Venice is an absurd city, a city of incomparable loveliness sinking into its own stinking canals, a city in which, as Italo Calvino points out in his Invisible Cities, we can see anything we want reflected, from decadence to decay, immorality to sublime beauty. It is the proto-heritage city, the first urban theme park, a city insistent on exhibiting itself and one that exists more in the imagination and memory than it does in reality. It is, then, the most potent place to hold architecture’s biggest visionary event and even more perfect that it should host this year’s particular theme of cities.
The Architecture Biennale has, for a generation now, been a forum for newness, the place where professionals pick up on the new theories, aesthetics and ideas from around the world, a place where architects can congratulate themselves. When it began two decades ago architects were supremely unpopular, widely perceived as intent on destroying all that was beautiful and humane. They needed to gather to convince themselves they had something to contribute, that someone was listening. Since then they have become celebrities and pop-heroes, jet-setting superstarchitects single-handedly reviving post-industrial wastelands, reinvigorating city-centres, transforming slums into photo-shoot penthouses.
But with celebrity came insecurity. The past few shows were dominated not by the dense postmodern or structuralist theory that provided the context for the early shows, or by any theory at all, but by wacky shapes, what this year’s curator, the London School of Economics-based Ricky Burdett, referred to as the “fruit salad” approach. The Biennale went from a powerful, if pretentious, forum for ideas to a reflection of the vacuity of most contemporary architecture.
To counter this current, Burdett cleverly (and bravely) switched the subject from buildings to cities. At a time when, for the first time in our species’ history, more humans are living in cities than in rural areas, it seems the perfect theme. Cities, however, unlike the latest odd-shaped art galleries or hyperphallic skyscrapers, are infinitely complex, paradoxical, constantly changing and intangible.
The spine of the Biennale is, as ever, the Corderia, the rope-making workshop in the Arsenale, an attenuated corridor of post-industrial space, both decaying and as eye-wateringly picturesque as only Italian industrial architecture can be. Burdett and his colleagues have filled it with a huge dose of urbanity. Dizzying statistics about everything from mobile phone use to immigration are leavened with photographs by first-rate artists and by fantastical stalagmite models constructed from diagrams of density of population. The space becomes an engagingly extruded coffee-table book.
It is a type familiar since Rem Koolhaas’s epoch-defining S,M,L,XL, the only architectural text of recent years to have become a bookshelf staple. Koolhaas invented the blend of fact and fantasy, political awareness, cynicism, humour and pop-art radicalism that haunts the top end of contemporary architectural debate. He provided the final transformation in the way we see cities, building on the postmodern adoration of junk culture to create a cynical, hip, incontrovertible series of aesthetic flips – ugly is good, malls are magical, Lagos and Shanghai (not Paris and New York) are our vital future. So it goes.
Burdett’s show is more earnest. It is a supreme effort to bring architects back to the reality of the streets, to reintroduce the tough issues of poverty, transport, politics, immigration, crime and so on. But ultimately, the show offends no one. The statistics are over-familiar, the solutions are too general, too glib. The show tells us cities are diverse. They are getting bigger. Olympics will happen in some cities. Cities are full of people. Transporting people publicly is good. Corruption is bad. This much we already know.
But Burdett has made a start. He has already created a stir in the architectural world by broaching the bigger issues, his intentions are good and he is to be congratulated on a complex, big and engaging (if slightly tiring) effort.
The pavilions, though, are another matter. Unusually, most nations have attempted to stick to the brief. The UK, with the puppyish enthusiasm with which it adopts an absurd new European Union directive, comprehensively ignored in Europe’s heartland, has taken it seriously with a pavilion built around Sheffield. When the choice was made to go with the North rather than London the establishment made sure it was seen to be suitably outraged. But luckily, in choosing Sheffield, everyone could feel equally left out as there is no architecture there. So instead Jeremy Till, the curator, treated us to discourses on pop (local band The Long Blondes played a fine set at the opening), found objects, shops, streetscapes, the ordinary and the everyday. The city is not about architecture but about people. Bless.
I liked it. It more than fulfilled the brief by concentrating on what makes the city, particularly a robust city such as this one that has had a harder time than most yet retains its pride and identity, perhaps more through music than through building. There is a lesson there for architects, even if they do not want to listen.
The US pavilion could have been about the rebuilding of Ground Zero but instead turned to New Orleans. More about destruction than renewal, it features a genuinely moving set of photos and films but the ideas on rebuilding are insubstantial: again, architecture is the weakest link. The Belgian Pavilion alights on the ordinary and the country that brought us surrealism somehow manages to squeeze contemplative juice out of the dullest traffic roundabouts and plastic seating.Relaxing and poetic, it succeeds because it does not attempt to grab you by the throat.
Their Dutch neighbours, however, provide arguably the biggest surprise. We have come to expect from the Netherlands post-Koolhaas junk-space, big, bold graphics and extraordinary architecture in featureless suburbs. Instead, they present an exquisite architectural history of Amsterdam in the 20th century through the only coherent set of architectural drawings to be seen anywhere in the show. Delightful.
Alexander Brodsky’s Russian Pavilion is dark and disturbing, its visceral art installations grating against the breezy atmosphere elsewhere. The Hungarians, meanwhile, have managed to blend serious comment with an impeccable lightness of touch. The pavilion, possibly this year’s finest, is populated by kitsch toys bought from Budapest’s burgeoning Chinese flea-market and slyly comments on trade deficits, immigration and the country’s precarious boundary condition between east and west. The Japanese pavilion eschews the country’s in-demand superstars to focus on a beautiful organic architecture emerging from older traditions.
Most of the rest is rubbish, at best a diverting one-liner. Perhaps the biggest problem is a lack of bite. Beyond some staggering photos of urban horror in the main show there is too little criticism here. If the idea was to kick architects up the behind, to make them think about the world beyond the edges of their own models, there should have been more grit. It is easy to criticise anonymous far eastern people-coops, harder to criticise the home-grown superstars who are churning out abysmal sub-modernist pulp and congratulating themselves on how they are transforming cities. And finally there is a fatal avoidance of the bigger issues. Where is Baghdad? And Lebanon? How is terror changing cities, borders? The Israeli pavilion, almost unbelievably, is a show of memorials to dead Israeli soldiers. In setting up a show on cities, Burdett opened up the potential for real, radical political debate, which is ultimately lacking. No one, except a few flouncy architects, has been offended, and they’ll be back next year anyway.
This Biennale is not a lost opportunity but a good beginning. The danger is that next time we’ll see the reaction in the form of a series of chapels dedicated to odd shapes and horrible sci-fi animations of autistic future cities. The problem of what we can learn from it all remains. Venice, in its impossible, doomed beauty, is a useless model. What can we take home from the world’s most tasteful theme park? That cities look good on water, that they become more powerful when reflected, when remembered, when dreamt? Or is it just that they are, despite it all, a very good thing?
