The British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist once told an anecdote to Poetry magazine that read like this: “After twenty years I still remember the response of a psychotic patient of mine when asked to distinguish between a river and a canal. Without hesitation he responded: ‘A River is Peace, a Canal is Torment.’”1Iain McGilchrist, “Four Walls.” Poetry (1 July 2010) So it is with Venice.
In May, I took an uncompensated journey to be on a panel about criticism at the Venice Biennale – not the art one, with its infamous streams of money and partying, but its more stolid cousin, the architecture one. Rather than sportscar aficionados, on the Biennale’s opening weekend, Venice’s tortured canals boasted gaggles of over-30s primarily concerned with how many angles one can sew into a single black smock. To the dismay of the field’s practitioners, dealers don’t hover around, cash in hand, to buy architecture. Even though architecture is, at its core, a commodity – an assemblage of commodities – it doesn’t work that way. And unlike with other events that the uber-rich tend to gravitate to, Instagram models are not particularly interested in mid-career design wonks, not to disparage the wonks.
This is not to say there’s no money in architecture, or at the Biennale. The exhibition spaces, a combination of a gaggle of small national pavilions and an endless ex-naval yard, the Coterie della Arsenale, were both teeming with it, though only the latter will be the subject of this essay. After leaving my hotel and powering my way through hundreds of sweaty, honeymooning bodies that always inflate Venice’s May population, I finally rounded the corner of the Arsenale. There, in a cramped corridor filled to the gills with elevated Uniqlo, the familiar suspects emerged from the crowd, every so often. Bjarke Ingels, the young starchitect with a predilection for Lego and comic books who featured on Netflix’s Abstract: The Art of Design (2017), wasn’t so young anymore, nor as innocent. A man always enthralled by the titans of the tech industry to such an extent that he cops both their informal way of pitching billionaires and their equally informal garb, Ingels walked the corridor in a hurry, with a bit of paunch in his face. A pair of Bhutanese craftsmen trailed dutifully behind him, about whom, more later.
My friend Daham, here in Venice as a worker – his task was the installation of one of the few political projects in the Arsenale by the Architecture Lobby, a group that advocates for better working conditions for architects – tapped me on the shoulder. “Dude, the Sauds,” he murmured, gesturing at, I kid you not, two familiarly turbaned young guys dressed from head to toe in streetwear, their Yosemite Sam-like barrel pants flapping in the stale breeze. Everything is so stupid, I thought then, a thought I would have many times over the short course of my stay.
Venice in the summer is a cesspool of mosquitos and human sweat, which makes the average architect’s commitment to wearing black nigh heroic. I myself packed an edition of “the uniform” – a boxy black dress and equally weird ballet flats – in order to blend in, much to the detriment of my beading forehead. There is, however, a way of wearing black that signifies money, and you saw a lot of it going down that narrow street. This was the opening weekend of the Biennale, after all: one of the few opportunities for the global architectural elite to get a fit off, to see and be seen, to peer from behind their sculptural eyeglasses at an endless array of projects of
varying quality.
Were it ever thus! The Biennale likes to pretend it is an age-old institution because, well, its brother, the Biennale for artists, is. That Biennale dates back to 1893, when the city established an exhibition of Italian art to celebrate the silver anniversary of King Umberto I and Margherita of Savoy. Over time it internationalized, and it has served as a kingmaker for artists ever since. The architecture Biennale, however, debuted only in 1980, at the decadent height of Postmodernism. Paolo Portoghesi, once a fascinating architect of late modernism and later one of Postmodernism’s many obsessive chroniclers, served as the inaugural director. In order to understand the present Biennale at all, one must first take this historical diversion.
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The Presence of the Past: First International Exhibition of Architecture: the Corderia of the Arsenale (1980), ed. Gabriella Borsano, published by La Biennale di Venezia (Book cover). The cover is illustrative of the exhibition, which featured a series of facades down an avenue within the exhibition space.
Thanks to the luck of a secondhand bookstore, I own a copy of the first Biennale monograph, put out by the mouthpiece of the era, Rizzoli. It’s falling apart to the extent that, as I type this, I have to cradle it gently in my lap. For those unfamiliar with Postmodern architecture, it’s the visual style we’ve come to associate with the 80s and 90s – think neon accoutrements, simplified pediments, skyscrapers made of green marble and topped off with silly gables, and architectural features that were exaggerated if not outwardly Disneyfied. (Disney itself was the great patron of this particular art.) Postmodernism blended the languages of the old with the idea of architecture as semiotics, as a system of signs and symbols, all executed with the tools of mass production and fabrication perfected in the twentieth century.
