The Biennale is always about cities. Rationalist cities, remembered cities, whacky cities, theatrical cities, post-modern cities. Architects love cities, they’re full of buildings. There’s nothing controversial there. But actually, they’ve always been far more about the trees than the wood. For this one, Ricky Burdett got wood. Cities are big. For the first time in our species’ history most of us now live in them. The countryside’s for cows.
I heard that Ricky’s big idea upset a few architects who thought the show should be more about them (more?), apparently there were too few icons for some. I can’t ever see too few icons, I was all with Ricky on this one from the beginning. The problem though is the politics. Cities are serious. They are corrupt, they seethe with poverty and inequity. They are venal and visceral, far more machines for living in than ever were Corb’s little cubes. They are also unknowable, unpredictable, the sites of riots and war, of slums and slaughters. While I think Burdett has taken the necessary first step in the abandonment of form for form’s sake he seems to have been loath to really bite. The Arsenale is a good effort, powerful post-Rem stats and graphics, brilliant 3D ECGs of extruded and mapped density, but it remains an attenuated text, overwhelming its underwhelming, rather wishy-washy conclusions. Cities are big. Getting bigger. They are full of buildings, many of which are getting taller. Some will soon have Olympics in them. Many have poverty in them. And public transport could be better. But, as is made perfectly clear in the British Pavilion, ultimately cities are not about buildings they are about people.
Bless.
I remain grateful not to know what the latest generation of concert halls and architecture centres will look like, how the new digitally generated towers will twist and weave they way into the clouds. But on the other hand I miss the meaty stuff. New Orleans is here but where’s Baghdad? Where’s Beirut? And the clearances in Zimbabwe, the destruction of the archaeology of the oldest cities in the Euphrates basin, how is terror changing our cities, how is not being able to take a tube of toothpaste onto a plane going to save the world? What is happening to travel, to borders?
The two pavilions which could best have addressed these issues tackled instead a hurricane and the commemoration of dead Israeli soldiers. These things, they seem to be saying are all acts of God and we are powerless. We can only look on in awe and commemorate. Israel’s pavilion is an offensive disgrace.
As the Art Biennale becomes ever more crowded, ever more unpleasant, ever more celebrity-driven, as it panders increasingly to the richest of the buyers and the richest of galleries, the Architecture Biennale has a real opportunity to transform itself from a self-congratulatory, masturbatory gathering of architects and academics into a thing of real substance which can become to make a real social and economic impact. Ricky Burdett has made the crucial first step, it would be absurd to criticise him for trying. But it remains, a first step and the increasingly real danger is that next time we will see the reaction, a return to the wilful and the whacky, the familiar circle-jerk of theory and post-rationalisation of arbitrary form. That is what architecture schools and magazines are for.
I was surprised that the pavilions stayed more or less on message. I thought architects always questioned the brief. Some were good, most were disappointing rubbish. I liked the British pavilion even it the impact of its quirky blend of chippy pop and as-found approach lacked the visceral impact which makes for the most memorable of pavilions. The French and Germans did OK but I couldn’t really see any point to either. Tschumi’s Swiss pavilion made me want to go home immediately. For a country with the best architecture on the planet this was either tragedy or irony.
The Hungarians were superb. The installations based on cheap tat found in the Chinese fleamarket in Budapest’s cheapest quartier made a sly and real point about the trade deficits between east and west, about consumer culture and about immigration and the changing nature of the centres of cities in the face on (still) increasing suburbanisation.
I liked the Gogolian darkness and absurdity of the Russian pavilion and the exquisite dullness of the Belgians, a self-deprecating and beautiful thesis on the ordinary which seemed to be lacking elsewhere. I also liked the Venezualan approach of fuck off, don’t preach to us and let us get on with it. A big DO NOT DISTURB sign with a certain Borgesian obfuscation. The Far East, with the exception of Japan, remains disappointing.
Burdett’s urban, anti-icon approach did not seem to keep the stars away, any offence they had taken was merely mock-horror. The event seems to be an increasingly important networking and status-seeking binge, it being important to be seen, yet there was no real dialogue, the discussions were weak, the criticisms were few. Architecture’s elite have become hugely powerful and everyone seems afraid to offend their peers who may be on juries or committees and standing up against them in the near future. The atmosphere is over cosy and only the installations which drift closer to art seem to retain the desire to provoke and even these succeed only rarely.
I genuinely enjoyed not seeing the new icons and though Burdett got it fairly right but I worry for the state of international architecture when a real opportunity like this turns out to be so conventional, telling us what we already know rather than what we don’t want to hear, skirting politics and the awful culture of jet-set globalised corporate crap which is homogenising urban centres. There is also a pervading sense of a lack of context. Venice is such a dream city, a setting which exists as powerfully in our collective memories as it does in reality, the proto-heritage-theme-park, that it should give us the platform to kick against and instead the pavilions would have been as comfortable in a convention centre as in this surreal setting among the model-pavilion-ciphers for fascist architecture, colonial design and the deadest hand of Deco. Where Rossi’s theatre of the world used Venice’s absurdity to make a point about archetypes and form, about architecture’s Carnevale tendency, nothing here seemed to reflect on this particular city instead we are given the city as idea, as technocratic construct of stats and aerial views, each seen from a balloon rather than the street. These are not the cities of Eugene Atget, Richard Wentworth or Borges but of those which appear on the models of corporate architects, those which exist to frame the big, bold, bland new developments which are fucking up their very fabric.
It is a start but it needs more work.
