By Christopher Hawthorne / Los Angeles Times
Editor’s note: This is the concluding part of the author’s coverage of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016, the 15th edition ongoing until November 27 after opening on May 28. The first part appeared on this page on July 19.
IT is not quite as grim as all that. Aravena (Alejandro, the 48-year-old Chilean architect who is this edition’s director) makes a point of insisting that the show include not just strategic but beautiful work. His biennale is generally optimistic, if also sometimes overly altruistic (with a few notable exceptions, including a sharply political project by Eyal Weizman analyzing “the distinct architectural signature” of drone strikes by the US military). In general, Aravena’s focus is on escape hatches (from oppression, lack of opportunity or architectural stagnation) and where to find them—or more to the point how to make them yourself, with your bare hands.
The only entry in the main exhibition made up entirely of American architects is from the Rural Studio, the design-build group operated in Hale County, Alabama, by the architecture department of Auburn University. An American documentarian, Gary Hustwit, is also here showing a new film, something of an outlier in the Aravena universe, on the design of the 21st-century office.
That sparse US showing leaves the American pavilion, organized at each biennale by the State Department, to shoulder a heavier weight than is usually the case, at least in terms of suggesting the current preoccupations of one nation’s architects. Titled The Architectural Imagination, it has been directed—in controversial fashion—by the editor and writer Cynthia Davidson and by Monica Ponce de Leon, for years architecture dean at the University of Michigan and now in the same position at Princeton.
The pavilion’s dozen projects reimagining sites in Detroit have drawn fire for imposing lofty, formally overwrought proposals on a struggling city. Though the exhibit itself is beautifully designed by Ponce de Leon, the projects (by architects including Greg Lynn, Preston Scott Cohen, Pita & Bloom and Andrew Zago) do stand quite blithely for everything Aravena wants to rail against: top-down and slickly rendered solutions shot through with disdain for the kind of expertise required to get architecture at this vast scale approved, financed and built.
The urban space cleared out by Detroit’s long decline is recast as an irresistible tabula rasa, a playground for American architecture’s digitally savvy but (with very few exceptions) politically illiterate parametric wing.
More effective are the national pavilions whose presentations suggest some solidarity with the larger themes of Aravena’s show without swallowing them whole. The British pavilion, overseen by Shumi Bose, Jack Self and Finn Williams, is an experiment in redefining residential architecture in terms of time rather than space. It includes full-scale mock-ups of apartments designed to be lived in for a few hours or months—there are the borrowers again—as well as a few years or decades.
TOUGH QUESTIONS
EVEN better is the Belgian pavilion, produced by the firms De Vylder Vinck Taillieu and Doorzon and the photographer Filip Dujardin. Linked in spirit to Aravena’s interest in unpretentious as opposed to preening beauty, it begins by asking if “bravura” architectural effects are still possible in cities struggling since 2008 with austerity and scarcity.
The answers are not what you’d expect. In displays by 13 contributors, including Stephane Beel and Office Kersten Geers David van Severen, the pavilion combines experiments in remaking existing buildings in physically crude, but poetic, ways with digitally manipulated photographs by Dujardin of buildings with no apparent function.
Dujardin calls some of these fictional constructions “memorials,” but it’s hard to tell what they’re commemorating beyond a grotesque banality or shrunken, apologetic sublime. One, a pavilion made of a mismatched collection of skinny columns holding up a wide roof, stands by itself on an abandoned concrete plaza; another shows a boulder squeezed between two apartment buildings. All of them are pictured under Soviet-gray skies.
The results celebrate the same architectural “imagination” as the American pavilion, but in ways that are both more subtle and more provocative.
Aravena’s main show, though full of timely and meaningful projects, doesn’t succeed terribly well strictly as an exhibition—as a sensory and visual experience on its own terms. (Over the last seven or eight biennales only Sejima’s rigorous, precisely choreographed 2010 show managed to impress in this way.) The little rectangles of text explaining each entry, hanging from small poles resting on the floor, are hard to read and then—when you are able to do so—blandly written. Some of the displays are overstuffed with projects and information, a sign that Aravena hasn’t been sufficiently ruthless in reminding the participants that the biennale entries that work best are almost always in presentation confidently stripped-down and in tone (choose one) blunt, elegiac or ironic.
In part this weakness may be explained by the quick time frame; it also seems to flow from Aravena’s generous sensibility, his interest in opening his arms wide to the architecture of the moment and featuring a range of voices usually not heard in Venice. In that sense, a desire for inclusion is his Achilles’s heel.
Some architects—some architects left out of the show, that is—complained in Venice that what Aravena has produced is little more than a politically correct biennale. It’s true that the only way this exhibition is likely to give offense is in its reluctance to give offense.
Yet, the tone is more tolerant and curious than strident or doctrinaire. Ultimately, the PC charge is a caricature, a reflection mostly of the anxiety of a Western architectural elite realizing that its influence is waning even in Venice, the place it has long gathered every two years to toast itself.
Image credits: Bravoure/Filip Dujardin