beirut: Using Data to Co-Design a New Future
  • SA+P faculty, researchers, and students are participating in the sixth biennial architecture exhibition “Time Space Existence,” presented by the European Cultural Center. The exhibit showcases three collaborative research and design proposals that support the rebuilding efforts in Beirut following the catastrophic explosion at the Port of Beirut in August 2020. This work is supported by the Dar Group Urban Seed Grant Fund at MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.
    • “Living Heritage Atlas” captures the significance and vulnerability of Beirut’s cultural heritage. 
      • Civic Data Design Lab (Sarah Williams) and Future Heritage Lab at MIT (Azra Aksamija)
    • “City Scanner” tracks the environmental impacts of the explosion and the subsequent rebuilding efforts. “Community Streets” supports the redesign of streets and public space. 
      • Senseable City Lab at MIT with the American University of Beirut and FAE Technology (Carlo Ratti and Fábio Duarte, co-PIs)
    • "Community Streets" 
      • City Form Lab at MIT and the American University of Beirut (Andres Sevtsuk, Maya Abou-Zeid, co-PI)

• Everlasting Plastics
  • Xavi Laida Aguirre
  • SPACES, a nonprofit alternative art organization based in Cleveland, Ohio, and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs are behind the U.S. Pavilion’s exhibition at this year’s biennale. The theme, Everlasting Plastics, provides a platform for artists and designers to engage audiences in reframing the overabundance of plastic detritus in our waterways, landfills, and streets as a rich resource. Aguirre’s installation covers two rooms and holds a series of partial scenographies examining indoor proofing materials such as coatings, rubbers, gaskets, bent aluminum, silicone, foam, cement board, and beveled edges.
• The BLACK City Astrolabe: A Constellation of African Diasporic Women
  • Yolande Daniels
  • From the multiple displacements of race and gender, enter “The BLACK City Astrolabe,” a space-time field comprised of a 3D map and a 24-hour cycle of narratives that reorder the forces of subjugation, devaluation, and displacement through the spaces and events of African diasporic women. The diaspora map traces the flows of descendants of Africa (whether voluntary or forced) atop the visible tension between the mathematical regularity of meridians of longitude and the biases of international date lines. In this moment we are running out of time. The meridians and timeline decades are indexed to an infinite conical projection metered in decades. It structures both the diaspora map and timeline and serves as a threshold to project future structures and events. “The BLACK City Astrolabe” is a vehicle to proactively contemplate things that have happened, that are happening, and that will happen. Yesterday, a “Black” woman went to the future, and here she is.
• Kishkindha NY
  • Mark Jarzombek
  • “Kishkindha NY (Office of (Un)Certainty Research: Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Parakash)” is inspired by an imagined forest-city as described in the ancient Indian text the Ramayana. It comes into being not through the limitations of human agency, but through a multi-species creature that destroys and rebuilds. It is exhibited as a video (Space, Time, Existence) and as a special dance performance.
• The Pilgrimage/Pionirsko hodočašće
  • Ana Miljački. Additional team members: Ous Abou Ras, Julian Geltman, Calvin Zhong, Pavle Dinulović. Collaborators: Melika Konjičanin, Ana Martina Bakić, Jelica Jovanović, Andrew Lawler, Sandro Đukić, Other Tomorrows, Boston.
  • The artifacts that constitute Yugoslavia’s socialist architectural heritage, and especially those instrumental in the ideological wiring of several postwar generations for anti-fascism and inclusive living, have been subject to many forms of local and global political investment in forgetting their meaning, as well as to vandalism. The “Pilgrimage” synthesizes “memories” from Yugoslavian childhood visits to myriad postwar anti-fascist memorial monuments and offers them in a shifting and spatial multi-channel video presentation accompanied by a nonlinear documentary soundscape, presenting thus anti-fascism and unity as political and activist positions available (and necessary) today, for the sake of the future. Supported by: MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) Mellon Faculty Grant.
