The future is adaptation beyond resilience. That is the message curator Carlo Ratti wants to tell us in this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, titled Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective, which opens on May 11th. For this edition, I have been granted a peek in the kitchen, as Ratti has asked me to review the entries as they were being formulated.
I have also become involved in several planned projects there: Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s expressive mechanism for bringing water from a canal, filtering it, and producing coffee; a temporary transformation of the Gran Caffe Quadri on San Marco Square to make the multicultural heritage and present day of Venice visible; and a symposium on “Pollinator Architecture” in a small pavilion created by Enri Ruiz Gelli and students at Virginia Tech.
Those projects are an indicator the Biennale’s larger concerns, as well as those rising in the discipline as a whole. After a decade that saw an increased broadening of our understanding of the field to include more of the whole globe and its diverse inhabitants; the signaling of the immense issues raised by our unsustainable and ruinous building practices; and the addressing of injustices built into the ways we design, make, and use buildings, there is now a focus on what we can do about at least one of the main concerns we must face: how to adapt to landscapes that are becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to inhabit.
The result is a Biennale that is strong on science and technology, with somewhat less concern about who is making architecture for whom, or what kind of world the discipline and its products shape. Ratti, a practicing architect and professor at MIT who is an expert on sustainability, is more interested in concrete steps architects can take than in speculations about the nature of profession or art itself.
As such, this Biennale reflects our current reality –as every Biennale is meant to do. There is a backlash underway not just against the drive for a more inclusive and multivalent discipline, but, as I noted in my last post, also against forms that are not familiar. We are facing calls for a return to classicism by the American state and to minimalist reserve just about everywhere else. Making good spaces or forms is something that seems to be getting lost in the debate. We should, in fact, not be making any new buildings if we want to be truly sustainable.
The academy is facing its own issues. Schools in this country, for instance, must think carefully about how they teach history and theory as they navigate the near-criminalization of telling truths about our complex and often violent past and present. In retrospect, the last edition of both the architecture biennale, curated by Leslie Lokko, and the art biennale, along with the appointment of more diverse leadership in art and architecture education and professional organizations, marked a high point of architecture’s ability to perform a critical role in the vital political, social, and environmental debates we must carry on.
What Ratti and others are saying, I believe, is that our reaction should not be to hide or regress, but to figure out what concrete actions architecture can take to confront this horrible backlash. Instead of dystopian imagination as warning, they propose the display of tentative models and building blocks. Instead of a collage of elements reflecting our complex identities, they propose bits and pieces out of which we could construct a better shared future. Instead of the problems of identity, the pose the concrete problems of survival.
The result is a curious mixture between can-do experimentation and caution –with what promised to be quite a few beautiful projects as a result. There are many proposals for building with materials that do not involve extractive mining and in such a way as to mitigate issues such as heat and rising water levels. There are ideas for new kind of community buildings using new materials. There are technological projects ranging from a new water bus station to a temporary bookstore that use the most refined technology to striking effects. All of these instances will express and foreground their invention rather than their social background.
The advantage this approach has, in my opinion, is to avoid not only the reactionary retreat into bombastic monumentalism favored by previous Biennale curators such as Sir David Chipperfield and Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, but also that aspect of more progressive efforts that were more about proclaiming injustice and difference than figuring out what to do about those issues. In that sense, Ratti’s approach is, as he himself admits, closer to that of Rem Koolhaas’ Elements of 2014, which deconstructed architecture into its constituent parts. Ratti now seeks to build on those elements.
I believe such forms of experimentation are vital to architecture’s future. However, I also think that hiding in familiar forms (as previous Biennales have done all too often) and continuing to have many too few of those that have always been left outside architecture‘s building and buildings (not by design, but by default), is problematic. The experiments must be inclusive, truly speculative, and open, but they must also build on the contested, riven, and contradictory social and physical ground on which they stand.
As always, the Venice Biennale’s official exhibitions, along with the buildings made by the world’s largest architecture firms (almost all of which are based in the United States or western Europe) only set the base line and I think this one, with over a thousand official participants and many site-specific installations, will be a spectacular one. It will be up to the many country pavilions, collateral events, and guerilla actions that come together in Venice in May and that should permeate our discipline, to figure out how to build justice, beauty, and openness on the adaptations being formulated in the giant laboratory into which Ratti is turning this year’s event.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: Uniformity in Architecture | Book on Frank Israel | Legacy of Ric Scofidio| Fredrik Jonsson and Liam Young | DSR's New Book | the Stupinigi Palace | Living in a Diagram | Bruce Goff | Biopartners 5 |Handshake Urbanism | the MONA | Elon Musk's Space X | AMAA | DIGSAU | Art Biennales | B+ | William Morris's Red House | Dhaka | Marlon Blackwell's new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.
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