From an impressive shortlist of 6 contenders the British Council has selected Jeremy Till and a team from Sheffield to curate the British Pavilion for the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale.

In a public competition, the British Council invited curators to submit proposals for an exhibition that considered the issues facing Britain’s regional cities and offered solutions to the future of those cities. The shortlist arising from this competition was Jeremy Till et al, General Public Agency, Newbetter, CJ Lim, The Architecture Foundation and a team comprising Nick Barley, Nicole Bellamy, Stephen Coates and Peter Murray.

The X Venice Biennale of Architecture opens to the public on September 10th and runs until November 19th under the general directorship of Ricky Burdett, Professor in Architecture and Urbanism at LSE. The theme of this year’s Biennale is ‘City’. In two international exhibitions, the Corderie and the Italian Pavilion, Burdett will explore the relationship between architecture and social dynamics in 15 major world cities. Meanwhile Burdett has exhorted the national pavilions of the Giardini di Castello “to exhibit the richness and diversity of urban conditions in their respective countries”.

Jeremy Till, Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield, drew together a team from Sheffield including Martyn Ware, founder member of the Human League and Heaven 17; Ian Anderson of the internationally acclaimed graphic design studio The Designers’ Republic; the cross-disciplinary art collective Encounters; and Tim Etchells (artistic director of acclaimed experimental theatre company Forced Entertainment) and photographer Hugo Glendinning.

In response to a brief that focused on issues facing Britain’s regional cities, Echo City presents Sheffield as an exemplar of post-industrial cities everywhere, and uses the city as a paradigm for discussion of their identity and renewal. Till explains:

“Sheffield acts as a vehicle to push around wider ideas about cities and their social dynamics. In this way, it is an echo of many cities, buffeted by the social and technological forces of modernity. The exhibition has Sheffield at its heart, but is about much more than Sheffield; it is about any city.”

An “urban catalogue” will be assembled in the four side rooms of the Pavilion, the composition of light, sound and images in each room reflecting urban experience at a particular architectural and social scale; either 1:1, 1:100, 1:10,000 or 1:10,000,000. The central room is a dynamic interactive space in which visitors will be able to create their own version of Sheffield – an Echo City.