Writing Architecture from Flanders and beyond

A+ 312 Natural Intelligence

14:00h, Belgian Pavilion (Giardini – Venice, Italy)

A+ Architecture in Belgium has been the leading architectural magazine in Belgium for decades. It is published in English, Dutch and French, crossing the different communities of the nation. A+312 Natural Intelligence presents the latest insights into the intelligence of plants and explores what natural growth processes can mean for the development of architecture and urban planning. From the knowledge of natural phenomena, buildings and cities can become truly ecological. Guest editor is landscape architect Bas Smets, curator of the exhibition ‘Building Biospheres’ for the Belgian Pavilion during the Biennale Architettura.

Architecture Yearbooks, a pub quiz

15:00h, Belgian Pavilion (Giardini – Venice, Italy)

All around Europe, architecture yearbooks highlight the most remarkable projects from their respective countries and investigate topics that occupy the minds of local practitioners. While they all share similar ambitions, it is in the very nature of these yearbooks that they each express their own architectural culture. At the Biennale, the Netherlands and Flanders organize a pub quiz to see how similar or different this architecture actually is. They invite yearbook makers from other countries and regions to put in their publications and projects as well. Can the audience guess which project was published in which yearbook?

With:

• Petrus Kemme, editor, Flanders Architectural Review
• Stephan Petermann, editor, Architecture in the Netherlands

Books from Flanders

16:00h, Belgian Pavilion (Giardini – Venice, Italy)

The Flanders Architecture Institute (VAi) presents the breadth of its publishing in four recent titles. As Found. Experiments in Preservation explores remarkable approaches in dealing with the existing built environment. Making Space Together documents ten years of alternative practice by the Antwerp-based collective Endeavour. In The Urban Villa. From Speculation to Cooperation, the architects and researchers of Dogma investigate the eponymous housing typology in history and as a model which deals with contemporary and future challenges. Ten Scenographies. A Matter of Architecture reflects on the pivotal role of exhibition design in the development of FELT’s architectural practice. In Venice, authors of these books go into dialogue with selected readers, all of whom are curators, commissioners or participants at the Biennale Architettura.

With:

• Hülya Ertas - moderator, Flanders Architecture Institute
• Ella Kaira - co-curator of the Pavillion of Finland, co-founder of Vokal
• Manten Devriendt - co-curator of the Pavilion of Latvia, co-founder of Sampling Architecture
• Michael Obrist - co-curator of the Austrian Pavillion, Professor at TU Vienna, founding partner at feld72 architects
• Maria Nefeli Xourafi - engineer architect

Building Metabolism

17:00h, Belgian Pavilion (Giardini – Venice, Italy)

Building Metabolism challenges architects, planners, and environmental designers to rethink planetary food systems along with architecture's expressive capacity to metabolize, digest, and generate resources, asking questions such as: How can we redefine traditional practices through which global food systems have operated in recent decades and encourage new forms of localization and production? Edited by Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou, this new publication (Actar, 2025) gathers a wide range of perspectives on how buildings and cities might metabolize resources differently — producing, digesting, and regenerating in response to planetary crises.

• Lydia Kallipoliti - Associate Professor directing the MS in Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia University
• Areti Markopoulou - Academic Director at IAAC in Barcelona
• Mireia Luzárraga - co-founder of TAKK and Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP
• Lola Ben-Alon - Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP
• Andreas Theodoridis - Assistant Professor at New York Institute of Technology
• Andrés Jaque – founder of Office for Political Innovation, Professor and the Dean of Columbia University GSAPP