AT talks to… Elisabeth Endres, director of the Institute for Building Climatology and Energy of Architecture (IBEA) at the Technical University of Braunschweig and a co-curator of the German pavilion ‘STRESSTEST’ at this year’s Venice Biennale.
Photos
Josef Grillmeier, Patricia Parinejad
What is your pavilion about and how does it respond to the title of Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective?
In the not-too-distant future, even some European cities will face temperature increases so extreme that people, animals, plants, and infrastructure will struggle to cope. This threatens not only social cohesion and productivity but also the health and survival of its inhabitants. The need for action is urgent. Our exhibition STRESSTEST in the German Pavilion turns the future reality of the urban climate into an immersive physical and psychological experience. We want show that architecture and landscape planning can – and must – create climate-resilient cities.
What do you want your pavilion to achieve and what do you hope people take away from it?
STRESSTEST is conceived as a wake-up call — for architects, landscape architects, public officials, investors, and everyone who calls the city home. By immersing visitors in the physical extremes of STRESS and DESTRESS, we aim to move beyond intellectual understanding and provoke a visceral, bodily awareness of climate stress. The pavilion is both a demand and an invitation: a call to take shared responsibility and to act boldly and urgently.
The curators of the German pavilion. From left to right: Elisabeth Endres, Nicola Borgmann and Daniele Santucci. Not pictured, fellow co-curator Gabriele G. Kiefer.
What other pavilions have been a highlight for you?
I really like the Serbian pavilion: its fragile yet impactful installation will gradually dismantle itself using solar power over the course of the Biennale, highlighting issues of circularity and sustainability of temporary exhibitions. The Danish pavilion is also a beautifully curated lesson in how to engage respectfully with the existing built environment.
What else are you excited to see?
I’m really looking forward to seeing the main exhibition in the Arsenale. With the tight schedule of the opening week, I haven’t had a chance to visit it yet.
If you were a student coming to the Biennale for the first time, what would be your advice to them?
Take your time. Don’t feel pressured to understand or remember everything. Just explore and observe parallels and contrasts between the projects that catch your attention. The insights come later, through reflection.
What else are you working on at the moment?
My co-curators come from diverse professional backgrounds: Nicola Borgmann successfully runs the Architekturgalerie in Munich; Gabriele G. Kiefer is a professor of landscape architecture at TU Braunschweig; Daniele Santucci and I both hold professorships in building climatology — he at RWTH Aachen and I at TU Braunschweig. I’m also deeply involved in the German GEBÄUDETYP E initiative, which seeks to implement new building regulations that reduce complexity—not in terms of quality, but by simplifying the structural and technical requirements. The aim is to promote more resource-efficient, adaptable, and affordable architecture.
Source: Architecture Today
