british pavilion 2023
Venice Biennale, Italy
Type | Shortlisted Competition
Client | A Small Studio
Collaboration | Empathy Museum
Status | Shortlisted by the British Council
Grenfell Residents and Stories of the Home is the proposal by A Small Studio together with Empathy Museum for the British Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2023.
The exhibition proposal aims to unpack the interconnected themes of housing, poverty, social injustice, racial inequity and the role of the architect. Through the lens of the Grenfell Tower tragedy the exhibition aims to tell a personal story about people, communities and their homes.
Theme
Our proposal for the Venice Biennale British pavilion of 2023 is to unpack the themes of housing, poverty, social injustice, racial inequity and the role of the architect using the lens of the Grenfell tragedy to tell a very personal story about people, communities and their home.
We want to explore how and why the private sector is currently in charge of delivering housing in the UK to the most vulnerable people, instead of this role being provided by the state. By unpacking the theme≤s around this problematic, we discover how there is a systemic marginalization of ethnic minorities and low-income households from the wider planning process, which invariably leads to social injustice on multiple levels.
This is particularly apparent with communities that are marginalized and don’t have a voice in wider planning process. And so we want to ask, what is the wider implication of people who don’t have a voice? The dilemma is amplified because we don’t want to talk about ‘housing’ but about ‘Home’. The home is an intimate space, a real, personal and accessible space that a wide audience can easily relate to. Problematically the Home can also be abstracted into policy discourse around housing and how it is delivered which immediately removes the person from the subject.
It is useful to understand that in the early twentieth century, before the advent of planning legislations, housing was considered a health issue, not a social problem. This explains why early legislation was concerned with preventing and controlling unsanitary development but not necessarily about making positive change. Instead, the discourse tried to establish how to deal with what was considered an urban problem of the ‘undeserving poor’, a distinction originally made in the Elizabethan Poor Law Act 1563 . The subsequent story of housing provision through the nineteenth and twentieth century is a rich and complex one, where the state has introduced different planning policies for building communities providing social housing as part of its role.
However, the welfare state in Britain came under continuous scrutiny with the rise of the Conservative Party in the 1970s when Margaret Thatcher’s government questioned the very basis of the ideological argument for delivering social housing and building new communities. Thatcher’s government marks a phase of property-led regeneration and market deregulation based on the political ideology of rolling back the state whilst shifting power towards the private developer. Under the Housing Act of 1988 the UK reduced social housebuilding being built by the local authorities and instead gave the role to Housing Associations backed by private finance. This was done under the economic pretext that it is not good value for money for the Treasury to invest in social housing. Instead, Private Finance Initiatives (PFI), Design and Build Contracts (DB) and other private procurement models have taken over the traditional procurement of large-scale residential housing in the UK.
But what is the actual impact? How do we understand the legacy that this has created and the impact it has had on people, families, and communities? One way of understanding the theme is not by addressing the past through a historical revision, or discursive policy analysis, but by revealing the stories and experiences of the non-experts, the non-planners.
Communities have an understanding of their environment that is unequivocal and their knowledge should be integrated to an adaptive strategy in future planning and in shaping the future of the architecture profession. Without oversimplifying we could ask: If we do not learn from the past, what happens when we learn from its residents? In this proposal we want to explore the value of local knowledge and amplify the voice of people with lived experience
© Grenfell Athletic FC
If we speak to residents that have lived in housing estates where a stock transfer has occurred, some really personal and richly detailed narratives emerge that give us an insight into the struggles of living in social housing under private management. We would learn that tenants distinguish between the design standards of older housing built by the Council when it was driven by social objectives in opposition to the newer developer-driven housing projects that reveal the worst aspects of Private-Public-Partnerships (PPP). We would learn that when tenants identify failures in construction techniques and problems of evacuation, they ask for help and call for the management company to join their resident meetings, but their voice is not heard. And if it is, their voice is silenced. We also learn that if tragedy strikes, rehousing is de-humanised, unorganised, vague and unapologetic. With private-public-partnerships being so closely likened to political ideology, there has to be a very strong political will in holding private companies to account. Unfortunately, in Britain today, property donors provide 25% of funds given to the Conservative party (The FT). So, Britain is living in a concerning culture of cronyism that, while not illegal, suggests a lack of accountability (The Guardian).
So how do you reveal the actual experience of living in housing where residents feel they have a limited voice? And how does the impact ripple across the tight-knit community they have established in their housing estate? Sadly, to illustrate this trajectory we can look at Britain’s most scandalous housing tragedy: the fire at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017.
exhibition concept
The story we want to explore in the 19th Architecture Biennale 2023 is Grenfell Tower which unpacks multiple themes: home, families, local communities, systematic social injustice, racial inequity, corporate accountability, building material performance, the role of the architect, and the role of the state.
Our proposal is to work closely with the residents organisation of Grenfell Tower to tell their story of life in Grenfell before the fire and the experience of where they are today. By hearing their voices and telling their story we can gently unpack these complicated themes and give real and accessible language to the idea of home and community; and to understand the wider implications of people who don’t have a voice.
The story of Grenfell Tower is the story of 120 families and 120 homes. If we don’t tell the story of Grenfell Tower to a wider audience, if we don’t hear the voices of its residents, if we don’t enquire where these residents have been rehoused, and if we don’t examine the forensics of the enquiry and those held to account then what lessons have we learned, and -more importantly- what will be the future of British Architecture and of the architecture profession?
The story of the tower will be told spatially (using a 1:10 model of the tower, 3D modelling and drawings prepared by the residents); orally through resident participation and engagement workshops which the curatorial team proposes to hold in the run up to the biennale; and through artefacts in the form of testimonies, evidence and findings and conclusions unearthed in the Grenfell Tower enquiry and published in their Phase 1 reports published in an exhaustive 4 part document.
The impact of this exhibition will enable young architects to question their role within the building industry. It will explore the environmental, health and safety significance of materials and why the supply chain of specifications matters (done so thorough details and physical models, photographic evidence published as part of the report) and it will give a new human-centred, family-orientated and community-focused perspective to what has become abstracted as a ‘regulatory affair’ within the industry but which, above all, is the story of how top-down decision making has a real impact on people, their livelihood and wellbeing. Importantly, the aim of this exhibition is to give a voice to the residents of Grenfell Tower through forensic examination of facts, evidence and storytelling.
© Tom Cockram - Never Forget Grenfell
As you enter the British Pavilion, you will not need to have known anything about Grenfell Tower. However, as you leave, the curatorial team’s primary concern is that the audience members can take away at least:
One story of a resident
The social injustice endured by the residents
The complexity behind the supply chain of building materials
The scope of the Grenfell Enquiry (both breadth and limitations)
The impact to the architectural profession as it takes on greater responsibility
The curatorial team would like to include the audience in a participatory action where they can respond to the pavilion and tell their own stories of home and community. We will ask the audience to reflect how ‘home’ reflects in their life and the Venice Fellowships Programme ambassadors can manage the process and display of the outcome. By engaging the audience and asking people to respond to the themes and story, an ‘other’ exhibit will run parallel as a response and participatory event.