VeniceSuperBlog

Odile, bless her, spoke for many when she wondered what had happened to architecture this year. But a break, however brief, from starchitecture was welcome nonetheless, no? The bits of this Biennale that stick in the mind are the promises and the lies (is that too harsh?). France was the initial standout but on the first Monday, after the opening, the stairs of their house were barred… It was like nobody was at home or worse, nobody was welcome anymore. They were on one side of the do-not-pass-the-crime-scene tape, we were on the other. I’ll be back in November and, hopefully, we’ll all be ‘chez France’ again. If it was just that the mosquitoes were getting to them, like they were to me, I’ll understand…

So it’s the oddities, the radicals, that linger most. The nobel, proud, shocking confrontation of the barrios of Venezuela: no help needed, thank you! Russia, with its flooded, barrell-organ city that rains nuclear fallout (or fishfood?) rather than Disney’s snow… and the tiny, poignant glimpse of the lagoon that became a panorama in the cardboard model cell that fronted it. Japan, sensual as you want, breath-taking and tactile (they’ll sell you gorgeous, bagged samples of bamboo, rope made from rice straw and charred cedar with the exhibition catalogues but don’t get caught touching the real thing!). That crazy Korean cartoon about death, burial and living forever through starburst cell phone messages… The RCA’s joyous, riotous London, MIT’s ecstatic, Big Brother Rome and C Magazine’s amazing photographs. And two long, unforgiving walks to the end of the line: Greece’s subtle and confounding intelligence about the archipelago and the poetry of China’s roof-tile square, an unforgettable rumination on the effects of modernisation, both rewarded every footstep and more.

But it is the paradigm shift represented by the Arsenale that is ultimately important. The most telling observation of all was by Christopher Hawthorne in the LA Times, reflecting on the denoument in New York that had Lords Foster and Rogers traversing the Atlantic from Venice to New York and back again during Vernissage: “After a decade in which architects and their clients grew obsessed with image ˜ as digital technology made the stunning two-dimensional rendering as powerful a force in the field as any completed building ˜ the shift is overdue. After all, the lessons seem all too clear at the World Trade Center site, where the participation of the world’s top architects failed to budge developer Larry Silverstein or Port Authority bureaucrats even an inch from entrenched positions. The rebuilding process there ought to be primarily remembered, at least in architecture, as a place where image took on power and was soundly routed.” Hmmm.

From an insular viewpoint: shocked to find Dublin described by our neighbours in the Padiglione Italia as a “shrinking city” (apparently the definition of shrinking cities is a hot topic for discussion in Germany, too, especially in Halle - and is gleefully exploited by the officials of Hamburg, among others) in the year that Ireland’s population reached its highest since 1861 and the capital’s inner city population increased dramatically, largely through immigration; but absolutely terrified by the implications of the European rail-v-air travel share over the next generation as set out in the Arsenale in Ricky’s Europe of Regions (2025) v Europe of Cities (2005) exhibit. In my mind, it moves heneghan.peng.architects’ proposal for a rail link between Ireland and Wales to Ireland’s top-of-the-survival charts. Ireland’s exhibit will come home in the New Year, the basis for a series of national discussions and debates. In an election year and with population growth over the next generation projected at up to 38%, you might say it’s gotta be shit or bust.