The World's Biggest Architecture Exhibit is Decorated with 100 Tons of Trash

In the foyers of the Central Pavilion at Giardini and the Arsenale, home of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, are 100 tons of trash. But not heaping piles of garbage—the trash is arranged artfully, architecturally. Slabs of chrome-colored scrap metal hang from the ceiling, like streamers. The textured stucco walls are made from 107,000 square feet of leftover drywall. It looks like somebody decorated a monastery for a glam-rock high school dance.

The installation is the work of Alejandro Aravena, this year's winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize and director of the 2016 Venice Biennale. It's made of trash from last year's Venice Art Biennale. The point, he says, is that constraints should not prevent architects from inventiveness. “Value is not based on the quality of material, but on creative and distinctive use instead,” Aravena said in a statement.

This vision of creating in the face of challenges is a common one at this year's Biennale, the theme of which is “Reporting from the Front.” In an official statement, Aravena explains the thinking behind the theme, which he selected, with a charming anecdote about archaeologist Maria Reiche, who studied the Nazca pre-Incan culture in Peru. It begins:

In his trip to South America, Bruce Chatwin encountered an old lady walking in the desert carrying an aluminum ladder on her shoulder. It was... Maria Reiche, studying the Nazca lines. Standing on the ground, the stones did not make any sense; they were just random gravel. But from the height of the ladder those stones became a bird, a jaguar, a tree, or a flower.

Maria Reiche did not have the resources to rent a plane to study the lines from above, nor was there the technology to have a drone flying over the desert. But she was creative enough to still find a way to achieve her goal. The modest ladder is the proof that we shouldn’t blame the harshness of constraints for our incapacity to do our job...We would like the 15th International Architecture Exhibition to offer a new point of view like the one Maria Reiche has from atop the ladder.

Aravena himself has created a practice around designing under constraints. He calls his method “incremental design,” and it often means using limited government funding to build deliberately half-finished structures. The approach lets tenants flesh out their respective units as they please, resulting in government-issued housing that’s colorful, vibrant, and personal—like a real home.