Examples of “neon accoutrements” in postmodern architecture: In these two projects by John Outram, elements are painted in bright yellows, blues, and reds. The first is the interior of the Judge Business School at Cambridge University, which is a kaleidoscopic funhouse of superimposed yellows, reds, and blues. The second is the Isle of Dogs Pump House, London, where the pediments of the columns flanking the door are painted in bright red, yellow, blue, black, and white.
Image left: Judge Business School: Image: Cmglee, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (cropped) https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en. Image right: Stephen Richards, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic (cropped) https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-sa/2.0/deed.en.
A prime example of a “simplified pediment” is the M2 Building, Tokyo, by Kengo Kuma (top), although this project is a source of shame to the architect, who has since shifted his practice away from postmodern motifs and artifice, toward traditional Japanese joinery and material tectonics (or the use of materials in ways which honour their innate physical qualities; e.g., stone in compression). Other examples include the Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans, by Charles Moore (bottom left), which features concentric facade-like colonnades which have little to no relation to the buildings they front, and the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, London, by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi (bottom right), whose facade references the motifs and elements of classical architecture in ways that are impractical, contradictory, and disharmonious upon closer inspection.
Image top: M2 Building. Wiiii, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported,https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en. Image bottom left: Piazza d’Italia: Sandra Cohen, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en. Image bottom right: Sainsbury Wing: Richard George, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en.
Examples of skyscrapers with silly gables include the Sony Building, Manhattan, by Philip Johnson, John Burgee, and Simmonds Architects (top left) featuring a pink granite facade. Its roof resembles an A-frame with a loop hole cut-out in the gable area, directly on and below the implied roof crest. Another example is the Dallas Arts Tower (formerly Chase Tower), Dallas, by SOM (top right) which similarly features cut-outs in its gable area. Although not a skyscraper, the Vanna Venturi House, by Robert Venturi (bottom), is a prime example of an architect playing with the gable area and subverting or contradicting an on-looker’s formal expectations.
Sony Building New York: David Shankbone, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en. Dallas ArtsTower: Nmajdan, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/bysa/2.5/deed.en. Vanna Venturi House: Smallbones, Public Domain.
Examples of Disneyfied buildings include the “Binoculars Building” (Chiat/Day Building) by Frank Gehry (left). It features an entrance framed by an enormous sculpture of binoculars by Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen. The Team Disney Orlando Building, by Arata Isozaki (right), features extruded Mickey Mouse ears sheltering the pedestrian entrance followed by a playful clash of geometric forms, each covered with brightly colored, plaid-like patterns and punctured with pixel-like, regular arrays of windows.
Binoculars House: IK’s World Trip, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en. Team Disney Orlando: Declan M. Martin, Public Domain.
The movement was, like many things in the Reagan 80s, a reaction against what came before – in this case, modernism, which by then had entered its Mannerist phase. After decades of International Style glass boxes and their skyscraper offspring, a heightening crisis of form versus function emerged. Like the architecture of the nineteenth century which struggled to reconcile historical forms with new technology, leading to the birth of modernism itself, the constant search for how to uniquely express modernist dictum architecturally led to a bizarre period called Late Modernism.
This is actually my favorite period of architecture because it was very, very weird. Its weirdness is in part shaped by the fact that architects were still thinking about big structures for big structural solutions: mass housing, environmental utopias, “paper” architecture depicting imaginary or theoretical cities. Automation, space travel, and cybernetics fueled these architectural fantasies. In this respect, our current moment shares some commonality with its Late Modern counterpart – the predilection for technological prowess is a constant in all things these days, but the choice of execution in the form of drawings, imagined communities, modelmaking, and other non-building projects is as popular now as it was then, albeit for different reasons. Paper architecture these days is a great way to market a firm, cause a splash, and secure grant money.
Examples of utopian and paper architecture. Left: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Sketches for Broadacre City, which he imagined as a utopian sustainable solution for urban sprawl and all manner of social ills. Right: Peter Cook giving a talk about Archigram, an avant-garde British architectural group. Among their “paper architecture” projects was Plug-In City, which envisioned the city as one mega-structure that high-tech dwelling cells and standardized components could be slotted into.
