What does it mean to renew with care?
At this year’s Venice Biennale, Renovation = Renaissance, a new architectural installation by Louise Braverman Architect at Palazzo Bembo, offers a more layered than loud response. The project traces a delicate yet determined line between preservation and progress as part of the Time Space Existence exhibition.
It’s not about nostalgia. Nor is it about spectacle. This is architecture as continuity, where the past is neither erased nor romanticized, but invited into dialogue with the future.
The installation reconsiders what meaningful renovation can look like in our climate-aware, socially complex era through the lens of three built works: Chelsea Court, an affordable housing project in New York; Joe’s Salon, a revitalized neighborhood gathering space; and The Prefab Learning Landscape, a modular education platform.
Each project is surrounded by its own contextual archive: traces of history, local materials, vernacular cues. Together, they suggest that architecture isn’t just sited, it’s situated. Deeply.
Sound, too, plays a role. An ambient audio layer invites visitors to inhabit the in-between: past and present, form and feeling, built and imagined. It’s not just adaptive reuse, it’s adaptive resonance.
Rather than layering new on top of old, these projects interweave them. The result is not contrast but cohesion. Aesthetic continuity meets environmental urgency.
Renovation = Renaissance doesn’t present a blueprint. It offers a proposition: that regeneration can be quiet, contextual, and even poetic. And that sometimes, the most radical move is to listen, then build from within.
Photo: Patricia Parinejad
