The unique conditions that have bred the UK’s housing crisis will be put under the spotlight in the British Pavilion for the 11th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.

Curated by award-winning architecture critic Ellis Woodman, Home/Away: Five British Architects Build Housing in Europe examines how five contemporary architects, all inheritors of the generation gap that ensued when Britain’s programme of post-war reconstruction drew to a close in the 1970s, are vigorously addressing the question of housing again.

This year’s Advisory Panel for the British Pavilion were architects David Chipperfield and Farshid Moussavi; Financial Times Architecture Correspondent, Edwin Heathcote; curator Francesca Ferguson, Director of SAM Basel; and Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum.

The British Council’s Head of Design & Architecture, Emily Campbell, said: ‘Our advisors for the 2008 Pavilion agreed that housing is the key issue that architects, developers, builders and government in the UK need to address. They wanted to consider the scale of Britain’s housing challenge and its potential to contribute to progressive architectural, social, commercial and legislative thinking. Ellis Woodman’s proposed exhibition will do just that in an intellectually rigorous and thought-provoking way.’  

The exhibition will not only explore the roots of the British obsession with home ownership but the effect of the long-term domination of housing by private-sector developers in the UK. Ellis Woodman explains:

'The nature of a country’s housing is shaped by many factors beyond the will of its architects. Home/Away: Five British Architects Build Housing in Europe considers the social and economic constraints within which different European housing cultures have emerged, and is particularly concerned to convey the testing conditions within which housing in Britain is produced.

At present, the average British dwelling is the most expensive of any country save for Monaco. The ratio between the number of homes being built and the overall population is less than that of any country west of Poland. At 76m², the average size of the homes we are building is at the very bottom of the European league. Our situation is further distinguished by certain deep-seated cultural prejudices, notably and aversion to large-scale planning and an attachment to the single-ownership house as the ideal housing model.'

A century ago, the UK was at the forefront of thinking about the question of housing. The garden city movement promoted by urban reformers like Ebenezer Howard and planners Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker proved influential across Europe and beyond. Now Home/Away will address this legacy with the work of five British architects who are designing housing in the testing conditions of the contemporary UK market.

Each architecture practice is building housing in another European country: Sergison Bates in Switzerland, Witherford Watson Mann in Belgium, de Rijke Marsh Morgan in Norway, Tony Fretton in Denmark and Maccreanor Lavington in the Netherlands.  Woodman added: ‘The far-flung success of this group suggests that, for all the challenges of the British condition, it may yet offer lessons for other countries. The exhibition presents examples of the participants’ British and foreign work, side-by-side, as a means of interrogating the cultural differences at play’.

The 11th Venice Biennale of Architecture will be open to the public from Sunday 14 September to Sunday 23 November, 2008. This year’s Biennale is under the directorship of Aaron Betsky, former of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) of Rotterdam, and now Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum. Betsky’s theme for the Biennale is 'Out There. Architecture Beyond Building.' Describing the rationale for his choice of theme, Betsky commented: ‘We must not let buildings be the tombs of architecture, but must make an architecture that helps us to feel at home in, figure out and represent the world we live in’.

In recognition of the complexity of housing as an issue in politics and commerce as much as in architecture, the British Council hosted a debate on housing on Saturday 13 September at the British Pavilion. Conceived by the architecture critic and professor Irénée Scalbert, keynote speaker Denise Scott Brown and moderator John Callcutt were joined by the five architects exhibiting in Home/Away.

Venice Biennale 2008:
11, 12, 13 September - Vernissage days
14 September - 23 November: Open to the Public

For more information on the British Pavilion please contact arts@britishcouncil.org.