A tower to the heavens, an enduring allegory of human ambition and pride. One people, one tongue, a monument to singular will. Until it splintered. The Biblical power scatters them, multiplying languages and sundering comprehension. The collective becomes cacophony. Babel has stood as the myth of difference recast as curse, plurality turned into burden. But perhaps it is misread? The scattering itself was not the punishment, but the insistence on one voice and one truth.

Architecture often inherits this—scripted as edifices to authority, casting singular narratives. But against the monumental, other structures insist on being built: over and over, 'othering' seeks common ground. We recognise Babel in the Bihar Museum Biennale, where competing stories jostle to be heard in the chorus of institutional authority. In Shimul Javeri Kadri's reading of Eileen Gray at ADFF:STIR Mumbai, her authorship, long overwritten, her story fractured and suppressed, is reclaimed.

In the ephemeral architectures of the cooperative Bellastock, their experiments portray how architecture need not pursue the hubris of permanence, that multiplicity itself is method. And in the collateral projects of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao at the Venice Biennale, fragmented cosmologies of the city reveal how memory, capital and survival speak over and through each other, and how urbanity is polyphony—never a single city, but numerous cities layered, contested, overlapping.

Babel is not curse but condition. We are already scattered, already plural, already speaking in many tongues. What matters is whether differences become ground for solidarity, or fissure for confusion and control. For all oppression is connected, all liberation, collective. If Babel scatters us, it also shows: no one story can ever hold or heal the world.