Agency For Better Living

The AGENCY FOR BETTER LIVING in the Austrian pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2025 in Venice focuses on the housing crisis spreading across Europe and around the world. For a large portion of the population, living in cities is no longer sustainable. The question is: What stance will architecture take on this?

This is why curators Sabine Pollak, Michael Obrist, and Lorenzo Romito are opening the AGENCY FOR BETTER LIVING. They want to explore practices, spaces, and rules for BETTER LIVING, i.e. a better life for everyone, and to show that it is possible to do something about current developments in urban coexistence.

Vienna and its pioneering role in the question of affordable housing for all is confronted with another European city in which self-organized forms of housing and living have emerged as a reaction to the failure of planning processes in modern times: Rome.

Both cities, Vienna and Rome, demonstrate different “intelligens” of how things can be done: Vienna is a city that cares, a caring city. In a top-down process, the municipality ensures that everyone seeking affordable housing gets it. Rome is the city of ruins, where hard-won, bottom-up processes create informal living spaces with often astonishing forms of self-organization. The Viennese system creates security, the Roman system a reactive and creative civil society. In both cities, innovative ways of living are generated – by very different, if not opposite, processes. Overlaying the two systems, we can imagine a new level of cooperation between planners and inhabitants, which could lead to the emergence of the potential utopia of future urban coexistence and to a strategy for unusual, inclusive, affordable, and climate-friendly forms of living together. A twofold learning from is called for.

The exhibition utilizes the symmetry of the pavilion designed by Josef Hoffmann. Both parts of the pavilion open by telling the ‘mythical’ stories of the cities and their approach to housing, land policy, and urban space. The two large exhibition rooms show different situations and themes in Vienna and Rome that relate to their respective history, specific places, forms of organization, initiatives, and spaces. The Vienna system is analyzed on the basis of nine stations featuring photographs and videos of urban and communal spaces, excerpts from films from various decades, infographics, and diagrams. Meanwhile, the modern history of Rome is reviewed from a bottom-up perspective which tells the story of the struggle for living, adapting, and transforming the ruins of the present, both abandoned places and planning failures.

A photographic essay by artist Armin Linke (I, DE) is installed in the covered area of the pavilion’s courtyard. It was created as a participatory photographic observation during field research in Vienna and Rome (December 2024 – February 2025) and displays photographs of spaces of negotiation, team building, planning, administration, and self-organization. 

The plateau in the courtyard is a “Space of Negotiation” that invites visitors to rest and join the discussion about the agendas for a “better living” around an open center. Between late May and November, a program with workshops and discussion rounds on the housing question and encounters between politics, administrations, activists, planners, theoretician and inhabitants will take place at the Austrian Pavilion. The events will be documented and accessible online.

Information about the latest program can be found at labiennale2025.at

ARCH+ issue 260
Wien/Roma – Agency For Better Living
ARCH+, the German magazine for architecture and urbanism which is well-known for defining the debate, is dedicating a special edition (with a print run of 10,000) to the Austrian Pavilion under the title “Wien/Roma – Agency For Better Living”. The bilingual (EN/DE) issue includes contributions by various authors, multiple series of photographs, and illustrations produced for the exhibition. 

labiennale2025.at/en/publication