The Wooden Shack Among World Powers – Reflections on the Venice Biennale
10/06/2025
After a year of work, four overland journeys, and three months in Venice, The Pavilion – Architecture of Stewardship opened at the Venice Biennale on May 8th. As we celebrated Finland’s super year at the Biennale Architettura 2025, we reflected together with old and new friends on the significance of such events and the potential of exhibiting architecture. In this logbook entry, we share our journey, the thinking behind our exhibition at the Pavilion of Finland, and our personal highlights from this year’s Biennale.
Buildings That Cannot Be Owned
When we responded to the open call for curators for the Finnish Pavilion, we found ourselves reflecting on our own history with architecture—and on the reasons we founded our practice in the first place. Back in 2023, we shared a growing skepticism toward new construction and questioned whether building anew was truly the only contribution architects could offer society.
We were drawn to the idea that buildings cannot ever be fully owned. They exist within time spans far longer than those of the people who commission, design, or construct them. While users come and go, the buildings remain—stewarded by different hands across generations.
Rather than bringing anything new to the Biennale we wanted to study what already exists in Venice. By telling the story of our exhibition space, the Pavilion of Finland, we could showcase the work of the countless people who have repaired and maintained it over the years. Perhaps Alvar Aalto is not the only author of this building but rather it should be seen as a collaborative effort.
The Pavilion of Finland presented an intriguing case study: a modest wooden structure tucked beneath the ancient trees of the Giardini, surrounded by the grand pavilions of global superpowers. Yet despite its humble scale, the timber pavilion has stood its ground—year after year—captivating thousands of visitors from around the world each month. We felt compelled to delve into the archives, and what a gem we discovered.
The Process: Preparations and July Trip
Our work began in early spring last year with an extensive archival study, followed by interviews with those connected to the Pavilion’s history. Some key figures—like lead designers Alvar and Elissa Aalto, or architect Fredrik Fogh, who led the first restoration—were no longer with us. Understandable, as the pavilion was originally built in 1956.
Our first conversation—even prior to our selection as curators—was with architect Gianni Talamini, who led the 2012 restoration. Warm and welcoming, Gianni immediately saw the value in uncovering the human stories behind the pavilion’s maintenance. He also shared hours of video footage from the restoration—an unexpected gift that supported our vision of creating an audiovisual installation.
Next, we spoke with architect and restoration expert Panu Kaila, now 84, who restored the building in 1993. He handed us a VHS tape containing a documentary film about the process. Two generations, two restorations—and the foundation for transforming our research into a visual narrative.
Eager to deepen our connection to the Pavilion and its surroundings, we set off on an overland journey from Helsinki to Venice in July 2024. Our route took us by FlixBus through the Baltic countries, across Poland’s corn and barley fields, past Austrian windmills, and through the Alps—finally arriving on the Italian side. The aches from cramped nights and the sweat of hauling heavy bags quickly faded as we caught our first glimpse of the Grand Canal at Venice’s St. Lucia station.
This field trip offered an embodied experience of the Pavilion’s context. Under the sweltering July sun and lagoon humidity, we began to understand—physically—what it means for a Finnish pine structure to inhabit this environment. The Giardini’s dense plant life, a result of centuries of global cultivation, offers ample shade but also teems with insects: ants, spiders, daddy-longlegs, and relentless mosquitoes. Vines creep in through roof windows and the back door, eager to claim space within the Pavilion’s wooden frame.
The Pavilion lives in a delicate balance within the Giardini’s ecosystem—maintained by humans, yet constantly encroached upon by other-than-human life, ready to take over at any moment.
Our July field trip offered vital insight into Venice’s social fabric. We witnessed firsthand the challenges locals face—rising seas, mass tourism, and a deepening housing crisis. Local organizations like Assemblea Sociale per la Casa and Poveglia per Tutti generously welcomed us, guiding us through their spaces of resistance. These encounters made it clear that our exhibition should engage not just with the physical context of the Pavilion, but also with its social surroundings. We decided to produce a companion publication: a collection of essays featuring voices from local activists and academics, exploring both the Venetian context and the broader idea of stewardship.
