Entitled "The laboratory of the future", this succession of exhibitions and national projects opened its doors to the public this weekend until November 26 with the aim of "offering ideas, projects, ways of doing and to think like a kind of gift to the public", summarized for AFP the Ghanaian-Scottish curator of the Biennale, Lesley Lokko.
Here are some examples of this rich panorama:
Down with the flushes!
Water is a precious commodity on the verge of scarcity, and yet homes in Western countries use "about 30% of drinking water by flushing the toilet", indignantly Eero Renell, an architect from Finland, where half a million chalets sprinkled in the forests resort to dry toilets.
Never mind: he installed in his national pavilion, right in the middle of the Jardins de la Biennale, a copy of a toilet requiring no connection to water or sewers: a tank placed under the bowl receives the waste, on which a handful of bark is thrown.
The liquid is collected in a small auxiliary tank. When the reservoir is full, it is emptied and this fertile humus is spread on the vegetable patch.
"We have learned to recycle everything else over the past decades, but the waste produced by man is still not considered a resource that could be recycled", regrets this architect with a nose wearing thick glasses.
Aware of the taboo linked to human waste, Eero mischievously shows a video where we see him with a pitchfork in his hand collecting humus from his own toilet and then harvesting the magnificent pumpkins he has been able to grow thanks to his precious manure.
A stone is eternal
Stacks of skilfully arranged disparate stones pile up in the pavilion presented by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a country known for its desert expanses within the confines of the former Arsenal, where the Serenissima built its warships.
Faysal Tabbarah, associate professor at the American University of Sharjah (UAE), regrets that "about 30% of the stones" extracted from quarries around the world are today "treated as waste for different reasons: aesthetics, their structure , their shape..."
Inspired by an ancestral technique of his country, which consists in making dry stone walls blending into the landscape thanks to the use of blocks of all sizes and shapes, the 36-year-old architect recalls that "the constructions in dry stone have many advantages".
"If you want to remodel, rebuild, move, it is not necessary to destroy" the existing construction: "the stones can be reused ad infinitum", he underlines.
New out of old
The Italian architect Alessandra Rampazzo is categorical: "We cannot talk about sustainable development and decarbonization only in terms of the technology of the materials we can use, that's why we bet on the reconversion of the existing heritage, seeking not to be demolished in order to rebuild while producing less CO2".
This radical method was applied to a former NATO base between Vicenza and Verona in northern Italy, "although the architectural quality (of the existing one) is not very high". A research and training center will occupy the old buildings, while the green spaces will be returned to the public.
"Nothing new in reality", she relativizes, "this is what has always happened in our cities (...) Our territory is being rebuilt by stratification and reuse of existing structures".
Grandma's Recipes
On the side of the Slovenian pavilion, no less than "fifty architects were invited to propose examples of vernacular architecture from the past".
In the past, "architecture was intrinsically ecological: with low means, the goal was to retain heat or coolness", recalls Jure Grohar, one of the project managers. "You don't want to be attached to a romantic idea from the past, but something that can be used today."
Like for example "space compression": "in a room with high ceilings, we stretch a fabric halfway up to retain the heat". A simple and effective "ephemeral element", just like the famous closed beds of our ancestors.
There is also this "Slovenian specialty: a room within a room". A small house is built inside a barn where there are farm animals, which thus provide warmth in addition to meat, eggs and milk.
The air conditioning water
Let him who has never had water falling from an air conditioner on his head throw the first drop of water.
Water that gave ideas to Latifa Alkhayat, architect and researcher behind the pavilion project for Bahrain, "one of the most water-poor regions in the world".
"In Bahrain, as the climate is hot and humid, the air conditioners remove humidity from the air (...) and currently unfortunately this water ends up in the sewer!"
“We realized the great potential that there would be in collecting this water for irrigation, such as the cultivation of date palms for example, or even for the restoration of old exhausted sources”, she argues. .
Implementing this idea "is really not expensive, because this water already has networks to be evacuated. You just have to connect it to a collection tank rather than letting it go to the sewers".