The Golden Lion Award for cities is awarded to Bogota, Colombia. This city has in the last decades addressed the problems of social inclusion, education, housing and public space especially through innovations in transport. Bogota has applied Mies van der Rohe’s dictum ‘less is more’ to the automobile: less cars means more civic space and civic resources for people. The city provides a model for streets which are pleasing to the eye as well as economically viable and socially inclusive. Bogotá is, in short, a beacon of hope for other cities, whether rich or poor.
The Golden Lion Award for national pavilions is awarded to Denmark (CO-EVOLUTION, Danish/Chinese collaboration on sustainable urban development in China). This pavilion shows us a country looking outward rather than inward, bringing its expertise to bear on the ecological problems faced by cities in China. The Danish pavilion does more than catalogue these ecological challenges; the Danish planners and architects propose concrete solutions to water and energy management through visual forms of aesthetic merit. And the Danes show what they themselves learned from their Chinese colleagues. We salute the creativity, intelligence, and generosity of the Danish pavilion.
The Golden Lion Award for urban projects is awarded to Javier Sanchez/ Higuera + Sanchez for the housing project “Brazil 44” in Mexico City. “Brazil 44” is a project small in scale but large in possibility. It shows how with simple meanings, housing of great aesthetic quality can be constructed for people with limited resources –housing to which the inhabitants themselves can contribute formal design ideas. “Brazil 44” is a project which invites adaptation and mutation rather than imitations, a project which brilliantly explores the DNA of the ordinary urban house. We celebrate it as an exemplary piece of social architecture.
The Special Award for schools of architecture is given to the I Facoltà di Architettura Politecnico di Torino, for a project on Mumbai. We applaud the scholarly erudition and visual imagination of this collaborative effort of a student group in designing new housing for poor families.
In addition to these awards, the Biennale jury would like to single out three exhibitions for outstanding merit: the Japanese Pavilion designed by Terunobu Fujimori for the integrity of its forms and for the sheer pleasure it provides to the visitors; the Iceland Pavilion for an outstanding collaboration between the artist Őlafur Elíasson and the architectural office Henning Larsen; the Pavilion of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia curated by Minas Bakalčev and Mitko Hadži Pulja for the depth and poetry of its thinking about urban form, rendered simple by chalks words and images on a black board.