• Housing as Infrastructure
  • Adèle Naudé Santos and Mohamad Nahleh. Additional team members:  Ghida El Bsat, Joude Mabsout, Sarin Gacia Vosgerichian, and Lasse Rau. In collaboration with the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut
  • On Aug. 4, 2020, an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut exploded, resulting in the deaths of more than 200 people and the devastation of port-adjacent neighborhoods. With over 200,000 housing units in disrepair, exploitative real estate ventures, and the lack of equitable housing policies, we viewed the port blast as a potential escalation of the mechanisms that have produced the ongoing affordable housing crisis across the city. The Dar Group requested proposals to rethink the affected part of the city, through MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. To best ground our design proposal, we invited the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut to join us. We chose to work on the heavily impacted low-rise and high-density neighborhood of Mar Mikhael. Our resultant urban strategy anchors housing within a corridor of shared open spaces. Housing is inscribed within this network and sustained through an adaptive system defined by energy-efficiency and climate responsiveness. Cross-ventilation sweeps through the project on all sides, with solar panel lined roofs integrated to always provide adequate levels of electricity for habitation. These strategies are coupled with an array of modular units designed to echo the neighborhood’s intimate quality — all accessible through shared ramps and staircases. Within this context, housing itself becomes the infrastructure, guiding circulation, managing slopes, integrating green spaces, and providing solar energy across the community. 
• From Redlining to Blue Zoning: Equity and Environmental Risk, Miami 2100 (2021)
  • Rafi Segal and Susannah Drake. Additional team members: Olivia Serra, and William Minghao Du.
  • As part of Susannah Drake and Rafi Segal’s ongoing work on “Coastal Urbanism,” this project examines the legacy of racial segregation in South Florida and the existential threat that climate change poses to communities in Miami. Through models of coops and community-owned urban blocks, this project seeks to empower formerly disenfranchised communities with new methods of equity capture, allowing residents whose parents and grandparents suffered from racial discrimination to build wealth and benefit from increased real estate value and development.
• The Swamp Observatory
  • Nomeda Urbonas and Gediminas Urbonas.
  • “The Swamp Observatory” augmented reality app is a result of two-year collaboration with a school in Gotland Island in the Baltic Sea, arguably the most polluted sea in the world. Developed as a conceptual playground and a digital tool to augment reality with imaginaries for new climate commons, the app offers new perspective to the planning process, suggesting eco-monsters as emergent ecology for the planned stormwater ponds in the new sustainable city. 
• Bahraini National Pavilion
  • Latifa Alkhayat and Maryam Aljomairi SMArchS ’22 
• Sweating Assets
  • Zhicheng Xu, Vijay Rajkumar, Natalie Pearl, Nada AlMulla, Sasha McKinlay, Khushi Nansi, Angela Loescher-Montal, Chenyue xdd Dai.
  • Sweating Assets entails the use of existing systems to their best capacities rather than starting anew. Our built environments, infrastructure, and relationships are a complex, resource-rich landscape with often overlooked offerings. In particular, the exhibition sheds light on water condensation from the interaction of cooling systems with Bahrain’s hot and humid climate. By no means encouraging wasteful usage of air conditioners, the research uncovers the possibilities (rather than solutions) made through their inevitable consumption. In Bahrain’s intense conditions air conditioning produces proportionally high condensate. Utilizing this unintended by-product of anthropogenic activity ties loose ends, redirecting water to parts of a larger ecology.
• Climate Inheritance
  • Rania Ghosn, Anhong Li, and Emma Jurczynski. Additional contributors: Marco Nieto, Zhifei Xu, and the Office of Luke Bulman.
    “Climate Inheritance” is a speculative design research publication that reckons with the complexity of “heritage” and “world” in the Anthropocene Epoch. The impacts of climate change on heritage sites — from Venice flooding to extinction in the Galapagos Islands — have garnered empathetic attention in a media landscape that has otherwise mostly failed to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis. In a strategic subversion of the media aura of heritage, the project casts World Heritage sites as narrative figures to visualize pervasive climate risks all while situating the present emergency within the wreckage of other ends of worlds, replete with the salvages of extractivism, racism, and settler colonialism.   
• School of Architecture and Planning alumni participants   
  • Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman SMArchS Design ’20 (co-curator, Mexican Pavilion)
  • Felecia Davis PhD ’17 Design and Computation, SOFTLAB@PSU (Penn State University)
  • Jaekyung Jung SM ’10, (with the team for the Korean pavilion)
  • Vijay Rajkumar MArch ’22 (with the team for the Bahrain Pavilion)