The Venice Architecture Biennale is known as 'the Olympics of architecture' where top design professionals gather to share cutting-edge ideas on the world stage. This year, Australia will be represented by a team of first nations creatives. As they prepare to travel halfway across the world, they're putting the final touches on a plan to take a piece of home with them.
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00:00Inside this studio, a home is under construction, but this home isn't anything like yours.
00:12The walls are rammed earth, the floor soft sand, and timber frames are slotted together
00:18to create display shelves.
00:21In just a few months, home will be installed as the Australian Pavilion at the International
00:27Architecture Biennale in Venice.
00:29We'll be creating a large circular form within the centre of the exhibition space that will
00:34hold people together in conversation and through yarning.
00:40Seven First Nations designers, collectively known as Creative Sphere, beat out the competition
00:46for a coveted spot on the exhibition floor.
00:50We thought, what can we bring to Venice Biennale that no other country can bring?
00:54And that's First Nations ways of being and practising in our culture, so the world's
00:57oldest living culture.
00:59The final design has grown out of a collaborative process of sharing ideas, knowledge and professional
01:05experience.
01:06Through that process, it became very clear that place, country, our cultures and where
01:18we're from and where we live now are so important.
01:22This version of home is a prototype.
01:24The First of a Nation iteration will be made using materials sourced from the local area.
01:29We're working with the materials of Venice in a First Nations way, respecting that material,
01:36where it's come from, and embracing a circularity in the way that we work with it, with so much
01:42of the materials going back to country at the end of it.
01:46Sustainable, locally sourced, so trying to reduce any transportation activities as well
01:50to reduce the carbon emissions that come and the embodied carbon that comes from architecture
01:55and the built environment and what can be a really unsustainable practice globally.
01:59Uniquely Australian sounds and smells will permeate the space, and in stark contrast
02:06to the do-not-touch edicts doled out in modern day museums, here visitors are encouraged
02:13to use all their senses.
02:14What we want people to do is touch it, to run their fingers across it, to smell it.
02:19Your body should remember it, the feeling of walking through sand throughout the space,
02:24gently wafting eucalyptus at different moments.
02:27We want to impart a really memorable experience of home.
02:32The Biennale opens in Italy's famed floating city in May.