Words Gabrielle de la Cruz and Biennale College Archittetura
Images The Venice Biennale
The Venice Architecture Biennale is ready for a new chapter: College.
This 2023, the exhibition calls for entries for its first-ever Biennale College Archittetura, encouraging emerging practitioners to express their design skills and interests and join in further exploring architecture as a practice.
Biennale College Archittetura welcomes submissions from various built environment disciplinary backgrounds such as landscape architecture, urban design, interior architecture, design engineering, or similar built environment practices. Only graduate students and graduates under the age of 30 and early career academic and emerging practitioners under the age of 35 are eligible to join.
As the 2023 Venice Biennale’s central themes are decolonization and decarbonization, participants must demonstrate how these two can be explored at the heart of architectural education. Submissions can either be visual, text-based, or performance media.
“Preference will be given to applicants with strong design skills and interests,” says the Biennale. A maximum of 50 eligible participants will be selected following the open call deadline by the Director of the Architecture Department of La Biennale di Venezia, Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic, and novelist Lesley Lokko. The chosen participants will “work alongside a global cast of renowned practitioners, academics, and built environment professionals on a range of design projects at different scales that map out new possibilities for architectural education in the coming decades.”
La Biennale president Roberto Cicutto shares that they “hope that the result will be equal to that achieved by the first College Arte held last year by Cecilia Alemani.” With the Biennale College Architettura opening a gateway towards the world to young architects, the primary goal is to increasingly make La Biennale “a laboratory and a stage for international debate for the young women and men who, thanks to this experience, will acquire even greater consciousness of the choice they have made.”
Biennale College Archittetura called for applications last January 9 and will accept entries until February 17. The event will run from June 25 to July 22 2023 in Venice, Italy. It will operate through a series of experimental studios, seminars, lectures, and public reviews, drawing on the rich history of radical and transformative pedagogies that have surfaced in architectural education over the past fifty years.
Since 1895, The Venice Biennale has been hosting international cultural exhibitions across creative industries namely art, architecture, music, theatre, film, and dance. The Venice Biennale of Architecture was founded in 1980 and was then held annually, with its frequency changed to odd-numbered years in 2021. •
