"It's the Moment to Open Up the Practice": In Conversation with Andrea Faraguna, Curator of the Bahrain Pavilion

Architect Andrea Faraguna is the curator of the Kingdom of Bahrain's national pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibition, titled Heatwave, is a site-specific installation that explores passive cooling strategies for public spaces, inspired by Bahrain's traditional architecture and reimagined through contemporary approaches. Its technical response to the global challenge of rising urban temperatures was recognized by the Biennale's international jury, which awarded it this year's Golden Lion for Best National Participation. While on site in Venice, ArchDaily's editors had a chance to discuss with curator Andrea Faraguna about the context that gave rise to the pavilion, the mechanisms put in place, and his perspective on events such as the Venice Architecture Biennale.

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Bahrain is a constitutional monarchy in the Arabian Gulf comprising a small archipelago with an average yearly temperature of 28.5°C. As the architect explains, during the past summer, the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities issued an open call for proposals addressing rising temperatures worldwide, particularly in the Gulf region and Bahrain itself. Heatwave is a response to that call: a cooling system for outdoor contexts. In the words of the curator, it is "a reinterpretation and combination of antique and traditional techniques of cooling spaces in Bahrain, but applied in the outdoor space."

The system that you see in the space is a mock-up, a simulation that represents what and how the system would work. The system originally combines two thermodynamic principles, which is the combination of a geothermal well that cools down air, not water, and then the air is distributed throughout this canopy and through a number of nozzles that blows air. We calculated that in Bahrain the temperature that we could reach at minus 20 meters is about 27 degrees Celsius. So we would be able to deliver under the canopy a continuous blowing of air at a temperature of 30 degrees. And then the air is extracted and exhausted again through a ventilation chimney, which is working through the principle of the solar chimney. - Andrea Faraguna

The exhibited installation is presented as a collaborative effort among various disciplines involved in the research, design, and construction stages. In the conversation, the influence of former national exhibitions at the Biennale is also mentioned, along with the positive effect of expanding relations beyond nations and professional clusters. Accompanying the installation, a publication expands the Heatwave project's scope through technical analysis and speculative inquiry. The publication gathers expert essays, climate data, field research, and historical precedents to offer a framework situating the pavilion's physical installation within a broader perspective.

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I think the goal here was to work with not only architects and open up the discussion within different fields, even if the project is rather technical. The goal has been to answer to the open call of BACA, but also to the call of Carlo Ratti, finding a principle interpreting architecture as a way of negotiating with the surrounding, with the ecosystem, and also finding and working with the intelligence, the local intelligence, the local natural and artificial intelligence that is around us. - Andrea Faraguna

The exhibition is located in the Artiglierie dell'Arsenale and will remain open until November 23. Among the 65 national pavilions at the 19th edition of the Venice Biennale, other exhibitions also address the pressing issue of climate change and globally rising temperatures. The German pavilion consists of an immersive installation titled STRESSTEST, which exposes visitors physically and psychologically to future urban climate conditions. The Uruguayan pavilion features an installation centered on the social, cultural, and environmental importance of water, while the Estonian pavilion addresses a social aspect of sustainability by questioning large-scale insulation projects.