Under the title “Making Heimat”, this year’s German Pavilion in Venice is questioning the relationship between migration and architecture.
Oh, that was nice for the people of Munich: not only was the program for the German Pavilion at this year’s Architecture Biennale presented in Munich instead of Berlin as expected. No, the team led by Peter Cachola Schmal from the German Architecture Museum (Frankfurt) had also chosen a demonstratively un-Munich location: the “Bellevue di Monaco” in Müllerstrasse. This is actually an alternative cultural project (one of the few in Munich). A meeting and living space for refugees is to be created here. In the vicinity of posh hostels such as Léonwohlhage’s Seven, the walls are bare and the heating was weak during last Thursday’s journalist scrum. Munich’s cultural scene was underground – and clearly relished the role. The team around Cachola Schmal, curator Oliver Elser and project coordinator Anna Scheuermann felt right at home.
The pavilion program for Venice will also be socially committed and unvarnished. “Making Heimat” is the title, which refers directly to the fragile relationship between the familiar and the foreign, which is always at stake in the discourse surrounding the current waves of migration. One part has already been realized – a database with a wide variety of building projects for immigrants. Further program items will follow. Cachola Schmal and Elser provided a foretaste that arouses curiosity. The focus will be on the theses of journalist Doug Saunders, whose book “Arrival City” focuses on the destination cities of large migratory movements – from the perspective of the migrants. Following this approach, the focus in Venice will be on German arrival cities. Cities like Offenbach. The city is a centralization point for many migration histories. And these are also reflected in urban development. Without the influx of migrants, Offenbach and our cities as a whole would look very different.
This idea will continue to be an important perspective on the consequences of migration in the future. What is currently taking place in response to the influx of migrants in Germany is a delayed and perhaps inadequate, but nonetheless tangible building promotion program. It is right not to differentiate between housing for migrants and for locals. Because even if refugees are not the core target group of a strategic immigration policy, they need housing just as much as Germans and the well-educated high potentials that traditional immigration societies have in mind. Internal differentiation can only lead to exclusion, which benefits no one.
What is important in this context, however, is that a simple “business as usual” approach to construction would be wrong. We don’t just need more living space. We also need others. It will be exciting to see what models the DAM makers’ database will reveal. Elser and Co. showed the above example on Thursday: accommodation in Oranienburg, Brandenburg, by BBP (Oliver Langhammer), Berlin. Elser sees a “perhaps rather southern” architectural style at least being considered. And that in the barren, decidedly unsouthern Brandenburg. The perhaps less Teutonic-orderly use is likely to do the rest to create a new and certainly irritating spatial atmosphere here – as in other Arrival locations.
It could therefore be that the image of our arrival cities will also become more “southern” through new architecture. Or to put it more fundamentally: Migration is changing our country.
Even if this change seems less evident these days due to the closing borders. Nevertheless, the transformation will continue. If we face up to it, Europe will also become culturally richer as a result – because it will literally outgrow itself. Of course, this does not mean that migratory movements will not bring massive new problems with them.
The Pavilion curators know this. And Biennale chief curator Alejandro Aravena knows it too. In this respect, one criterion for judging Venice will also be whether the Biennale succeeds in coming across as culturally constructive – without settling for a do-gooder project positivism.
