Architecture Biennale 2023?

Prologue (January 2023) before Venice
The winning design for the Romanian pavilion at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, a project that uncovers forgotten solutions to contemporary problems, in collaboration with the Dimitrie Leonida Technical Museum, has been announced. I hope it will be, as the presented solution shows, a clever way to use the two locations, the Giardini pavilion and the small ICR gallery on the ground floor of the Romanian Institute for Humanist Research in Venice/ Palazzo Correr/Casa Iorga.
Late Prime Minister Nicolae Iorga, who endowed his homeland both in Rome and in Venice with world-class places to research and write, to exhibit and artistically imagine works of great value, deserves a tribute. Then, the professional and human quality of the curator, Mr. Emil Ivănescu, and his team, coupled with an already impressive experience in this kind of public presentation of architecture, are a guarantee that things will be fine. I have to say that many of the pavilions in the past have been rather average, at the average biennial level.
The problem, as I see it, is that the average level of biennials, since 1991 when I first went, has been declining, and they are more installations of all sorts of components than statements of the current, or future, state of contemporary architecture (with a few exceptions, the most notable of which was Fundamentals, curated by Rem Koolhas). More and more, I get the feeling that we have a kind of second-hand art biennale, rather than architecture biennale. Where are those like Paolo Portoghesi's biennale, which kick-started postmodernism in Europe in 1980?
Architecture itself has changed, it's true; it's not architecture that I have a problem with, it's the way it ends up being put on display in front of a public that is in no danger of understanding it better that way, to the detriment of the architects themselves, who go there to get a feel for their own profession. As has always been the case, this year too we have a progressive theme (The Laboratory of the Future), now curated by a specialist curator on Africa, Lesley Lokko. From this point of view of the curatorial theme, I think that the theme of the Romanian pavilion is well chosen, although we will be dealing with the futures of yesteryear, futures for which perhaps we were not prepared when they appeared...
In any case, I have already booked my tickets for Venice in June, and I am hopeful that everything will be done well at the Romanian pavilion in the little time left until this... laboratory of yet another future conceived in times of crisis... opens to the world...

Biennale opened with major controversies
In the meantime, the biennale opened and the prizes were awarded. Immediately after the opening came Patrick Schumacher's opinion, with which, if you have read the prologue, you will understand that I completely agree. With minimal exceptions, of esteem, such as David Adjaye, who richly deserved a Golden Lion and didn't get it (here all the awards, it's interesting the activist language with which the awards and mentions are justified, almost entirely managing to ignore the term architecture or urbanism). Neither in the Arsenale nor in the Giardini exhibitions curated by Ms. Lokko is the only subject, apparently, apparently Africa. Africa in the cosmos, for example, is a kind of Wakanda with a military dictatorship and anti-aircraft guns. Africa in the courtyard designed by Carlo Scarpa means the complete concealment of the author's delicate design gestures with garlands of firewood and Plexiglas pictures of human bodies from the original continent of mankind. The climax, this after you walk through one of the most pleasant rooms of the exhibitions, the one with the models of various buildings by African authors, among which David Adjaye's stands out, as does his installation next to the abandoned crane at the Arsenale, which looks like a (black) slice in a wooden pyramid through the interstices of which the sun sneaks in, as well as through the two openings high above.

This biennial is all about quotations from Ms. Lokko's favorite readings, displayed in obscurity amidst a plethora of pseudo-artistic installations and excessively many video projections that would make the visit a very long one. Not about Africa, not about laboratories of the future, not about Africa in its position as a laboratory of some kind of future. Many previous biennales have been weak. This one doesn't exist. No wonder the associated events, with conferences and screenings, are called carnivalesque...

National pavilions

Then there are the national pavilions. Yes, the Brazilian one is interesting, about the technique of using beaten earth by the Amazonian peoples, for which purpose all the interior furnishings of the pavilion were made of the same material. I thought the Austrian pavilion was very good, where a local project is on display, connecting the Arsenale de Giardini area by a pedestrian route that would allow the use of the gardens and the off-season biennale. The City Hall gave part of the Arsenale to the army and biennale organizers, which suspended the project, which would have gone behind the Austrian pavilion. The Austrians are protesting, through their own pavilion, against the political blocking of this project to increase public space in Venice. And they are protesting not only through the exhibition, but also by symbolically constructing the part of their own pavilion that would have been theirs. It's the story of a failure, of local parochialism, denounced by the Austrian architects, who want no part in it. Very cool: social stakes, battle for the quality of public space, architectural micro-insertion (there's a bridge over a canal running behind the pavilion) or urban acupuncture? All in one.

