IT’S ABOUT TIME
10th Architecture Biennale Rotterdam
September 22 – November 13, 2022

It’s About Time, the 10th edition of the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale, will be taking stock during its just over seven-week-long manifestation. More than a wake-up call, this edition will be showing realistic courses toward a livable future, this at a time at which the consequences of climate change are becoming increasingly apparent. The situation as it is today was predicted 50 years ago by the Club of Rome, which published its The Limits to Growth in 1972. This report outlined the possible consequences of an exponential increase in population, agricultural production, resource extraction, industrial production, pollution, and the loss of biodiversity. The report caused a commotion worldwide and marked the beginning of environmental awareness.

Fifty years after the publication of the Club of Rome report, the 10th edition of the Architecture Biennale Rotterdam takes stock, bringing together historical research (since 1972), inspiring practical examples (anno 2022) and future scenarios (towards 2072). This overview paints a picture that is both worrisome and hopeful. The exhibition features work that documents and maps the causes and consequences of climate change, creating a contemporary landscape that reflects the effects of climate change and calls for a response to this constructed hyper-reality.

Time and Speed as Crucial Factors
The title IT’S ABOUT TIME hints at the ever-mounting time pressure under which we are trying to counteract the effects of climate change and connect them to other social challenges. The title also zooms in on time and speed as crucial factors in architecture and spatial design processes and appeals to the profession to work effectively to resolve socioecological urgencies.

Setting Course for a Livable Future
While the Club of Rome recommended limiting growth, the Biennale shows real, hopeful possibilities of new, more radical courses toward a livable future: drastic, achievable transitions that lead to a just and ecologically sound world. The projects and practices that the Architecture Biennale Rotterdam 2022 is gathering together are ambitious, often the result of long-term research, and widely applicable. They have been developed in close collaboration with local actors, take the spatial aspect of socioecological issues as their starting point, and use time as a tool in the design process.

In a Former Gas Storage Facility 
The 10th edition of the Architecture Biennale Rotterdam will take place from 22 September to 13 November 2022 in Rotterdam’s city harbors. The exhibition IT’S ABOUT TIME will be presented in the Ferro, an imposing former Gas Storage Facility in Rotterdam’s western harbor area. The nearby Keilepand will host the work of ‘The Future Generation’ in an exhibition that comprises a selection of graduation projects by students from the Netherlands and Belgium. Connecting the two exhibitions is an extensive program of guided tours, lectures, debates and workshops for children and young people that will make room for dialogue, knowledge accumulation and experimentation.

www.architecturebiennalerotterdam2022.nl