Broadacre City: Kjell Olsen, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en. Plug In City: Peter Lindberg, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en.
Examples of Late Modernism. Left & center: The exterior and interior of the Westin Bonaventura Hotel, by John Portman. Right: Centre Pompidou, by Renzo Piano.
Credit: Jean-Pierre Dalb.ra, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en. Geographer at English Wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en. Hotel Lobby: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en.
What was actually built during Late Modernism, however, was equally strange – and exciting. Sprawling megastructures straight out of science fiction, concrete buildings in all forms of curves and recesses, tinted curtain walls (a la the Westin Bonaventura Hotel of John Portman), inside-out buildings like the Centre Pompidou, whose services and circulation were the form – each of these grappled with how function was expressed architecturally, and often couldn’t do so without some form of compromise. In the Pompidou, for example, having the services exposed is like turning the building inside out, but at the cost of, well, very high maintenance. The fact that this period, which spanned the 60s and 70s, coincided with the end of architecture as a public good, especially with regards to housing and culture, as well as the dawn of neoliberalism, should not go unnoticed. The tendency was most marked in the US and Britain. Late Modernism had big plans, but that’s in part because governments and societies writ large did too.
Learning from Las Vegas: Revised Edition (Cover), by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Paperback – Illustrated, June 15, 1977, The MIT Press.
In the late 60s, historians like Vincent Scully and critics like Charles Jencks began noticing these contradictions between purported function and ever more byzantine form. To their credit, it was a bit absurd that a building like the Pompidou was willing to expose all its guts to the vagaries of the weather in order to resolve the old masters’ dichotomy. That these buildings were, despite all their protestations, not purely functional, was a dirty secret the early postmodernists sought to expose. The canonical text of Postmodernism, husband-and-wife architect duo Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas (1975), made the case that late modern buildings, specifically Paul Rudolph’s towering, Brutalist Crawford Manor, had become the very thing they railed against. “Ironically,” write the pair, “the Modern architecture of today, while rejecting explicit symbolism and frivolous applique ornament, has distorted the whole building into one big ornament.”2p. 103.
Venturi and Scott Brown’s critique was populist in sentiment, though apolitical in content. In order to repudiate the gross contradiction of late modernism, one had to look towards what they called “ugly and ordinary” architecture, which is to say, the vernacular – the ticky tacky houses and Las Vegases of the day. In an era where the scale of the automobile had replaced the scale of the human being, the sign on the highway was the most effective form of communication. Buildings, then, should function like signs, a concept they called the “decorated shed.”
The new architecture would pull from the languages of the everyday, the languages the people wanted, and combine them, as the Venturis did in their Guild House, a Philadelphia apartment complex for the elderly, with older architectural forms – in this case, the Palazzo. These ideas were refreshing and earnest in their day. In our current moment of revanchist “trad discourse” they serve as an uneasy precedent. The defense of the vernacular, an architecture that high architects had long rejected with elite disgust, was and remains compelling. However, it was not long before such an architecture became, in a word, co-opted by the elite institutions and wealthy individuals it had once railed against. In short, it became not a reaction to modernist crises, but a reactionary movement writ large, a movement, to paraphrase Fredric Jameson, with no futurity, addicted to pastiche. Form for form’s sake that, despite its use of historical languages best suited to certain typologies, failed to discriminate between the corporate headquarters and the shingled retreat in the Hamptons.
Postmodernism would peter out in the late 1990s, but not before it became the de facto language of theme parks, where it found its best home. The children of the era – and I count myself among them – long endlessly for it; no movement could capture the imagination of a child better than the one employed by fast food restaurants and the entertainment industry. Theirs were trips to Harris Teeter, where giant foam replicas of food hung suspended from the ceiling. Nothing, in comparison, would ever be fun again.
1980, the year of the first Biennale, represented an important moment in Postmodernism: that of total triumph over its predecessor. The irony of merging Postmodernism’s anti-establishment streak with, well, a new and definitionally elitist institution like a Biennale is not lost on the contemporary reader. The critic Charles Jencks, Postmodernism’s hagiographer-in-chief, was in his polemical element writing the introduction to the catalogue. Deeming Postmodernism a “Radical Eclecticism” magically bereft of the faults of the earlier eclecticisms of the nineteenth century, he claims that this movement “…seeks to enhance a pluralist society in all its richness and diversity and one that looks for a deeper justification for its use of various languages of architecture that existed in the past.” History has not vindicated him here, much to his later despair.