Winter in Venice
After a short four day visit in September and months of planning, we again headed towards the city on water, this time leaving from Vuosaari Harbor in Helsinki, boarding Finnlines, a hybrid cargo-passenger ship alongside truck drivers and a young man from Finland’s west coast, bound for the Netherlands to start anew in horse racing. Thirty-six offline hours followed—watching the Baltic Sea, spotting shadowy cargo fleets flying distant Pacific flags, and sharing spontaneous conversations over German-style buffet dinners of potatoes and omelets.
We arrived on a cold January night in the outskirts of Travemünde. Guided by moonlight, we hauled our luggage—packed with filming equipment—along quiet roads flanked by fields and forests toward a small train stop. Booking overland travel often tempts with low prices, but reality hits when you’re stuck waiting between connections. At Hamburg’s station, we found refuge in the McDonald’s—a social microcosm and one of the few warm places open at night. There, a quiet ritual unfolded: regulars and newcomers alike shifting seats in the middle of the night, from one side of the restaurant to the other as half of it underwent cleaning.
After days packed into winter trains and a ferry, we arrived—mildly ill and worn out—once again at Venice’s St. Lucia station. The city was quieter this time, wrapped in a thick, dreamlike fog that lingered for days. Every morning, during thirty days in January, we walked to the Giardini with our filming and audio equipment. There, artisans Daniele and Valentina from Vita Restauri were at work on the Pavilion’s annual maintenance. They began by washing off the algae, dirt and other residues from the wooden exterior, almost ceremonially, before carefully applying a new coat—a deep blue, blended from local pigments and Finnish linseed-based paint.
Over those weeks, we got to know this kind duo well, filming over their shoulders and observing their craft up close. In the misty stillness of the Giardini, hours would pass in near silence. Above us, giant seagulls stood guard on the Hungarian Pavilion, shrieking now and then, as if to remind us we were guests in their domain.
Exhibiting Architecture
As we began planning our open call proposal in early 2024 we envisioned an empty building brought to life through projections that would evoke the memories embedded in its walls. Designing an empty space was no simple feat.
The first person we invited to join our working group was exhibition architect Antti Auvinen. Antti embraced the challenge of the minimalist exhibition design, and together we spent countless hours planning how to balance audience circulation with precise control of the lighting conditions.
We wanted to separate our interventions clearly from the existing structures so that the Pavilion’s original architecture would be legible. We decided on adding one major installation, a curtain—sewn by a Venetian seamstress—that would control the natural light and host the only exhibition texts. We wanted to trust the audience and let the audiovisual work speak for itself.
We invited video artist Merle Karp and sound designer Jussi Hertz to take the material we had compiled and transform it into a site-specific audiovisual installation. Merle has a background as a VJ and she is a co-founder of the Helsinki-based biennale of audiovisual culture Aavistus Festival. Merle’s work often deals with the exhibition space itself and she always prefers to project on an existing surface rather than canvas or screen. To Merle, projections serve as augmented reality—revealing new perspectives of the space itself.
Merle took the countless hours of archival material and new footage we had compiled and started finding the story among them. We spent almost a year drafting and rewriting the script as new material emerged. Merle identified moods and atmospheres in the different times of the Pavilion’s history—from the desperate moments of ruin in the 1970s to the almost mythological era of its 1956 construction and grand opening. Merle was fascinated by the tug-of-war between humans and other species as they battled over the control of this wooden structure over the years. The sound design by Jussi made us feel the crushing blow of the Gleditsia falling on the Pavilion and the melancholy of the Pavilion reduced to ruin every 20 years.
As curators, we wanted to free the audiovisual work from the responsibility of transferring information. The goal was not to create a documentary film but rather evoke feelings and reflections—to make the audience feel the laconic work of both daily cleaning and annual maintenance tasks.