And this pavilion doesn't get an award, instead it gets the UK's, which is a joke, pretty much in the spirit of the whole thing. I found the Spanish pavilion potentially interesting, about the architecture of food, fromcraddle to grave, but too technical; the Finnish one, with its ecological Buddha, provocative. Sverre Fehn's Nordic Pavilion, by Sverre Fehn, remains the same brilliant work, now with a reiteration of the Eskimo culture of the north. In Canada it was some kind of protest action, unclear who by and against what. In the U.S. we saw nothing but barrels and bales of stored plastic. In South Korea - a very decent exhibition. In Russia it was closed, in Germany they were still working, in the Czech Republic it was closed, in Venezuela, friend of the Russians, it has been closed for a long time, and in Switzerland I didn't get a chance to go in, as it was closing time and we were told to leave.

Romania

Very honorable is the Romanian pavilion, where architecture, even if exiled in the attic of the space, was nonetheless present, from the results of the 2022 Iași competition with guests (UN Studio won) to the adobe toilet with reeds on top at Capul Doloșman, designed by Cătălin Berescu and the late Alexandru Nancu, former director of the Habitat and Art Foundation in Romania.
The idea of punctual elements of technical progress, which lacked the necessary context to take hold and grow, is interesting, despite the slight protochronist flavor, concealed by the white scaffolding. Even being true, ideas such as, to take the idea to the extreme, the invention of writing in Tartary, this only makes the generalized functional illiteracy and the quasi-disappearance of reading in the same territory even sadder... Here the time gap is much narrower, these are interwar ideas at the latest, and the strangeness of the Perșu or Capră machines makes the trip to the pavilion pleasant.
The individual flying machine to me, one, only reminded me of the state of the roads in my homeland, on the one hand, and of the extremely interesting project of the future from a few biennales ago, when a project asked the question what will cities, the buildings in them, look like when travel and transportation become aerial? It was a biennale where all the world's greats exhibited at the Arsenale. A long time ago.
So, sincere congratulations to the Romanian organizers. Unfortunately, the context in which Romania's exhibition survives is poor, to put it mildly. And James Stirling's 1991 bookshop at the Giardini, which I had the honor to be present at the inauguration and even shake hands with the brilliant architect, is in need of restoration.

Kengo Kuma

And so we come to a couple of off Broadway exhibitions, so to speak, i.e. outside the traditional venues of the Architecture Biennale, exhibitions that save a visit to Venice this year if you're in search of interesting architecture. First and foremost, La Palazzo Franchetti, across the Canal Grande from the Academy of Arts (crossing the bridge), a marvelous Kengo Kuma retrospective (with an echo-installation in the garden across the ponte), which dwarfs two other interesting exhibitions in the same prestigious venue, namely the pavilions of Portugal (expressively dedicated to water, in fact, countering the absence of water) and Qatar (Building a creative nation 2005-2030) respectively.
Kengo Kuma is presenting an exhibition called Onomatopoeia Architecture. It should be taken in at your leisure, or at least twice (the third time already makes sense - i.e. it makes sense as you dextrogically move through the space). Very briefly, the author proposes a series of Japanese onomatopoeias, which are pronounced doubly, each couplet is doubled by a grapheme of the author's and assigned an architectural gesture (full, empty, spiral, etc.). The aim, we are told, is to short-circuit a metadiscourse in verbalized language, which would parasiticise the understanding of the architecture designated by the onomatopoeic couplet. If we were to say, like Mircea Cărtărescu, paper-paper-paper, we would no longer have to explain the whole gesture of the censor who cuts and extracts part of the text. Something like that here. Putting the whole exhibition under the sign of onomatopoeic sonority, as a form of suspension of the escorting, explanatory language, is suggestive in itself. Moreover, however, to each such twin couplet of onomatopoeia, the author associates a project of his own that would illustrate it. We are all familiar with Kengo Kuma's great projects, their relationship with wood (a ship's prow made of plank and tension cables guards the entrance to the exhibition here as well) subjected to many different kinds of challenges (bending, transformation into waves and colorful ribbon-like waves and curls, and wrinkling drawn from traditional Japanese culture), but also metal (especially tensioned, by cables). What we learn, moreover, from this exhibition is a discourse that refuses conceptualization in order to propose atmospheres, halos, auras, in the good Japanese and phenomenological tradition. I don't know if the onomatopoeic sound comes before the design process or, after. Most probably, I think, it is after poesis (or poiesis?). But does it matter?
Exceptional exhibition, which makes the pauper nature of the biennale even more laughable/embarrassing.

