COethos

The island nation of Grenada proudly announces its first participation as an official national pavilion in the Venice Architecture Biennale. 

COethos is a voice from within Grenada that heralds a new cultural, economic, and social perspective as a way to live locally in relation to rising environmental global issues. COethos is a vision, a narrative, where the individual parts are staunchly interdependent  and the already completed House of Parliament is the capstone. The future project endows the old town of St George’s with a new narrative and enhances it as a central place where the community recognises and proclaims its own unique identity.

The reconfiguration of St George’s urban landscape, its buildings and forts, and the rejuvenation of key components of Market Square and Carenage, the management of its infrastructures and its motorised and pedestrian traffic, if realised, will eventually benefit every individual.

Grenada is almost the southernmost island of the Caribbean paradise, the last of a series of gems in a crown that softly fades before meeting the continent of South America. A marvel floating above the surface of the water, it is a mirage. 

Alongside the beauty looms an ever-present threat: waves rise with global warming, winds threaten to destroy its surface and forest, tectonic plates move  and quake in a slow dance, and magma boils muffled in the underwater silence.

Inhabiting this land produces the most extraordinarily resilient relics—its  people. Grenada, like Venice, is a paradise suspended between a solid historical  identity and an uncertain and fragile future. Similarly, its environmental  conditions are the cause of both its quality and the weaknesses that undermine  the solidity of its paradisiac image. The resilience of its people to rebuild time  and time again after each catastrophe is the impetus of the architect to provide a  living, breathing, dynamic, urban design that will serve the people well. COethos interrupts time and simultaneously stretches it: Grenada and  its House of Parliament become the place where the geological ages and a community’s identity meet. It is the expression of the dynamic ways of inhabiting  an unpredictable land, it suspends time and the fragility of the environment  while acknowledging them as part of its existence.

Commissioner
Susan Mains

Curators
Babau Bureau (Marco Ballarin, Stefano Tornieri, Massimo Triches) 

Participants
Caribbean Office of Co-operative Architecture, Bryan W. Bullen

Collaborators
Sharon Bidaisee, Irina Kostka, Michael Julien

Pavilion management
Luisa Flora, Officina delle Zattere

Technical support
Fulvio Caputo, C and C architettura ingegneria

Research
Asher Mains, With the support of The Ministry of Culture, Grenada
Cymat
Act—Art 
Design Grenada