Wireframe of Life

Two shelter frames at the Venice Biennale. One bare, as it arrives in a crisis. One clad the way people around the world clad theirs: bamboo from Kenya, rammed earth from India, scrap metal from Colombia.

More than 120 million people are displaced. Emergency shelter is meant to be temporary. It rarely is.

Wireframe of Life was Better Shelter’s installation at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, a special project of Carlo Ratti’s exhibition, open in the Giardino delle Vergini from May to November 2025: two structures on compressed earth, one a bare shelter frame, the other the same frame clad by artisans in Kenya, India and Colombia in bamboo, rammed earth and scrap metal. Inside, a film by Senay Berhe: a day in Tana River, Kenya, where families displaced by floods are building new homes on higher ground, some of them on Better Shelter frames.

Rocket—Science brought the film home. adayintanariver.org plays it the way the Biennale did, as a loop. The book, a hand-bound edition sent to Better Shelter’s partners and donors, tells the same day in stills and words. A material folder carried the installation’s story to the people who fund the next one.

The Biennale closed as its most visited ever: 298,000 tickets and 17,584 pre-opening visitors, 315,584 in all, half of them from abroad.

TT’s story ran in Aftonbladet, Göteborgs-Posten, Borås Tidning, Barometern, Smålandsposten, Blekinge Läns Tidning, Skånska Dagbladet, Ystads Allehanda and Nyheter24. Vanity Fair Italia and Arkitekten wrote their own.