Those who wanted background information could immerse themselves in the book that accompanied the exhibition. Architecture of Stewardship compiles the research and theoretical framework behind the exhibition. As a collection of essays it features contributions from Finnish and Italian writers and mirrors the collaboration of the two countries in the Pavilion’s history.
We could not think of anyone better to design the book than graphic designer Samuli Saarinen. Samuli took the initial—even contradictory—references we had from classical Venetian publications to modernist encyclopedias and merged them into a cohesive whole. Samuli had a vision of overlays—as if the pages had been printed on several times over the years.
We believe that the role of the Biennale exhibitions is not to directly transfer the wealth of research to the audience. Amid the overwhelming flow of information that is the Biennale Architettura, our aim was to give visitors the freedom to form their own interpretations. For those seeking deeper engagement, the accompanying book offers an invitation to a more thorough and reflective dialogue.
The Biennale
Biennale week was filled with meaningful encounters, reconnecting with old friends and getting to know new ones. We participated in a panel discussion alongside the Oslo and Lisbon Triennales and joined a book talk at the Belgian Pavilion. Conversations with like-minded architects and designers sparked new ideas and revealed projects that resonate with our own, offering fresh inspiration for the future.
This year’s Biennale emphasized situatedness. Many pavilions explored global themes through local narratives—a refreshing shift in focus at a time of hyper-globalization, and a welcome development in the architectural field. We were particularly drawn to site-specific pavilions that engaged in a dialogue with their exhibition spaces.
Some of our highlights from this year’s Biennale included the Polish Pavilion’s Lares and Penates: On Building a Sense of Security in Architecture curated by Aleksandra Kędziorek. Drawing on the idea of architecture as a shelter from threats—natural, social, or political—it questions whether architecture can truly create a sense of safety.
We were also inspired by the Holy See Pavilion’s Opera Aperta (“Open Work”), set in the former Santa Maria Ausiliatrice complex. Curated by Marina Otero Verzier and Giovanna Zabotti, and designed by Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO and MAIO Architects, the project emphasizes architecture as a collective act of care. In collaboration with international teams and local Venetians, it transforms a 500-square-meter site into a space for restoration and social connection.
We were drawn to the Luxembourg Pavilion’s Sonic Investigations, an immersive audio experience that shifts focus from the visual to the sonic, curated by Valentin Bansac, Mike Fritsch, Alice Loumeau. As a counterpoint to image-driven narratives, it invites us to listen—opening space for more-than-human voices and new ways of engaging with built and natural environments. At its core is Ecotonalities: No Other Home Than the In-Between, a sound piece by field recordist Ludwig Berger. Composed from recordings across Luxembourg, it explores how sustainability and digitalization are reshaping the country’s landscape.
Many times, we questioned whether it makes sense for the entire world to exhibit simultaneously, saturating the city of Venice with a number of exhibitions. Yet, perhaps there is value in having such a broad overview—a kind of global status check of architectural discourse. Amid the noise, it’s still possible to discover inspiring individuals doing meaningful work. We found both inspiration and potential collaborators in the side panels of the main exhibition. Simply being in Venice introduced us to people we might never have encountered otherwise.
Reflections
What do we take with us from the Biennale? For us, the guiding light throughout the process has been a deepening understanding of the context in which we are exhibiting. This has meant coming to terms with the Finnish Pavilion—not only as the focus of our research, but also as an exhibition space.
Unlike the grand stone and concrete monuments that surround it, the Pavilion of Finland is a modest, curious wooden structure. Its role is not to inspire awe, but to invite the audience into a quiet, intimate encounter.
In our view, the most successful exhibitions in the Finnish Pavilion have been those that focus on doing one thing — and doing it well.
At its best the Pavilion of Finland can be a deeply personal experience that speaks with focus and clarity in the overwhelming spectacle that is the Biennale Architettura.