... the architectural equivalent of a UN summit is as kooky and curious as ever

Uruguay opens a swap shop, Australia makes a splash with its pool while Germany and Austria’s pavilions tackle the refugee crisis with varying success 

Housing bubble … Home Economics, the UK pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Housing bubble … Home Economics, the UK pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale. - “Life is changing,” says the leaflet, which is peppered with interesting nuggets (likein 2014 the bed overtook the sofa as the most-used piece of furniture in the home); “we must design for it.” But design feels like the one task the team has studiously avoided, creating minimalist room-sets that feel like a cross between a sterile Thomas Demand sculpture and a lifestyle concept store, a sense confirmed by the odd inclusion of some JW Anderson clothes in a Perspex wardrobe. My advice: read the catalogue instead; it’s brimming with thoughtful ideas that simply don’t come across in the show. © Awakening/Getty Images

In a mischievous twist on this year’s theme, Reporting from the Front, the Uruguayans are encouraging visitors to forage for items from rival exhibitions, while dressed in plastic “invisibility cloaks”, and bring them back. The reward is a vacuum-packed bag of soil dug from a hole in their gallery floor. All items will be taken back and exhibited in Montevideo, they say, as a way of “reporting back from Venice”. Confused? You will be by the end of a day in the giardini.

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The Serbian pavilion has been fitted with a gigantic blue half-pipe and electrical sockets, where weary biennale-goers can recharge, while the Swiss have conjured a dreamy, climbable landscape in the form of a lumpy concrete cloud-cave. At times it can all feel like a souped-up pre-school playground – and, appropriately enough, this year’s biennale seems to be crawling with more toddlers than ever.

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The Belgian pavilion triumphs once again with a show celebrating architecture of the everyday, curated by Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu, interior architectsDoorzon, and photographer Filip Dujardin. They have rebuilt select fragments of a dozen buildings and structures in Belgium – from a pair of brick gateposts to an air-conditioning duct penetrating a door frame – revealing the care and attention given to such simple, seemingly mundane moments. The combination of these “sampled” elements, displayed like freestanding sculptures next to Dujardin’s unsettling manipulated photographs, celebrate architecture as the simple act of making, freed from the weight of thornier issues tackled elsewhere.

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The future of living is the subject of the British pavilion, Home Economics,curated by a young trio who studied architecture but who now variously write, teach, edit, plan and regenerate. Their backgrounds are evident in the eloquent prose and provocative statements in the accompanying leaflet, but also in the fact that the physical installation doesn’t quite share the power of their words. The exhibition looks at the future of the home, variously reimagined in timescales of days, months, years and decades.