Chipperfield next to Scarpa

There are many others, such as the traditional Time, Space, Existence exhibition at Palazzo Mora, or the Taiwan exhibition in the Ducal palazzo itself (which excels, unlike that of mainland China, which, I guess, no longer cares how it presents itself at such events in Europe). I couldn't see them all, obviously, which means another visit would be in order. But there's more to tell here.

Time, Space, Existence at Palazzo Mora

Old Procurations Restoration David Chipperfield Architects Milan

Two words on David Chipperfield's jazzy restoration (DC more on that later) of the upper floors plus terraces of the Old Procurations, which have not been accessible to the public for 500 years. DC strikes me as the best before such a challenge, like the Neues Museum in Berlin, or working at the hand of Mies van der Rohe at the National Gallery, also there.
The great architect, whose works I have seen in London and Seoul recently (with his AmorePacific cube), but also in his studio in a former warehouse in Berlin, has nevertheless found this incredible formula of contemporizing past material and, on the other hand, classicizing contemporary material. Well, you would say that the National Galerie was already classic. Here, in Venice, the interventions are minimal but recognizable, from a stairwell to the amphitheater of recomposed stone arches and Venetian mosaic along the space now filled with installations, computers, virtual reality and other interactive gizmos (not all of which work, I personally found), plus terraces that seem thoughtfully designed in terracotta and are completely deserted, like in De Chirico's paintings. Near the entrance to the old Procurations, the Olivetti shop by Carlo Scarpa remains the same painstakingly detailed marvel, a sort of yardstick by which to measure the restoration of Chipperfield's neighbor.

Carlo Scarpa

It goes without saying, while we're on the subject, that you have to make at least a day of Scarpa when you're in Venice, for the architecture faculty opposite the train station or the Tomba Brion on the mainland at San Vito d'Altivole, but especially (apart from the Olivetti shop already mentioned) for his exceptional intervention at the Fondazione Querini Stampaglia. Just outside the Giardini, as you come towards the vaporetto station, in the water, there is also a memorial dedicated to the partisans - a corpse washed ashore - but which may well now also recall the plight of African refugees who (don't) reach Italian shores, a theme to which Rem Koolhas, the author of the best biennale I have seen since 1991, had dedicated a substantial part of his Arsenale exhibition.

Neom

Zero Gravity Urbanism is the most intriguing architecture (?) exhibition I have ever seen. Gathered around a mountain of money, some of the most resounding names in contemporary architecture validate the fantasies of a tribal regime, against which Dubai's buildings are child's play. The Neom project proposes manifestos for a different kind of inhabitation (a dress rehearsal for when the planet is completely scorched and all that can exist are these artificial ecosystems mimicking the natural, defying gravity and thus tectonics). Neom means the Linear City, an industrial center called Oxagon, some tourist resort and a few other smaller projects (the Linear City people need to get out of the sandwich they've been sandwiched into - will they be chosen? - have they been forced? - or will they have to live their existence). Le Corbusier, for example, had already conceived the linear city in conjunction with the Obus project for Algiers (1930-33). I was also reminded of the tubular orbiting station in Interstellar. There, if you looked up, you could see the meadow and the neighbor's house, and the sky - only at the ends of the rotating cylinder (to generate gravity).
Now the linear city has already begun to be built. The ghostly, utopian (in the etymological sense of placelessness) or, rather, dystopian and panopticist to the limit (the city looks at itself) character could not escape these giant names of late modernity. I can understand Sir Peter Cook, with his dreams of Archigram, the walking city and other hogwash, or Wolf Prix with the sixty-odd early experiments with Coop Himmelblau. But the others I can't understand, except perhaps in the financial sense. Especially in the way they aesthetically cautize a political project that is clearly totalitarian, if not downright concentrationist - but certainly claustrophobic on a gigantic, perhaps planetary, scale. I hope it is worth the compromise. Sad are the justifications in the languor, again and again, linked to the environment, to resources, to all sorts of concepts crocheted, again and again, in the new wooden language; at Giardini, the apotheosis is over-armed military regimes; here, it is counterintuitive, anti-tectonic, garrison-cities proposed by regimes deficient in all the areas that really matter: dictatorial dystopias. Too bad, because the technology and simulations impress, the books and catalogs already published give the illusion of serious research, and the big names bail out the pharaonic project (not that Egypt doesn't have its own fantasies, with the new Cairo).

