![\"what](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/agency-better-living-designboom-11.jpg\")
the Agency for Better Living at the 2025 Biennial of Architecture in Venice was curated by Lorenzo Romito, Sabine Pollak, and Michael Obrist | all images \u00a9 Hertha Hurnaus<\/p>\n
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In conversation with Romito, Pollak, and Obrist<\/p>\n
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When chatting with Pollak and Romito, both based in Vienna, they begin by recounting the early discussions around the Agency for Better Living<\/a> as they waited for Romito to join the call from Rome. Pollak brought up that he\u2019s been very involved in advocacy work for Spin Time Labs, an occupied space in Rome that housed over 400<\/a> people and was recently disbanded, causing its inhabitants to sleep in the street during Europe\u2019s extreme heat waves. When Romito popped into the chat, the other two smiled to see him again before launching into a discussion on the future of our cities.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Researching cities of interest for sustainable housing<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u2018We were starting from the housing crisis,\u2019 Obrist remarks on how it\u2019s increasingly difficult for not just Europeans and Americans, but city-dwellers all over the world to secure housing, both in terms of finding affordable leases and being able to own property. \u2018It has to do with an incredible financialization of the housing market and a long-delayed response from a lot of governments to this kind of crisis.\u2019<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n They presented their research in the Pavilion through a combination of timelines, films, and other visual media that allowed visitors to walk through the histories and contemporary discussions happening in both Rome and Vienna. \u2018We involved a lot of researchers to write the texts together with us. At the same time, we did interviews with experts. We took a trip to look at both very early and current protagonists of co-housing living models and the basis of how they financed all that and how they organized it.\u2019 She also talks about visiting Romito in Rome to learn about his work on the ground. She points out that she believes, \u2018one of the biggest taboos in this work is really money,\u2019 elaborating that, in the past, wealthier people with inheritances had a kind of unfettered access to the city. Yet since the financial crisis of 2008, \u2018not having access to the city is becoming a problem for everybody.\u2019<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Vienna as the \u2018top-down\u2019 model<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u2018But its not just low rents, it\u2019s really a vision for society,\u2019 Obrist says when explaining why Vienna became the \u2018top-down\u2019 model for their first case study in the Agency. The curators saw the decades of success Vienna has had in providing incredibly affordable living solutions in the form of social housing and government-subsidized homes to about 60% of its residents. This \u2018vision\u2019 isn\u2019t just cost effectiveness, but it also comes in the form of providing services embedded in the building like, \u2018swimming, active pools, public spaces, and community spaces in the house itself.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Agency for Better Living at the Venice Biennial of Architecture \u00a0 At the Agency for Better Living, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":599642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[51972,27802,307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60,249273,21315],"class_list":["post-599641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-architecture-in-austria","tag-architecture-in-italy","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-modes-of-habitation","tag-venice-architecture-biennale-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/599642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"what](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/agency-better-living-designboom-10.jpg\")
Romito\u2019s been very involved in advocacy work for Spin Time Labs, an occupied space in Rome that housed over 400 people and was recently disbanded<\/p>\n![\"what](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/agency-better-living-designboom-06.jpg\")
Obrist remarks on how it\u2019s increasingly difficult for not just Europeans and Americans, but city-dwellers all over the world to secure housing, both in terms of finding affordable leases and being able to own property<\/p>\n