Turkish Pavilion, Architecture as Measure – Venice Architecture Biennale 2021

Place: Venice, Italy

The Pavilion of Turkey at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021; photo © Riccardo Bianchini / Inexhibit.

Turkish Pavilion, Architecture as Measure – Venice Architecture Biennale 2021

At the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, the Turkish Pavilion presents an ambitious exhibition titled “Architecture As Measure” and curated by Neyran Turan, partner at NEMESTUDIO and Associate Professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

“Architecture as Measure” focuses on how architectural imagination could contribute to shaping a new way to intend sustainability and address climate change “going beyond environmentalism and technological determinism”. Consequently, Neyran Turan advocates a holistic approach through which she “proposes that architecture needs to see larger planetary questions and the everyday aspects of its own making as one and the same thing. The planetary is about the here and now; it is embedded in everything we do, and it is waiting for a long-overdue radical change”. In this sense, the term “measure” has a twofold meaning; on the one hand, it represents the act of ascertaining the size, amount, or degree of something by using an instrument; on the other hand, it means to scrutinize things in depth by taking a pause and focusing inwardly.

Overall, Architecture as Measure comprises an installation, a website, a series of paper works, and a program of talks and special events. The installation consists of a pavilion, an ephemeral architecture built inside the 15th-century Sale d’Armi complex at the Venetian Arsenale, in which everything is painted in bright yellow.
The pavilion contains four dioramas each focusing on specific sites of architecture: an abandoned quarry, a warehouse, a maintenance and care facility, and a site of reconstruction for the future inhabitants of the Earth. Each diorama contains a sort of architectural stage comprising banal elements and also presents an imaginary story taking place in Turkey.

“Visitors can walk inside the dioramas as if they are in the interior space of an architectural model. As the dioramas collide the architectural and the planetary, the human and the more-than-human, the banal and the spectacular, and the everyday and the mythical, ideas of foreground and background are constantly flipped and negotiated.”

The Turkish Pavilion caused me mixed feelings; on the one side it features one of the most iconic installations seen at this edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale; on the other side, its message is rather cryptic and possibly too intricate to be conveyed in full to the hasty public of the Venice Biennale.