Jencks, who viewed the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe, the St. Louis public housing estate starved out by years of racist municipal policy, as the death of modernist architecture (and yes, to him, it was modernism, not racism’s fault) continued his tirade against the movement here, too. “Obviously, weighted with the problems of Modernism – the overscaled commissions of Late-Capitalism, the 50 million-pound quick-built monolith, the symbolic poverty, the malapropism – [Late Modernism] mitigates these problems with an aesthetic sweetener, an anaesthetic some would say.” Let it be known that Late Modernism was confused, paradoxical, ineffective, while Postmodernism was universally understood, humanistic, rooted in the body. I actually quite like Jencks as a writer and critic; I often imitate him myself. But make no mistake: this was a man and a movement taking their victory lap.
The monograph itself is a who’s who of the moment: future elevated McMansion builder and Disney wage slave Robert A.M. Stern; his more playful and childish cousin Michael Graves; the luscious, drippy, erotic facades of Hans Hollein; the humorous visual gags of Stanley Tigerman; Charles Moore at a transitional time in his career, during which he moved away from the vernacular and more towards the spectacular; and a burgeoning and still-interesting Frank Gehry, who took a completely different approach to the whole thing, choosing to mix languages of construction rather than those of ornament. Beyond the copping of the Art Biennale, Venice was a natural match for such a project. Its iconic canals are lined with spindly, highly ornamented palazzos built primarily in a period spanning the ninth through the fifteenth century, in what has become known as the “Venetian Gothic” style.
Venetian Gothic itself was an ad hoc historical eclecticism reflecting the city’s medieval independence and worldliness. Its most famous structure, St. Mark’s Basilica, a dizzying array of patterned marble, a veritable lexicon of columns, Byzantine-influenced domes and mosaics, and a forest of gothic arches, is a natural icon for our later group of architects desiring to convey the same worldliness, albeit in the language of concrete and cladding. It was from these building blocks of ornament, roseate arches, and palmette capitals that the nineteenth-century design reformer and eclecticist architect John Ruskin believed all of architecture could be derived. It was a taxonomy of style one could go out and view en plein air. Venice, even in Ruskin’s time, was overtouristed. For a century at least, it had ceased to function as the mediator of a globalized feudalism, but instead became a living museum, the logical endpoint of any bourgeois son’s Grand Tour. Pompeii, as my friend Daham put it, without the volcano.
Much like the cluttered facades of a rich city’s Gothic, the array of projects at the 1980 Biennale represented architecture at its most decadent, its most self-gratifying, and in a departure from Ruskin’s reformism, its most conservative. In this respect, while the Biennale’s debut may have been fun and imaginative, in terms of self-gratifying indulgence the distance between it, and the lackluster one I was about to embark upon myself, was small. Even so, I longed for Hollein’s chrome-plated palm trees in the lobby of the Vienna Travel Agency and the insanity of Best Supermarkets. I longed for something worth all that gilded beauty lining the canals, just outside. What I got instead was robots.
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Entering the Corderie della Arsenale, a dark, cavernous building that’s already inherently helpless-making, it would be easy to mistake what’s on view for the Consumer Electronics Show. The halls are filled with glowing LCD screens, robots, 3D-printed installations, interactive gimmicks, and renderings of blobby, oozing buildings accompanied by jargon-filled texts. On that latter bit fear not: if such writings are too taxing for one’s screen-addled brain, the Biennale has provided AI summaries of each project to ensure further cognitive decline. If, to the architecturally informed, so much of what can be gleaned at first glance feels oddly familiar, that’s perhaps because many of the masterminds behind the 2010s’ faux-utopian, techno-optimist thought (dutifully bankrolled by oil magnates) still haven’t given up control of what little is left of the field’s public–facing image.
The glittery renderings of Bjarke Ingels’ floating smart city Oceanix, a conceptual project that is by now almost ten years old, live on in countless plastic boards fastened to the Arsenale’s columns. They claim to reimagine the world through water (i.e., a swoopy, far-fetched rendering), or, as one German (yes, German) project puts it, “translate [the] indigenous wisdom [of the Khasi people] into modern living architecture” (i.e., also a swoopy, far-fetched rendering.) The latter is not, unfortunately, an isolated case of orientalizing the vernacular, but it is perhaps the most embarrassing way of inadvertently confessing to it. The array of placards, models, diagrams, and reams upon reams of text allow even the stars to get lost in the weeds. Jeanne Gang, of Chicago skyscraper fame, has some hexagons glued to a pole. These displays may be uninspired, but they are among the field’s less sinister examples.
