Just been back from a day of trotting around the gardens and the arsenale, not to mention the best day of sunshine had in the north of italy for a few weeks now.

the show is the tightest it has been in years, the presentations are amazing, the general level of work is faultless.

Yet i cannot shake a strage feeling out off my head...like...like it had all been done before, or if not, i could have predicted what most projects would have looked like. almost every style/current/movement has been in one way or the other touched by deconstructivism, in either is formal appereance, program or theoretical background. crooked shapes, loads of folding planes, fractals. a few wooden boxes, all joint under the "feeling,sensation, materiality"category, like fractal geometry cannot generate feelings in the user.

the sensation was that behind it all were the same two or three ideas, chewed up and spat by many, really understood by few. architecture has been in the spotlight like never before in recent years, but there was very litle evidence of someone wanting to take advantage of it, with most firms (and we are talking about the most important firms in the world) just enjoying the fact that there are now less formal constraints, and clients are willing to pay for the icon. an architecture of pure image, avantguard as an excuse to built wackier things, but without any sense of real innovation. hollow. postrationalized. a collection of very well developed stereotypes.

i hope someone will go to visitand come up with a different view, because i hope that is not what arch. is meta-morphing into...