Open for Maintenance is not an exhibition. It is an action framework for a building culture beyond the prevailing model hinging on the exploitation of resources and humans. The spotlight is put on previously used materials gathered from over 40 national pavilions and exhibitions at the 2022 Art Biennale, as well as on a broad network of Venetian and German activist groups. By carefully working with the existing—in material, social, and urban terms—the German Pavilion renders visible processes of spatial and social care work which are usually kept hidden.
Open for Maintenance squats and maintains the German Pavilion “as found,” including Maria Eichhorn’s contribution Relocating a Structure for the 2022 Art Biennale. In this way, the Art and Architecture Biennales become spatially and programmatically interwoven for the first time. The new architectural interventions are oriented towards local needs and include a ramp for accessibility, an ecological and nondiscriminatory bathroom, a space for meetings, a kitchenette, a material repository, and a workshop. The interventions, made entirely with materials salvaged from the 2022 Art Biennale, address questions of social and spatial inclusion in addition to resource issues. Open for Maintenance transforms the monumental German Pavilion into a living place of (re)production. Assisting various groups from civil society, university students and crafts apprentices will help to maintain, repair, and care for social infrastructures across Venice as part of the Maintenance 1:1 workshop program. Designing with the unpredictable—be it the unknown availability of materials or the open-ended participatory processes—generates creative possibilities that spell an optimistic outlook for architecture while simultaneously contributing to its regeneration as a social practice.

‘San Riemo’ is the first housing project realised by the KOOPERATIVE GROSSSTADT, a cooperative founded in 2015. It is designed as a spatial infrastructure that allows for pluralistic forms of living within one robust basic structure. The possible plan of the apartments is outlined by concrete beams on the ceiling: room-units have a neutral size of 14 square meters – just big enough for a living room and not too lavish for a child’s room. Larger rooms are created by combining several room axes into one unit.

The large kitchen in the center of every unit is not purely a place for cooking, but at the same time a living entrance hall and large distribution space that allows for a non-hierarchic organization of the surrounding rooms. The spatial variety arises as the structural grid is filled with non-load-bearing drywalls. The residents themselves decided which grid axes should be filled with walls, how open the connections between rooms are, and where doors are positioned. By adding doors between appartments, the possibility of swapping rooms with neighbouring flats was implemented in several units. Many appartments also share larger rooms with neighbouring flats: sometimes up to 4 to 5 appartments share a common room that can be freely programmed.

The structure allows for flexibility in the near or far future: neutral room sizes, rooms that can be switched back and forth between different units, and the possibility to add or remove partition walls within the concrete skeleton. The heart of the house is an open communal area on the ground floor. This 4 metre high hall extends from the main entrance as an inner street through the whole house. It serves as a circulation space, laundry room, communal kitchen, library, stroller storage, workshop, and much more besides. On the way to the stairs and elevators you meet neighbours doing their laundry, baking cookies together and exchanging books.

San Riemo received the “DAM Preis 2022” of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum!

VDK&C4 factory is a common work-, production- and above all meeting place for two small companies. The project is situated on the outskirts of the city on an industrial site dominated by concrete industrial halls. Without denying the context, the building on the prominent corner plot tries to counteract the anonymity of the surrounding buildings, creating a recognizable “place”. By shifting color, composition and form, typical elements and materials from contemporary industrial construction are abstracted, so that they acquire a new peculiar character. Heart of the building is a triangular courtyard, which breaks the rational rectangular shed, creating a collective meeting space and providing the interior spaces around with light and a view into the greenery. The garden divides the building into three parts: the joinery, the coffee roaster and a storage area. On top of the lower storage area is a communal roof terrace, which can be used by both parties.

The semi-attached house situated between a quiet street on the outskirts of Ghent and a popular birdwatching nature reservoir is standing shoulder to shoulder as the submissive counterpart to the taller and larger neighbor house. Due to the ground conditions and several previous alterations, the construction had been weakened, resulting in it starting to tilt. Rather than demolishing the building, we decided to add a supporting structure in the form of a tower. This open steel tower serves as a new gate to the property and made it possible to relocate the entrance from the ground to the first floor. The new position of the entrance also allowed us to lift the common living areas from the dark groundfloor to the two upper floors, offering the view to the green landscape behind the house as well as providing more daylight. The house is realized with an extensive use of reused elements and materials from different buildings in the area, such as windows, doors, stairs, timber, bricks, roof tiles and even insulation.

Located in the fields on the edge of the city, Meschenisch is a place strongly associated with its large-scale housing development from the seventies – which became famous for its severe social problems in the past. The Sport Club Meschenisch, as a meetingpoint for children and young people is of great importance for the social integration of a huge diversity of cultural and social backgrounds. Despite the extremely tight, publicly funded budget, the new clubhouse presents itself confidently and optimistically and offers a clear identification for the young people and adults of the neighborhood. The compact and wheelchair accessible building offers changing rooms, sanitary facilities, offices, and a multifunctional club room inside. A wide outside staircase offers space for spectators of the football game.