Today, however, land is mainly treated as a commodity : it is largely private, sometimes the object of speculation, and is constantly being sealed. In Luxembourg, for example, an area equivalent to a football field is sealed every day. The lack of housing, the pressure on agriculture, and the loss of biodiversity increase the competition around access to and use of land which is, by nature, limited and non-reproducible. The question of land is therefore as much a social and ecological issue as an architectural and urban one.

This exhibition, shown at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2018, inaugurated Luxembourg’s presence at the Arsenale and was considered by critics to be the most political pavilion. The challenge was to make visitors feel what Luxembourg’s low level of public land represents in spatial terms for the construction of affordable housing and complementary social infrastructure, and how architects can react conceptually to the privatisation of buildable land.

The 11 projects from the imaginary history of architecture, symbolically liberating the ground, are all represented at a scale of 1 :33 and thus show the diversity that can exist within the same typology. However, this exhibition is not a plea for a city on stilts, but a call to question the constructability of the land.

To inaugurate luca’s new headquarters, this exhibition is complemented by a panorama of positions on the question of land in Luxembourg and by the comparison of more recent architectural experiments conducted by the University of Luxembourg.

Exhibition credits :

Commissaire / Commissioner
Ministère de la Culture

Curateurs / Curators
Maribel Casas, Florian Hertweck, Philippe Nathan, Andrea Rumpf

Équipe / Team

luca – Luxembourg Center for Architecture
2022 \ Eline Bleser, Lili Krack, Thomas Miller, Giulia Zatti, Séverine Zimmer
2018 \ Stéphanie Baustert, Maribel Casas, Bastien Fréard, Pascale Kauffman, Lili Krack, Thomas Miller

Master en Architecture, Université du Luxembourg
Marielle Ferreira Silva, Diogo Gomes Costa, Markus Hesse, Nikos Katsikis, Simona Popova, Christian Schulz, Sara Volterrani, Danièle Waldmann, lvonne Weichold

Luxembourg lnstitute of Socio-Economic Research
Antoine Décoville, Valérie Feltgen, Olivier Klein, Julien Licheron, Antoine Paccoud

Experts / Experts
Tom Becker, Jacques Brauch, Norry Dondelinger, Alain Guiheux, Laurent Langer, Dirk Löhr, Shaaf Milani-Nia, Christine Muller, Anh-Linh Ngo, Véronique Patteeuw, Jeff Ries, Frank Vansteenkiste

Identité visuelle / Visual Identity
Thomas Mayfried

Production et montage / Production and installation
Prefalux Construction