Liane Lefaivre: Reality is pretty nasty. I think I heard you say something to this effect. Do you think this Biennale brought architecture any closer to the real world?
Paul Finch: Architecture is intimately concerned with the real world, dealing as it does with individuals and organisations as clients, planning and regulatory regimes, the construction and materials industries and the other professionals who combine to create buildings.
However, this concern, generally speaking, relates only to partial aspects of architecture’s true canvas – the city. I think the 2006 Biennale compels architects to consider the appropriate role for architecture in respect of at least the following:
• Should the future planning of expanding urban areas be a matter for planners and engineers alone?
• How can the demands of demographic change and developing world industrialisation be reconciled with environmental design?
• Are the most signficant housebuilding programmes in human history to be informed/guided/determined by anything other than the ‘ideology-free’ construction industry?
• Is the idea of a city aesthetic an irrelevance?
•Is the city more than the sum of its parts?
• Where do ideas about public space, both hard and soft, find a voice in cities undergoing uprecedneted growth?
• What conversation needs to take place without the particpants being accued of megalomania on the one hand, or impotence on the other?
