Studio-Mobile Venice Sarajevo 2023

Studio-Mobil is an ephemeral nomadic stage providing a living lab for bridging research in sustainable architecture with human and environmental rights. Anchored between the 18th and 21st of May 2023, at the Global Campus for Human Rights, Monastery of San Nicoló at Lido, Venice, the ETHZ Chair of Architecture and Urban Design engages in an open discussion during the opening week of the 18th International Venice Architecture Biennale.

More than forty years ago, Aldo Rossi designed the “Teatro Del Mondo” a floating building for the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale, which later traveled to socialist Yugoslavia. Today, Studio-Mobil is sailing in the opposite direction, from the Western Balkans to Venice. Paying tribute to the people of the culturally rich and diverse cities of Sarajevo, Rijeka, Tirana, Belgrade, and Dubrovnik, having endured shared histories of Venetian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian colonization, living through a century of socialism, urbicide, turbo-privatization, human-, environmental crisis. Studio-Mobil crosses the Adriatic Sea to the Global Campus for Human Rights (GCHR), Venice / Lido, disembarking an outdoor stage for direct engagement with local people, students, faculty, guests and participants of the Architecture Biennale.

We find ourselves in Venice and Sarajevo, between the Adriatic Sea and the Balkan Mountains, confronting multiple crises and uncertainties; climate change, migration, pandemics, inequality, war, environmental degradation, natural-and man-made disasters. At the same time, we see the need to create new kinds of collective actual and virtual spaces for exchange in our European cities. The growing information provided by science and technology raises complex questions about sustainable development, environmental-, and human rights agendas, and their relationship to culture and the arts. Based on our ongoing work in Sarajevo and the Western Balkans, the Chair of Architecture and Urban Design (ETHZ), the Global Campus for Human Rights (GCHR), and their Venice engagement are co-creating multidisciplinary perspectives on learning the city.

During the 2023 Architecture Biennale opening week 18-22 of May, we are staging Studio-Mobil as a nomadic knowledge-exchange platform. A performative architecture, exemplifying our approach to designing urban imaginaries in front of UCHR Headquarters Monastery of San Nicoló, in the Park of Human Rights, merging into the, Festa della Sensa and its Market organised by the City of Venice, VELA spa and the Proloco Association of Lido and Pellestrina. The Studio-Mobil design out of recycled offshore sails in cooperation between ETHZ Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, utt_next and Seidl Custom Sails. The gear wraps around a mobile research station featuring roof extensions and sheltered spaces, creating a scenographic image of a street theater anchoring at Lido, engaging citizens with a contemporary experience of a living architecture lab for Design connecting the arts, science, technology, and human rights by learning, research and outreach.