2038: The New Serenity

An anthology set in the year 2038, published alongside Germany's contribution to the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.

The German pavilion was the work of 2038, a project started by Arno Brandlhuber, Nikolaus Hirsch, Olaf Grawert and Christopher Roth. It looks back from a future in which the great crises have been overcome. The disasters of the 2020s drew people, companies, states and institutions into common cause; they committed to fundamental rights and built shared systems on a planetary scale, while leaving local communities room for their own ways of life. Technology and data helped put ideas into practice, and architects were often among those who had answers.

Set somewhere between fact and fiction, the project drew on international specialists in architecture and art, ecology, economics, politics, philosophy, science and technology. It was presented through a series of films, which could be watched in full in the Cloud Pavilion, where work by the invited artists Bahar Noorizadeh, Diann Bauer, Mohamed Bourouissa, and João Enxuto with Erica Love was also shown.

Contributors to the book include Audrey Tang, Evgeny Morozov, Mark Wigley, Tatiana Bilbao, Suhail Malik, Hilary Mason, Leif Randt, Ludwig Engel, Mitch Joachim and terra0, as well as Christopher Roth, Olaf Grawert and Lukas Kubina.

Sorry Press, 2021. 260 pages, paperback, 11.5 x 18.5 cm.