The darkness of the Arsenale itself meets its match in some of the Biennale’s bleakest projects. Takashi Ikegami and Luc Steels’ “Am I a Strange Loop?” features a humanoid robot that takes audience questions in an attempt to persuade the crowd that it is self aware. Someone asked, “Are you feeling anything right now?” Its answer was painfully obvious, though the small crowds with pre-opening passes didn’t seem to get tired of the spectacle. Such frivolities are not very architectural in nature, but neither is a lot of what ends up in the Arsenale. Every year, a critic later told me, more and more of the Coterie is occupied by the big conceptual projects endemic to the art world. Soon, the Biennale that once diverged from art will be reabsorbed, a split protein in a prion disease.
If you thought this would be the last and worst use of a robot, you’d be mistaken. In Philip F. Yuan and Bin He’s “Co-Poiesis,” humanoid Boston Dynamics robots play instruments and dance under a canopy made of wood recovered from trees felled by the Bebinca typhoon in Shanghai. What’s intended as a display of “environmental adaptation” becomes an unintentionally apocalyptic scene from a future where climate change-induced disaster can at least offer us building materials, even if no one is left to use them. This post-apocalyptic sentiment was echoed in the project “Lunar Ark” by IVAAIU Architects. It features another Boston Dynamics robot, the doglike one called “Spot,” which, beyond such circuses, is mostly employed by militaries and militarized police departments. In the display, Spot constructs, with the help of a humanoid arm on its back, a “data center on the moon.” The data center in question appeared to be a bunch of metal toasters radiating from a central spine. People in gorpcore sneakers crowded and took pictures. Maybe I’m the one who’s wrong.
The culprit responsible for what became an ongoing and inexorable obscenity is Biennale director Carlo Ratti, founder of the MIT Senseable Cities Lab, one of the school’s many ominous endeavors. Ratti, a longtime mainstay of the smart cities set, is an architect-engineer and a robotics startup founder – his companies Makr Shakr and Scribit aim to develop robots that can do the work of bartenders and draftspeople, respectively. Here we find a man whose dream is to further proletarianize both leisure and architecture, to remove what little human touch is still utilized by the latter’s practitioners, which, I suppose, passes for innovation these days. Imagine an architecture without architects, and not in the sense Bruno Rudolfsky invoked when talking about the spontaneity and creativity of vernacular architecture. In fact, quite the opposite.
Per its own manifesto, Ratti’s MIT lab aims “to use big data to observe urban phenomena in order to develop new approaches to understanding, designing, and studying the built environment” – i.e., an academic’s Sidewalk Labs, without the public processes built in, not that there were many to begin with. Ratti organized his Biennale under the theme of “Intelligens,” referring to so-called intelligences grouped into the Natural, the Artificial, and the Collective. But if the robots are any indication, it’s clear that what really excites him, and has always excited him, is an artificial intelligence, or at least a technological one, with the other two intelligences playing a supporting, if not entirely rhetorical role. The invocation of humanity is merely a way of escaping blame.
Ratti’s brand of technooptimism has always blurred the line between big data and surveillance and, as a robotics peddler, he’s also long gravitated towards the post-human, the idea of a world in which our participation in society itself is eradicated in favor of endless consumption, Wall-E style. More sinisterly (if that’s even possible!) Ratti’s ilk mark the beginning of a shift in architectural thought, following their AI overlords and tech industry accelerationists, toward a belief that the time for stopping or slowing climate change has passed, and the time for “climate adaptation” is all that’s left to us. As Ratti writes in the Biennale’s introductory remarks: “In the time of adaptation, architecture is at the center and must lead with optimism…[it] must rethink authorship and become more inclusive, learning from science.”
