Liane Lefaivre: The question I would like to ask you is: How did this Biennale, which for the overwhelming part was anything but beautiful, dealing as it did with ugly, sprawling, messy side of cities like Mumbai, Mexico City, Shanghai, Caracas and so forth, strike you, as someone who has definite views about the architecture of beauty. (I am assuming you had time to have a look at the main exhibition at the Arsenale) How do things look from your standpoint? Have architects gone round the bend and perhaps off the deep end? Should the situation be redressed?
Alain de Botton: ‘This was my first trip to the Biennale and my overwhelming impression was of the difficulties of reporting on architecture in an exhibition format. Shows such as these are uneasily poised between the pleasures of witnessing real buildings - and of reading books about them. They are often in danger of missing out on the pleasures of both. The Arsenale exhibition was very well done in its genre, but it was essentially a book on walls and I myself would have loved to sit in a comfortable armchair and read the book version, rather than walking down the eerie and endless corridor. This said, it’s good to see architects considering the problem of the city, though intellectually all the arguments are by now extremely familiar and have been well formulated by people like Jan Gehl. In a sense, most thinking about urban design could be termed ‘What Le Corbusier forgot and Jan Gehl remembered.’ Nowadays, everyone from Richard Rogers to Prince Charles agree on what needs to be done to make cities habitable. No one is proposing schemes as mistaken as those urban designers put forward in the 20th century. Good urban design has become common-sense. So the real challenges lie in the area of delivery: and it would have been good for the show to concentrate a little more on the politics and economics of getting good urban design. This is in a sense much trickier than the architecture. Then again, perhaps these themes are best left to the World Economic Forum or some such body to debate. My most joyful architectural experience of the Biennale came from looking around the French pavilion: it’s cheap, human, lively and inspiring.’
