“Reporting from the Front will be about sharing with a broader audience, the work of people who are scrutinizing the horizon looking for new fields of action, facing issues like segregation, inequalities, peripheries, access to sanitation, natural disasters, housing shortage, migration, informality, crime, traffic, waste, pollution and the participation of communities. And simultaneously it will be about presenting examples where different dimensions are synthesized, integrating the pragmatic with the existential, pertinence and boldness, creativity and common sense.”

“It is not easy – concluded Aravena – to achieve such a level of expansion and synthesis; they are battles that need to be fought. The always menacing scarcity of means, the ruthless constraints, the lack of time and urgencies of all kinds are a constant threat that explain why we so often fall short in delivering quality. The forces that shape the built environment are not necessarily amicable either: the greed and impatience of capital or the single mindedness and conservatism of the bureaucracy tend to produce banal, mediocre and dull built environments. These are the frontlines from which we would like different practitioners to report, sharing success stories and exemplary cases where architecture did, is and will make a difference.”

The 15th International Architecture Exhibition will feature three Special Projects, the first promoted by La Biennale, the other two the result of agreements stipulated with other institutions, organized and realised by La Biennale itself. The exhibition curated by architect Stefano Recalcati, titled “Reporting from Marghera and Other Waterfronts,” to be shown in the exhibition venues of Forte Marghera (Mestre, Venezia), will analyse significant projects for the urban regeneration of industrial ports, helping to fuel the debate on the conversion of production in Porto Marghera.

The collaboration agreement with the Victoria and Albert Museum of London takes its first step in the Applied Arts Pavilion at the Sale d’Armi in the Arsenale, with the exhibition entitled “A World of Fragile Parts,” curated by Brendan Cormier.

Finally, in view of the United Nations – Habitat III world conference, to be held in Quito, Ecuador, during the month of October 2016, and as part of the Urban Age programme, organized jointly by the London School of Economics and the Alfred Herrhausen Society, La Biennale will present, also in the Sale d’Armi, a pavilion dedicated to the themes of urbanisation – “Report from Cities: Conflicts of an Urban Age” – with particular attention to the relationship between public spaces and private spaces, curated by Ricky Burdett.