What if they gave a Venice Biennale and nobody came? Luckily, that wasn’t the case, as more than 5,000 people showed up for the opening days of the world’s oldest and most respected biannual exhibition, which was also Italy’s first major public event since COVID-19. What was absent from this gathering of architecture’s most diehard fans, however, were some of the exhibitions themselves: Canada, Australia, and Germany, usually among the participants with the strongest presentations, left the doors to their national pavilions shuttered or their buildings empty, instead referring visitors to virtual presentations that could be viewed from computer screens anywhere. Others, such as the Czech Republic and Venezuela, did not show up at all, as was evident both by the shuttered pavilions in the main exhibition area, the Giardini, and in the notably smaller number of presentations and collateral events strewn around Venice itself (more about the national pavilions and collateral events in my next post). Finally, there was an absence of almost any prominent architects, who usually attract their own sizable posses.
That latter reality, however, was by design. This year’s edition, delayed by a year and curated by Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, was titled “How Will We Live Together,” which seems to have meant: “Without either well known designers or eye-catching buildings.” A vast majority of the participants were presenting in Venice for the first time, and Pritzker Prize-winners were notably absent. The displays themselves consisted of a parade of dolls’ houses showing miniature versions of ourselves living together in a more organized and—if labyrinths and grids count as democratizing agents—more equitable manner. What curves and angles were on display brought to mind the domes, yurts, and pop-up cities popularized by American hippies in the 1960s and 1970s.
The exceptions to the norm, as always, made for the most enjoyable viewing. In the Arsenale, the half-mile long parade of installations that serves as the visual translation of Sarkis’s argument, two displays especially caught my eye: one by the Living’s David Benjamin, who designed structures made out of loofah, an expressive example of adapting natural materials to human purposes; and the other by the Germans Achim Menges and Jan Knippers, who reinforced a two-story steel structure with spun glass fibers to show off the possibilities of new technologies. For all that technical bravura, however, the strongest display to me was by Allan Wexler. For the last four decades, the New York-based Wexler, trained both as an architect and as an artist, has been translating the rituals that guide and strengthen social relations into installations of great beauty and humor. For the Biennale he revisited his previous work, sewing together shirts and table cloths as a means of forcing families to sit down together over a meal, and also constructing a harness a single person could use to support a cantilevered table where another diner could sit.
What was most remarkable to me about the Biennale was the fact that it seemed to exist in something of a historical and typological bubble. Many of the displays defaulted to boxes and pitched roofs, familiar vernacular forms that are a shorthand for community and are easy to build, but that in reality reinforce stereotypes of established norms and what communities are. Even though this was by far the most international Biennale yet, even featuring projects in Antarctica and the North Pole, that scope did not do much to broaden the formal, aesthetic, or social repertory of architecture beyond its European influences.
Moreover, the Biennale’s answers to the crisis created by our exhaustion of natural resources and destruction of our landscapes were largely technological, from machines that harvest sun to the usual sprinkling of algae farms and water collectors. There were few examples of adaptation, reuse, or upcycling. That our society is inequitable and plagued by violence that makes it impossible for many of us to “live together” did not go unacknowledged: the overwrought display by artist Peju Alatise, which served as the Arsenale's entrance, was comprised of sculptures pierced by what appeared to be instruments of torture. But the Biennale never really considered that reality at the level of architecture.
It is easy to criticize a Biennale, especially if you have organized one (as I did in 2008, when the critics also pounced). It is also easy to admire the fortitude and accomplishment of this year's organizers, who were hampered by COVID-19. Sarkis wisely set his sights beyond the pandemic, seeing its specific problems as indicative of larger questions about how we live together.
This is an earnest Biennale that asks serious questions of a broad array of participants. That those architects, designers, artists, and researchers failed to answer, or in some cases even respond to, the issues Sarkis raised, and the fact that they also failed to produce anything compelling beyond the passing interest of so many miniature worlds, is more an indictment of the discipline than of the Biennale itself.
Aaron Betsky is a regularly featured columnist whose views and conclusions are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine nor of the American Institute of Architects.