Conclusions

It is possible that only some architects envisioned this biennial as a showcase of the state of the art in our profession. It may not be possible to maintain the level of Paolo Portoghesi's 1980 Biennale, which defined and established European postmodernism (it had already been around in America for some years), or Rem Koolhas' Fundamentals. Portoghesi's biennale has all the ingredients to launch the theme of postmodernism from all angles. Aesthetics, theory, and even implicit self-irony, if I need only mention Venturi's unfolded... Ionic column (to understand it, you need to have read Vitruvius on the emergence of classical orders, something that has long ceased to be done in our country: in 1995, I was the one who cut the pages of the Romanian edition of the treatise, which appeared in the late fifties), or the absent column, cut out of a wall (or, from a completely different context, Umberto Eco's text on the meaning of the column). A dense biennial that not only summarized what was happening in architecture at the time, but also predicted its fate in the years to come. We were working in workshops and in the dorm with its catalog and with Charles Jencks' books in mind, read on the sly at the American Library.
The effort made by Fundamentals is equally overwhelming. Koolhas and OMA worked not only on their own curatorial projects, but also with the curators of the national pavilions; I remember Bogdan Tofan's stories of meeting with Koolhas' team and then at home with the few of us he had gathered at the UAR for the same purpose. Fundamentals was the best of all the biennales I have seen in Venice. I was so impressed by the work of documenting in such detail and condensed rendering of information that I really thought it heralded a paradigm shift and that we were witnessing it. But I was too enthusiastic and it is now clear to me that, at least here in my homeland, it has had no effect, since very few Romanian architects make this pilgrimage once every two years (Venice) or three (Milan) to take the pulse of things. As far as the students are concerned, Mihaela Criticos and I managed to go with a few young assistants and students, I think in 2008, but that's all. And this year I offered to go again, with the same, non-existent, success.
Some biennales had serious themes, like Less aesthetics, more ethics, or Beyond architecture, the one curated by Aaron Betsky, an art critic from Cincinnati, OH (so, a fellow countryman of mine), who barem programmatically assumed a programmatic departure from architecture, talking instead about what precedes architecture and what it generates, from atmosphere to social impact.
There have been, in past years, forests of three-dimensional graphs showing various conditions capable of impacting the production of inhabitable, social space; there has been urbanism of all kinds, from participatory to instant; there have been workshops brought to the arsenal (Balkrishna Doshi) and retrospectives (Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid) at the Giardini or in exhibitions outside the biennale. Social themes were also to be found at the penultimate biennale, attention paid to migration was there (even at the Koolhas), and there were worthy African architects such as Francis Kere.
But I don't think that, since 1991, we have had such a collapse in the level of the Venice biennale. There was, now, nothing much to see; where there was something, it either had nothing directly to do with architecture (such as a series of manufactured materials and textures) or was a poor set-up for political slogans of today's left (woke or feminist).
It's not just about the loss of relevance of this biennale in the context of so many other worthwhile architectural exhibitions emerging with their own agendas, but also about the very economic rationale of coming, as an architect or just as a tourist, to Venice after having already been 15 times and seen how the shops and restaurants are being taken over by Asians, that it is full of refugees who no longer sell pirated goods but have now ended up begging menacingly in the lonelier nooks and crannies of its once prettily preserved city...
The Moses project, which has been widely reported in the Italian press for years, seems to have come to an end, but in the evening there was water in Piazza San Marco again. And that is not good. Perhaps conclusions will also be drawn for our exhibitions, both annual and biennial, which must have a strong core of professional expertise and mutual (re)acquaintance between members of our guild, only to be followed by related events for a wider public.
This year's Venice is the opposite.