Venice Architecture Biennale Preview: Home front

Venice Architecture Biennale 2016 – This year’s British Pavilion exhibition examines the role of the home in British society.

• Home Economics proposes architectural responses to the domestic conditions of different periods of occupancy
• The exhibition is being produced in collaboration with architectural practice Hesselbrand, with graphic identity by OK-RM

In response to Venice Biennale curator Alejandro Aravena’s theme of Reporting From the Front, the British Council invited artists, architects and designers to create full-scale models proposing new uses for the home, whether occupied for hours, days, months, years or decades.

‘Home Economics is not about designing better versions of established housing models that are already broken,’ say curators Shumi Bose, Jack Self and Finn Williams. ‘It is about designing new ideas of the home, understood through the duration of occupancy.’

Days by London-based art collective ÅYR, for example, imagines a new type of personal and portable space in response to services such as Airbnb that have made us think about the home in its short-term context.