This vulgar scientism is perhaps to be expected. Ratti, as a director, is clearly a compromise between the allegedly liberal high art world that, for reasons of optics, must remain “progressive-facing” at all costs, and a deeply reactionary government spearheaded by Giorgia Meloni. The president of Italy chooses the director of the Biennale each year, and Ratti is a test run asking: how far right can we get away with being while also maintaining plausible deniability? His appointment also represents a backlash against the decidedly radical 2023 Architecture Biennale, titled The Laboratory of the Future. Headed by the Ghanian-Scottish novelist Leslie Lokko, the ‘23 Biennale reoriented itself around projects and ideas from the African diaspora. Lokko’s own words express the sentiment of this edition, one of the best of the last 10 years, thusly:
It is often said that culture is the sum total of the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves. Whilst it is true, what is missing in the statement is any acknowledgement of who the “we” in question is. In architecture particularly, the dominant voice has historically been a singular, exclusive voice, whose reach and power ignores huge swathes of humanity – financially, creatively, conceptually – as though we have been listening and speaking in one tongue only. The “story” of architecture is therefore incomplete. Not wrong, but incomplete. It is in this context particularly that exhibitions matter.
An architectural vision like this one couldn’t be any further from Ratti’s. Instead of highlighting the nuances of who tells architecture’s stories, and thereby the nuances of humanity itself, Intelligens flattens humanity into the kind of noble meatbagism endemic to the tech world. In Ratti’s architectural future, we no longer retain even the cyborg’s dignity in the most blighted metaverse. Instead we are mere product to be fed to the meat grinder of a failson’s Mars colony – or worse, a bevy of customers whose grimy faces are barely worthy of being stuffed by robot caterers.
If the 1980 Biennale marked the height of creativity within architecture’s last centralized movement, the 2025 one represents its opposite: the field’s terminal decline. The star architects of the 2000s and 2010s, whose embrace of technology and athletic formmaking emerged from their boredom of an overly decorated world, now languish in the Arsenale like overpriced charcuterie, sweating in the sun.
Some of these falls from grace are sadder than others. In a display of pure diva-ness, Rem Koolhaas, dripped out from head to toe in black Prada (a brand for which he has long served as vassal), refused to answer moderator Christopher Hawthorne’s questions during a panel on criticism he participated in with Ratti, who himself left early after basically repeating the same stuff written in his statements. Jean Nouvel, an architect who remains obsessed with the same exterior gardens and green walls he began showcasing in the 2000s, such as at the Musee du quai Branly in Paris, has a new design to show off in Kuala Lumpur, hanging off a pair of silvery, dildoed skyscrapers. These are neither bad nor interesting. They’re just there, inert renderings, as they would have been nine years ago, when I first started writing about architecture. Such projects give the game away. It’s the same stuff, merely exported to a new generation of wealthy nations.
Then came the arch-panderers. The project of Zaha-less Zaha Hadid Architects, titled “Participatory Urbanism,” I found tucked away in an inauspicious corner no different from those housing the work of underpaid grad students. It offered passersby a Meta Quest headset, which no one put on. I can’t really blame them. There are so many projects – over 700 – in the Arsenale that one grows fatigued by the middle of the great hall. This, I think, is by design. It shields the Biennale from criticism because, if you want to address, say, the robot situation, there’s always some obscure yet more progressive project the curators can point to and say, hey, you missed this! But this swell of content also benefits firms like ZHA who are pretty obviously phoning it in.
“Participatory Urbanism” is essentially a map of the city of London that can be played in the game Fortnite. One can feel their desperation to appeal to an imagined party of young people, the online-poisoned minds of Generation Alpha. With the exception of a few characteristically swoopy buildings, there is not much new here to explore, nor much to glean about urbanism from, well, playing Fortnite. It does reveal, however, what these architects consider participatory, which is to say, consuming media while the real urbanism cooks in the anthropocene heat. There is no more true democracy in the real city, so one must compensate for it with the proprietary video game one.
Then there is the matter of Thomas Heatherwick, architecture’s reigning champion of anti-intellectualism and forever-darling of the billionaire class. I realized I saw him palling around, tall and wavy-haired, outside the Coterie, too. The perils of the uniform. Heatherwick’s choice to do an event at the Russian Pavilion was a surprise to many participants, who, in a matter of hours, called for a boycott, supported by the Ukrainian Pavilion. (In Heatherwick’s defense, the Russian pavilion had been converted to a general educational space, as both Russia and Israel did not participate.) Overall, the Biennale served as a good platform for Heatherwick’s usual (and insipid) schtick about how everything from climate change to affordable housing could be solved if buildings were simply less formally boring. Tone deaf as always, and equally resentful of the public as well as doubtful of their intelligence, Heatherwick, in his book Humanise, even extended this critique to Grenfell Tower, blaming “boringness” in part for the catastrophic cladding fire that killed 72 people.
