The Norman Foster Foundation and Holcim have presented the research project "Essential Homes" on the occasion of the opening of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023.

The Norman Foster Foundation has designed a housing prototype to provide an adequate response (providing security, comfort, and well-being) to displaced populations who need housing and who can live for decades in "temporary" settlements. Holcim has brought the project to life with a series of sustainable construction solutions, making it low carbon, energy efficient, and circular, thus demonstrating how emergency sustainable construction can be possible.
 
METALOCUS is live reporting from the Venice Architecture Biennale, which takes place from 20 May to 26 November 2023. See METALOCUS Guide LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA for all the latest information you need to know to attend and know the best events and pavilions in LA BIENNALE.
A life-size prototype will be on display in the Marinaressa Gardens throughout the Biennale, accompanied by an exhibition at Palazzo Mora explaining the development of the project. Framed in the theme of the Biennale, "Laboratories of the future", this research project focuses on the debate on access to basic housing for all.
 
“How can we ensure that everyone, including some of the world's most vulnerable populations, can have decent living conditions? During the Venice Biennale we show our starting point around this idea: the result of our collaboration with Holcim.”
Norman Foster, President of the Norman Foster Foundation.

Essential Homes Research Project, by Norman Foster Foundation. Photograph by Chiara Becattini.
 
“I am very excited about the potential impact of this collaboration. It enables the construction of essential housing with circular, energy-efficient, and low-carbon building solutions, demonstrating that sustainable construction can be possible.”
Jan Jenisch, President and CEO of Holcim.
 

Essential Homes Research Project, by Norman Foster Foundation. Photograph by Chiara Becattini.
 
The Essential Homes research project provides security, comfort, and well-being. Highly sustainable, this prototype has a 70% lower CO2 footprint than traditional structures. This is because it includes a number of sustainable construction solutions from Holcim that make it low-carbon, efficient, and circular. It is composed of:
 
- Roll-up concrete sheets that serve as exterior coating and provide security.
- ECOPact low-carbon concrete pathways that connect homes and include aggregates that absorb light and reflect light at night, reducing energy consumption and light pollution.
- Energy efficient insulation systems, from Elevate boards to low carbon Airium foam, to guarantee thermal and acoustic comfort.
- Driving circular construction, Holcim's ECOCycle® recycled demolition materials are used to make the base of the Essential Home more resistant.
- Circular design, each component of the Essential Homes model can be reused or recycled.
 
The Essential Homes research project opens a fundamental debate on how to make sustainable construction accessible to all, thus guaranteeing the future of people and the planet.

METALOCUS is live reporting from the Venice Architecture Biennale, which takes place from 20 May to 26 November 2023. See METALOCUS Guide LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA for all the latest information you need to know to attend and know the best events and pavilions in LA BIENNALE.

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Architects
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Developer
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Norman Foster Foundation and Holcim.
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Dates
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May 20 to November 26, 2023.
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-Physical prototype in the Marinaressa Gardens.
- Exhibition in Palazzo Mora.
Venice, Italy.
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Chiara Becattini, Mika Cartier, Pablo Gómez-Ogando.
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Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.

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Published on: May 18, 2023
Cite: "Essential Homes Research Project by Norman Foster, at Venice Architecture Biennale 2023" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/essential-homes-research-project-norman-foster-venice-architecture-biennale-2023> ISSN 1139-6415
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