Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: a healthy dose of dissent from Detroit Resists, The Architecture Lobby and more

2016-06-06T18:14:00-04:00

The criticisms generated by productions as significant as the Venice Biennale reveal just as much—if not more—about the central ecology of the event as its official material. Evidenced by the gradient of oppositions representing the national pavilions (and even a handful of Aravena’s curated projects), the inclusive nature of the “Reporting from the Front” agenda manages, intentionally or not, to filter in detractors and cultivate an atmosphere of issue-airing.

The assembly of sometimes wildly disparate perspectives and approaches that comprise this year’s Biennale sets up the conditions for the calling out and, hopefully, working through of the architecture discipline’s contemporary conflicts and quandaries. Several counter movements worked their way into the exhibition—stirrings, perhaps, that are indicative of interests to which the Arsenale and Giardini will give form or ground (again) next time.

At the outset, Alejandro Aravena’s opening panel, “Meetings on Architecture: Infrastr...

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Dispatch from the Venice Biennale: a healthy dose of dissent from Detroit Resists, The Architecture Lobby and more