The entrance to this year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture is via a dark, hot hall in which air-conditioning units are suspended, spotlit and whirring above shallow pools of what looks like oil. It is sinister, dark and oppressive — just as it is supposed to be. This is a world about to broil, suffocate and flood. We have reached, curator Carlo Ratti suggests, the acceptance phase: it is too late to stop climate change and rising waters. What we need to do now is adapt.
You emerge into the theatrical scenography of the Arsenale, but here there is no great revelation either, no sudden wave of hope that architecture can save the world. Instead, fragments of nature are encapsulated in vitrines, tethered robots with humanoid faces jerk around, endless screeds of text assault the eyeballs in the dark while disembodied heads appear on suspended screens. Ratti, an exuberant MIT professor, inventor and architect, has brought together a tech-inflected cast of characters, from biology, IT and physics — even a few architects — to create something that is as much laboratory as exhibition. The result is bleak: a dark future in which humanity appears as a disease on the face of the Earth and apocalyptic visions of post-carbon futures focus on repair and remaking in a world tainted by pervading paranoia.
Architecture is not exactly absent but rather peripheral. At times it looks like a teen’s fantasy bedroom: all black and neon-lit, mediated through screens, augmented by sophisticated tech, robot arms and AI. At other times it seems engaged and keen to confront problems. Occasionally, the mood turns deeply dystopian, suggesting a desperation about architecture’s impotence — an ongoing crisis eloquently expressed here. This is a profession that, at its intellectual end, remains profoundly anxious about its reliance on extraction, capital, carbon and land, but which at the other end is gung-ho about planetary-scale transformation.
Ratti’s chosen title, Intelligens: Natural, Artificial, Collective, is actually three themes, not one. Of nature there is only a denuded version here: disembodied and lacking agency. Artifice? Well, yes, plenty. And yet collective is where he really succeeds; this Biennale features more participants than ever.
Interesting things lurk in the gloom. A temple for elephants, for instance, is a parabolic vault made of dung discs by Thai architect Boonserm Premthada. A huge curving wall is designed to illustrate the similarity between human and microbial populations. But there is also much we have seen before: acres of pointless, 3D-printed gloop; knitted shelters; trees contorted into useless sculptural forms and microbial structures (none of which has or will have real-world impact).
Most dismal is the finale. The large-scale scenography fades and we come to a surprisingly delicate Nasa space suit and a small, speculative group of items about future human life on Mars. Really? However bad life gets on Earth, surely it will be better than Mars. What exactly is the message here? It’s the kind of tone-deaf conclusion you might expect from tech titans cocooned in their bubbles of influence and wealth.
It’s a real relief to emerge into the light outside, the shimmering salty waters of the lagoon and the slowly decaying archaeology of a boat yard. They serve as a reminder of a time before architects experienced angst about their works and just built huge spaces that are somehow still adaptable and awesomely beautiful.
Some, however, are crumbling. The Italian pavilion, which usually houses another big thematic show is, like so many buildings in Venice, in restauro, which piles more pressure on the other national pavilions to rebalance the Biennale. Too many fall into the trap of too much text: unreadable scrolls of words on walls that assume each visitor has endless time to delve into the depths of the complex, admittedly often fascinating social situations facing contemporary designers. As a result, many of the most interesting stories are lost in the constraints of time and energy.
A few shine through with real clarity. In the Giardini, Bas Smets’ miniature forest in the Belgian pavilion is a beacon. You walk in and feel the trees and plants actively cooling the space — and no need to read a label. The Spanish also try something new by exhibiting good new buildings (focusing on more sustainable and local material supply chains).
The Romanian pavilion is a delight. Here, finally, are some 20th-century architectural drawings, neatly curated. It transpires that the focus is not only on the buildings, but on the figures inhabiting them. Artist Vlad Nancă has extracted some of these figures from their 2D confinement and applied them to the walls in stylised outlines that appear as subtle murals, occasionally escaping a little into 3D. The effect is quite wonderful and the curation of the drawings by architects Muromuro is lovely. It makes you realise that you have been deeply missing simply presented architectural ideas on paper.
The Polish pavilion takes a tongue-in-cheek look at security, slathering warning signs around one door and making a grotto for a fire-extinguisher on another. This highlights the general absence of humour in this year’s Biennale — rarely, perhaps, a strong point for architecture but welcome in small doses.
The British pavilion, dramatically draped with strings of clay beads, is fizzing with ideas but incoherent. Its disparate stories are apparently linked by their location along the Great Rift Valley from Mozambique to Palestine. There is something strange about grouping casts of caves, sculptural installations and proposals to rebuild Gaza using salvaged materials. Nevertheless, it at least means that the tragedy of Gaza is present here, although glaringly absent elsewhere.
Also representing the Middle East, an elegant bamboo structure designed by Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari serves as a place holder for the forthcoming Qatari pavilion (to be designed by Lebanon’s Lina Ghotmeh).
Water, so urgently present around this city, emerges as a recurring concern. I liked Chile’s reflection on water use and data centres (the real cost of the AI explosion). On the other side of the lagoon, in industrial Marghera, British architect Nigel Coates and the Architectural Association present a post-industrial fantasy cityscape, “Margherissima”, that deals with issues of toxic land and polluted waters but manages to suggest an architecture of creativity and pleasure, otherwise mostly absent here.
Then there is Uzbekistan’s captivating exploration of the huge heliocomplex “The Sun”. Designed in the last years of communism and completed in 1987, this futuristic machine in the mountains outside Tashkent focused sunrays via mirrors to create extreme temperatures. In Venice, the curators try to resurrect it as something between industrial seriate and cosmic symbol.
The US pavilion, usually a mess, is a mess. But its theme of the porch as a place of vernacular welcome is indeed welcome in the current political climate, and the big-gesture timber structure by Marlon Blackwell is striking. The dominant theme elsewhere is self-reflection. A handful of pavilions, including the Swiss, Danish, Japanese and Korean, are concerned with their own archaeology, meta-tales about their histories. Some good stories about forgotten architects and material culture emerge, but it all smacks a little of architectural therapy.
I used to think that the best thing about staging an architecture Biennale in Venice was that, if you disliked it, you could always escape back to the city’s decaying beauty and forget all the overwrought texts, dubious theorising and hand-wringing. Now I’m not so sure, unsettled by a cityscape more than half a millennium old that is more complex and prophetic than anything being built today. Those endless AI, robots, fizzing screens and spurious futures seem insubstantial. Has the magnificence of the city outside become a burden, a reproach?
To November 23, labiennale.org
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