by DOUG SAUNDERS

We have turned the German pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which runs for the next six months, into another kind of European architecture, the kind you find in the poor immigrant districts of the big cities, fashioned by newcomers themselves from low-cost materials to suit their changing commercial and residential needs. Inside, you find an exhibition devoted to this kind of architecture, to the best ideas for using architecture to make immigrant integration succeed.

My own first encounter with this structure last month was doubly jarring. After all, it is quite literally a building-sized rendition of a book I wrote in 2010. Its walls are stencilled, in what I call an Honest Ed’s typeface, with my words, its many exhibits designed to illustrate my arguments with European architectural examples. Each room is an invocation of one of its key ideas.

The German pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale includes four large openings in the walls meant to symbolize that the country is open.
The German pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale includes four large openings in the walls meant to symbolize that the country is open. © Felix Torkar

That book was called Arrival City, and it looked into the inner functioning of the immigrant-settlement districts of 20 cities around the world, and chronicled the factors that make them succeed or fail. A circle of German architectural visionaries had invited me to turn this book, and my subsequent urban and migration research, into a national exhibit bearing the title “Making Heimat – Germany: Arrival Country.” (Heimat, a hard-to-translate German word, refers to a sense of belonging attached to one’s home village.)

How had my journalistic work on immigrant districts come to be the official voice of Germany at the world’s most prestigious architecture exhibition? How had Angela Merkel’s conservative government decided to make Arrival City the basis for its premiere statement about the state of architecture?

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A core component of our pavilion is a database, available online, which documents more than 400 refugee-housing projects currently under way in Germany (many are intended to be turned into social or student housing once the refugee emergency abates). Some of them are awful. Some are ingenious. After standing in a room surrounded by these examples, the notion that architectural design has large-scale social consequences becomes far less abstract: These designs, for better or worse, will affect the lives and outcomes of families, communities and cities for generations.

Other rooms, and the pavilion’s main chamber, are devoted to the “eight theses of the arrival city” we developed in a series of meetings in Frankfurt. These, distilled from my research conclusions, are emblazoned on the walls and illustrated with case studies of districts and projects in European cities:

The arrival city is a city within a city. The arrival city is a network of immigrants. The arrival city is affordable. The arrival city is close to business. The arrival city is informal. The arrival city is self-built. The arrival city is on the ground floor. The arrival city needs the best schools.

For the many thousands of people who have passed through our pavilion during the past two weeks, it has been a break from capital-A architecture and a swift plunge into the most turbulent debate in Europe’s modern history. Some, like Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, have lingered to take notes. Some have started arguments, sketched designs or told us they suddenly see their city’s kebab-shop district very differently. Others have just hung out, had a bite and soaked up the simultaneous sense of comfort and unfamiliarity – in the process, experiencing a small version of the sort of place we’re chronicling here.