There wasn’t much architecture at this year’s Venice International Architecture Biennale. The German pavilion, for instance, contains nothing more than the leftover components from last year’s Art Biennale stacked in the centre; the floorboards ripped up. The Israelis have closed their pavilion. And the Swiss have put nothing but a carpet in theirs, on which is woven a plan of the adjacent Venezuelan pavilion.
The response, as one might imagine, was mixed. On the one hand, Patrik Schumacher, principal of the major architecture practice Zaha Hadid Architects, was irate. “The Venice ‘Architecture’ Biennale is mislabelled and should stop laying claim to the title of architecture,” he wrote. Yet other critics applauded the radical change of direction. “Artists and designers have occupied these spaces in a much more convincing way than usual,” wrote Tom Wilkinson.
Exhibiting architecture is tricky: you reduce these big, expensive outdoor structures into smaller indoor ones. And how exactly? Models? Photographs? Drawings? Films? All of the above? Why would you even bother? It is an impossible but necessary game. And yet it is something that we have been playing for as long as architecture itself; so long in fact, that it is architecture.
Of course, the palazzi of the Grand Canal remain untouched, and this may seem like an esoteric, avant-garde kerfuffle that is best ignored. However, even if you are a hopeless trad, the absence of architecture at the Venice Biennale is an unsettling development, which reveals much about the predicament of today’s creative classes.
Consider the German pavilion. Not only does it lack any trace of real architecture, but its limited rhetorical force is further diluted by the fact that this has been done before. For the 1993 Art Biennale, Hans Haacke and Nam June Paik ripped up the marble floor of this kicked-about building and stuck up the words “Germania” on the back wall. Just after reunification, the artists were using the pavilion designed by Ernst Haiger, a Third Reich architect, to call into question German expansion in an admittedly unsubtle way. We got it. Today, by contrast, it isn’t immediately obvious what this round of petulant floorboard extraction is meant to symbolise. Boo Nazis again?
If so, then what explains the Israeli pavilion? And the Swiss one? Clever reasons are given for this strategy of non-representation: the Germans want to concentrate on activist community-building on the southern Venetian island of Giudecca, although whether the poor Giudeccans, who seem to have a thriving community, had any say in the matter is not disclosed. The Israelis wanted to show that their modernist pavilion is a product of a machine age. The Swiss wanted to discuss “neighbourliness”. (No one stopped to consider how you’d feel if your neighbour was displaying a plan of your house in theirs. Neighbourliness is not the word you’d use when phoning the police.)
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