The British Council has appointed the award-winning architecture critic Ellis Woodman to curate the British Pavilion for the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale.

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.

Woodman’s exhibition will examine 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 beginning to address the question of housing again.

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.’  

Woodman says that 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. He asks: `What housing might persuade the British to raise their families in cities? Why are we building the smallest new houses in Europe? Is the public sector enabled to tackle the housing crisis effectively?'

The exhibition will investigate these and related questions through the work of five British architects who are building housing both in the UK and abroad. These are: Sergison Bates, Tony Fretton, de Rijke Marsh Morgan, Witherford Watson Mann and Maccreanor Lavington. Woodman added: `These architects’ experiences of different housing cultures will serve as a means of interrogating the successes and failures of the British condition’.

Ellis Woodman is the architecture critic of The Daily Telegraph and buildings editor of Building Design. Born in 1972, he studied architecture at Cambridge and North London universities and was a practising architect for seven years. He has been named the International Building Press Architecture Critic of the Year twice and is Britain's representative in the CIVA anthology of architecture writing: Looking at European Architecture: A Critical View.

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.

In recognition of the complexity of housing as an issue in politics and commerce as much as in architecture, the British Council will organise a debate on housing during the opening days of the Biennale. The international panelists for this debate will be convened by the architecture critic and Architectural Association professor Irénée Scalbert.

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.