His contribution to the Arsenale – “Space Garden” – was typically science-fictional. It consisted of a tentacled, chandelier-like contraption teeming with teeny tiny egglike portals in which one could allegedly grow radishes. Surrounded by acrylic panels with photographs of more livable biomes, “Space Garden” aims to be an “orbiting, autonomous greenhouse that will support cutting-edge agricultural research and global engagement in the future of our Earth-Space ecosystem.” The firm expects the project to actually go up in space in the next five years. Given the fact that every SpaceX rocket has a penchant for self-immolation, this claim is dubious at best.
Neither of these goofball failures hold a candle to Bjarke Ingels Group’s “Ancient Future: Bridging Bhutan’s Tradition and Innovation.” Located near the event stage, onlookers watched patiently as two Bhutanese artisans (whose visas in Meloni’s Italy must have been a real challenge to obtain) carved winding, animalian Bhutanese traditional motifs into three connected wooden beams. Behind them, a robot arm followed their movements, smoothing the carvings out, brushing away the sawdust, perfecting, if you want to call it that, what is human in the way only a machine can.
The attempt, of course, is to show symbiosis between humankind and technology. The result is not only superficial; it bears more resemblance to an Orientalist human zoo. The underlying cruelty of putting craftspeople from a faraway country to work performing their art for a gaggle of rich tourists and leering spectators at an event that openly longs for their impending obsolescence is obvious. However, I find this equally humiliating for Ingels himself. Once considered a Millennial visionary and a pioneer of ecologically-driven architecture, Ingels’ creative muscles have atrophied and his vision has become more cynical. His is the peril of modeling the architect on the Silicon Valley CEO, a paradigm that once represented a progressive (in at least the technological sense) future, but now, in every way, occludes it.
All this is not to say that there weren’t good exhibitions at the Arsenale. Outside the Coterie itself, many of the national pavilions offer a soothing antidote, highlighting important architectural considerations such as gender, materiality, sociality, and labor. I’ve written about these welcome contrasts for Curbed. But to me, it is the Arsenale that represents the dark direction architecture is heading in, at least if we let its most famous practitioners stay holding the reins. The first Biennale’s idea of architecture as a form of language seems laughably quaint in an era where language itself matters less and less, is degraded into marketing slop, wholesale. Here we can see an emerging architecture poised to relinquish its beliefs in sustainability and ecology except as a kind of formal gimmick – by extension, an architecture that has relinquished the future. Here we witness a crisis of disavowal, one architecture has suffered from since that first ever Biennale, a disavowal of the political, of what is necessary to truly effect change in such a way that ecological and socially driven architecture can come to fruition in the first place.
Ours is a poor architectural culture wherein everyone wants to talk about “Greening AI” or some such nonsense without acknowledging the real political upheaval it would take to force the AI giants and their government underwriters to back away from an environmental disaster they have every intent to commit. No one, least of all Ratti, wants to talk about the role undemocratic and heavily surveilled oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE play in financing the biggest names in the field, or the way architecture is being used to art-wash climatic and social despotism.
Never before have I felt so despondent about the field to which I have devoted my intellectual energies and my lifelong passion – not only for buildings in all their diverse configurations, but also for my political beliefs in a world that deserves better – a conviction that architecture can, in fact, contribute meaningfully to the human condition. The tech industry, with its supposed desires for a better world now exposed as a ridiculous canard, has little to offer unimaginative architects whose visions of the future are just as occluded as anyone else’s. And yet architecture clings to tech because it is the only thing that seems to move forward. The nostalgia underlying that old-school Postmodernism has since become pathological, infecting every part of our culture, with its commercialized memories, endless remakes, and simulacrum moodboards in which things from the 1990s are misremembered as being from 2007. Without a reorientation towards true, egalitarian humanism, without a vision for a better world, there is nowhere left for architecture to go. In this respect, the exhibition reflects reality. The maw of the Arsenale is a bleak one we are all, in some way, staring into. The only blessing to be found in the Venice Biennale is that it is in Venice, and thus one retains the ability to go outside and marvel at the work done by innumerable, nameless human hands. ~
