Issue 118, Winter 2006 - Venice - Venice Biennale 10th: International Architecture Exhibition - September, November 2006.
Circa 118: Review  | | ElasticCity , henengan.peng architects | By 2050 more than eight billion people will be living in cities . [1] Eight billion people represents three quarters of the world’s population, and it was with this insistent headline that the Venice Architecture Biennale announced its dedication to exploring Cities . Architecture and Society . Architecture is becoming sexy again, in a way it hasn’t been since – oh, around the fifteenth century, when Brunelleschi was working out how to build Florence’s Duomo . ‘Sexy’ in the sense that even though the Architecture Biennale isn’t quite the star-and-schmooze fest the Venice Art Biennale is, people are starting to wake up to the fact that architecture is about more than the constructions (good and bad) that line our streets, litter our cities and mark changes in our countryside. And the artworld is noticing architecture too; the introduction to Hal Foster’s article on Zaha Hadid in the September issue of Artforum suggests that “it may be in architecture that we can best glimpse the look of modernity today.” [2] The reconciliation between the worlds of art and architecture isn’t always a good thing. There are the attempts to force collaborations between artists and architects, and there is the growing but misplaced belief that all architectural planning needs is a few artists, and then everything will be all right. There are also the cases of exhibition strategies borrowed from art installations, where ill-conceived buildings, a lack of real ideas or the bad intent of developers, are hidden with artistic and idiosyncratic presentation. That said, architects have been misrepresenting their buildings through mendacious models long before they renewed their love affair with art. The worst and most brutally disproportionate towers and buildings are usually modelled in gleaming (and sometimes illuminated) perspex. The word ‘podium’ conjures bandstands, but usually means a cement block with a car park underneath. The skies are always blue and nothing is ever ever dirty. This thought came to me in the Singapore pavilion at the Biennale, and again while flicking through the Arup book that was handed out to people drunkenly leaving one of the event’s many opening parties. Pages and pages of images of beautiful meadows and blissfully peaceful wildlife seemed rather incompatible with the development the book was intending to promote. There was also a certain level of incompatibility in the volumes of paper, leaflets and books handed out by so many of the pavilions promoting ideas of sustainability. [3] The Biennale’s main exhibition was at Venice’s Arsenale, a huge cavern of a building dedicated to exploring the present condition and future prospects of the world’s metropolises. Curated by Richard Burdett, the Arsenale was so information-packed it might have been better to have been a book. Presenting an at-times relentlessly doomsday-gloomy view of our teeming, socially unequal cities, the relieving elements came in the form of occasionally visionary ideas, planning and design. Impossible to take in all at once, the overall impression was one of vital big questions urgently demanding answers. How can cities accommodate waves of newcomers? How can the greed of developers be offset by planning principles and policy? How can cities make space for families? How many ‘iconic’ buildings can one city take? How can we balance urban and rural? And how can we best use our limited resources? It was with these in mind that I turned to the national pavilions housed in the Giardini, and dotted around the rest of Venice. The pavilions are an interesting mixture of national pride, quirky gestures and, yes, some architectural enquiry. And many do suffer from overly artistic exhibition strategies. Parts of the UK pavilion felt like an art installation; one that was high on concept, short on practical ideas. Exhibiting by country also means that of course there’s always going to be some nationalism (or national self-promotion) from some countries; it’s inherent in the structure of the pavilions, all competing for attention. Some countries transcended this – Hungary, for example, wittily raised an issue that Europe and the US urgently need to address, the often-ignored influence, through immigration and commerce, of East Asian culture (although they didn’t explore it fully, and so the presentation was irritating, rather than interesting); meanwhile South Africa had tourist brochures available, belying the impact of some of their exhibition with glossy testaments to the country’s achievements. You could see the relative successes of the publicity games over the opening weekend in the bags on people’s shoulders. Rotterdam 2007 was a big hit, and so were Denmark and Great Britain. And even after all the other shoulder bags had been handed out, Israel couldn’t have given them away. I wasn’t anxious for an Israeli bag, even before I had seen the content of their pavilion (an exhibition of memorials to dead Israelis, difficult to consider when placed in context of the current situations with Lebanon and Palestine), but it was to the United States pavilion that I brought my real prejudices. I walked around Building on higher ground with a sense of anger. Asking myself with what hypocrisy
could the US present responses to the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina, when the actual response had been so negligent? Where were the panels addressing the displaced poor? Where were the admissions that the government had ‘messed up’? And it was only later, after I had visited, been engrossed in, and generally applauded the presentations in the Irish pavilion that I realised how unfair I was being. SubUrban to SuperRural showed the responses of nine Irish architectural practices to Ireland’s growing urban and suburban sprawl. Some of the presentations were sensible, some fantastical, some extremely clever and some thought-provoking. Boyd Cody proposed reclaiming the Boora Bog from Bord na Mona to create a new county for Ireland. Bucholz McEvoy reimagined the way rural public life and communities might be organised. de Paor Architects suggested a return to the Irish Tower House as a new vernacular, to replace the bungalows dotting the countryside. FKL (also curators of the Irish exhibition) proposed a reorganisation of the way the countryside is settled, so that people may indeed enjoy the dream of a job in the city and a house in the country. Henchion Reuter suggested high-speed rail links, to ‘shrink’ the country, by shrinking the temporal distance between our cities (Sligo to Dublin in forty-eight minutes). Heneghan Peng imagined a road bridge between Ireland and Great Britain. MacGabhann Architects suggested ways in which holiday homes could sink underground when not in use. ODOS built up instead of out, proposing vertical sprawl in an imaginative way that was fantastical and fun. And Dominic Stevens came up with the idea of riverside settlements, where the attractions of the city float along, bringing the cinema, theatre, bars and restaurants past every now and then. What SubUrban to SuperRural did was underline the idea that architecture is about how we think about how we live, as much as the buildings that actually go up. Deciding to dispense with the usual reams of paper, much of the really gritty (and interesting) information was not in the elegantly executed exhibition, but in a book, published by Gandon, which will hopefully be available long after the Biennale is over. Unfortunately, this had sold out its initial delivery to the Biennale after the opening weekend, and the exhibition made less sense without it. [4] But if I was angry with the US pavilion, where was my sense of disgust at the Irish Government? Their historical corruption, which has led to a blighted countryside and appalling problems for suburban commuter families, has also led to Dublin being singled out by the “European Environment Agency (EEA) as a ‘worst-case scenario’ of urban planning so that newer EU member states such as Poland might avoid making the same mistakes”. [5] While government support is generally necessary to bring an exhibition to the Biennale, I have to remember to try to look at the ideas in the presentation, not the politics of the country. In this, of course, Israel failed on both counts. ‘Starchitects’ travel the world, bringing their visions and solutions across the divisions that the national boundaries (exemplified by the pavilions) create. Commerce also transcends national boundaries, and it seemed to me, as I thought about how unfair I was being to the US, that as national political influence loses ground to international trends and multinational finance, political nationalism grows ever stronger. Leaving the pavilions, however, thoughts of nationalisms and also of highlights (Korea, Japan, the RCA London and MIT in the Italian Pavilion, Ireland, China) are quickly dissipated by Venice itself; Venice, that fantastical city, where architecture has triumphed over geography and society over nature – for the time being at least.  | | Demographics , Henchion + Reuter Architects | | Tideaways (detail), MacGabhann Architects | Gemma Tipton is a writer and critic on art and architecture based in Dublin. Venice - Venice Biennale 10th: International Architecture Exhibition -
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