"Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good"

As I've noted before, it's been amazing to be a part of the project curatorial team for the US pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale this year. The exhibition, Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good, explores and showcases the movement toward innovative, ground-up, and often quite informal design contributions that people are making to their communities (overlapping in many ways with the phenomena I refer to in my research as DIY urban design). In addition to helping to find, review, select, and write up statements for the featured projects, I co-edited the exhibition catalog (a special issue of Architect magazine) with the pavilion commissioner and head curator, Cathy Lang Ho.

Well after 10 months of work, it was incredible to find myself in Venice's Giardini last week for the opening of the Biennale. Just seeing the installation itself in physical form was wonderful, truly exceeding my own high hopes for it - cheers to the team on the ground in Venice for the past month installing it all (as well as keeping the space running smoothly during the opening days).

The American pavilion is essentially four big galleries arranged in a horse-shoe around a front courtyard (above; a small central hall behind the columns pictured connects the second and third galleries, so there are two on each side). For our installation, the galleries are filled with 124 hanging banners, each one featuring one of the participating projects. (The exhibition website also features the content from each of the 124 banners.)

On entering, one actually sees the back of the banners (see photo at top), which have colorful 'bar codes' indicating the different thematic areas the intervention speaks to (community, information, environment, etc.). On the fronts of these are the descriptions of the projects. And, when a visitor pulls down on a banner, a pulley raises a block on the opposite wall showing the problem the project addresses:

On the floor is a winding timeline of urbanism, broken into four chunks by room, running from the "first city" (c. 7500 BC) through the rise of urban planning and design in the 19th century to recent things like Critical Mass and pop-up parklets.

In the central hall area, a video montage featuring interviews with a number of our participants plays on a large screen.

And finally, in the outdoor courtyard, a vibrant interactive public space was created by the New York design group Interboro. It features a raised platform for sitting, mingling and for presentations, and a sunken area for sitting, interacting, or participating in activities, all stocked with bright orange plush cubes - which can be used for sitting, or for playing. The space was programmed with panel discussions and workshops for much of the day, and was otherwise usually alive with children (and adults) interacting with the cubes and the space.

The exhibition, the installation, and the catalog are all very much what I hoped they would be, and a wonderful realization of the ideas that Cathy Ho and so many others had in doing this rather non-traditional exhibition. And don't just take my word for it - I'm proud to say that Spontaneous Interventions has already received many accolades, and on Wednesday we were awarded a relatively rare Special Mention by the Biennale judges (with the top Golden Lion award going to the excellent Japanese pavilion). "This interactive installation impressed the Jury with its celebration of the power of individuals to change society in small but effective ways," the judges wrote of the US pavilion, adding: "The unpretentiously simple presentation was a delight.”

The exhibition was realized by a talented team of hardworking individuals (many unpaid), every one of whom was excited and passionate about the project and its subject. I couldn't be more proud to have been a small part of this.