The curators behind the twelfth São Paulo architecture biennial – Vanessa Grossman, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and Ciro Miguel – haves issued an open call for ‘pertinent architectural and urban projects, research, speculative works and installations, as well as other spatial interventions’. The biennial, which takes place in September, takes the theme of the ‘everyday’ and is organised into three chapters, ‘everyday stories’, ‘everyday resources’ and ‘everyday maintenance’. Here’s the full skinny:
‘Architects and urban planners have long aspired to design total environments, civilizations, even the planet. However, in the current climate of political and economic uncertainty, occurring against the backdrop of unprecedented environmental impacts wrought by rapid technological development, design professionals have begun to acknowledge the vulnerability of their work to global transformations and the challenges of an automated future. In response, by shifting their focus to the quotidian realm they have started to pose fundamental questions about the core remit of design in an over-designed world—be it banal objects, daily routines, rote maintenance protocols, or even the use of basic resources. This line of inquiry reframes what appears to be the most trivial dimension of reality—the everyday—as an intrinsic mediator in the ongoing production of architecture and the city. Within the last decade, the potential of the everyday have influenced both practical and theoretical domains of architecture and urbanism by triggering a new ethic and aesthetic of humbleness.’
Proposals will be judged by the curators of the biennial alongside Javier Agustín Rojas (an architect, photographer, and journalist from Buenos Aires), Gabriela de Matos Moreira Barbosa (architect and founding coordinator of the Brazilian collective Arquitetas Negras) and Renato Cymbalista (architect and professor at the University of São Paulo). Submissions are to be made via the biennial’s website up to 1 April.
4 March 2019
