Venice Architecture Biennale: Home Economics

Lujaine Rezk. Courtesy of Lujaine Rezk

As part of our ongoing series from the Venice Architecture Biennale, Lujaine Rezk, one of the interns taking part in the rolling programme at the National Pavilion of the UAE, brings us this report from the UK Pavilion. Since the Biennale opened in May, The Art Blog has published regular articles by the interns from a pavilion of their choice.

Born in Alexandria, Lujaine Rezk is an interior design graduate from the American University of Sharjah who is currently extending her practice and experimenting with woodwork. She is specifically interested in the production and fabrication aspects of design and aims to develop her career in furniture and installation fabrication.

Lujaine writes:

Titled Home Economics, the UK’s Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is tackling the UK’s most pressing architecture frontline: the home. The pavilion is proposing a new brief for the home that critically considers the amount of time we reside in a dwelling as a solution for the lack of sufficient housing.

The pavilion is a simple plan of five divided spaces that exhibit suggestions and alternatives to new ways of inhabiting a domestic space. These alternatives are based on the modern idea that domestic architecture is no longer rigid in its function but can instead be designed to accommodate a growth of multiple needs and a change in social norms and lifestyles. Spaces can be inhabited for an infinite number of durations, therefore, it is more fitting to design a home considering time rather than space. The pavilion is proposing five full scale architectural models of inhabitable spaces designed by five different designers; these models address domestic needs for the durations of hours, days, months, years and decades of inhabitation. The pavilion invites the visitors to become a part of the exhibition as they are encouraged to interact with and test out the experience of each room. It starts with the ‘Hours’ model, which considers what a place would look like if we were to inhabit it for a number of hours and thus the model can be described as a shared living room for different individuals. This model is titled ‘Own nothing, share everything’, and offers an economic form where communal storage of equipment and belongings results in an environmentally thoughtful luxury.

In the area representing ‘Days’, which is titled ‘Home is where the Wi-Fi is’, the concept of mobile homes is addressed. The model offers an inflatable and portable space that can be claimed by its user as their home. This model directly responds to the ephemerality and adaptibility of today’s global mobility where a Wi-Fi connection is the most essential necessity. ‘Months’ is a model that focuses on organisation as a tool that provides a person with their basic life necessities; bathroom, bed and storage. The model is titled: ‘A house without housework’, and has all the needs built in.

The ‘Years’ model named ‘Space for living, not speculation’, strips a home of all the unnecessary elements that are built only to add cost. The model is a pragmatic shell that can be modified by its user based on their personal needs.

Finally in the ‘Decades model’ titled ‘A room without functions’, contains rooms that have no predetermined functions. The different spaces have a diverse range of spatial conditions such as light/dark public/private wet/dry and soft/hard. The inhabitants can then tailor and assign the spaces to their personal choosing. As the exhibition is concluded, the visitor is left questioning their preconception of what today’s home is, the needs it must meet and how it can meet those needs in a minimal and efficient way.

* Lujaine Rezk has participated in several competitions including Tashkeel’s design programme: Tanween for 2016/2017. Find out more about her on Instagram on @lujainerezk. Follow the Venice interns on @veniceinterns and hashtags #uaeinvenice and #veniceinterns