This biennale was not perfect. None are. And frankly I wonder whether Venice can ever be a fit venue for a serious interrogation of issues more profound than the Campari or Aperol conundrum. The vernissage is, at heart, a schmoozey, boozey networking knees-up in which the architectural great and good cheek-kiss their way down Via Garibaldi occasionally glancing in a pavilion. Arevena knew this all too well when he set out to give the festival some bite. — Architecture Foundation
Architecture Foundation Deputy Director/Turncoats founder Phineas Harper gives his two cents on critics' self-righteous reactions to the Venice Biennale.
Find more Archinect coverage on the 2016 Venice Biennale in News and Features.
5 Comments
What im reactive negatively too, in spite of many interesting individual projects like the Spainish "Unfinished" project, is the overall Social-washing message being delivered, pitting "western architecture elite" vs "the poor's needs." In a way, this is a trend that has been going on since MoMAs Small Scale Big Change, which more successfully focused on architectures role rather than weird concept art. Now it seems like the narrative has overwhelmed any sense of human scale. Even the Spanish pavilion, focusing on unoccupied buildings, presents a narrative first rather than something more nuanced and close to truth.
It seems like a reflection of polarized rhetoric. This was positioned as an either/or exhibition in a both/and world. If the exhibition were to focus on the complexity of change, the two-steps-forward-one-step-back way that culture evolves, maybe this would have seemed more illuminating.
"The argument of this year's detractors seems to boil down to a feeling that architects ought not to try and help poor people." - Phineas Harper
Harper's summary of the criticism again reflects the tendency to go to the absolute extreme and chuck nuance out the window. Obviously Architecture has a role to play in making social progress, but we also know that we'll encounter limitations. Examining the limitations and the complexity could have saved the Biennale from being easily dismissed by skeptics. It could have also made is seem less like a well-intentioned gesture and more like the next logical step in a globalized profession.
LiMX,
so there's too much political correctness in architecture as schumacher criticized shigeru ban?
people make the case that we are in a resource deficient post-industrial economy. how are issues of climate change and depleting fossil fuels effecting architecture?
i think issues such as this always become battles of high culture vs. pop culture and "what people really related to."
I don't know why Schumacher is criticizing Ban--he's just as dogmatic as the social-washing crowd (Aravena at least claims to value craft and beauty, though he nor his participants deliver). I don't know when we decided to categorize everything either social or aesthetic.... maybe the social-washers should start a LEED-like rating system for this kind of work, where designs will be rated by their social narrative.
Corrupt organizations like the AIA perhaps are the real villains, as they have failed to connect the work of architects to the public in substantial ways. You can't expect Biennale's to fill in the gap when architecture organizations have failed in so many ways.
This was positioned as an either/or exhibition in a both/and world. We talk about this on the podcast this week (which should go live later today). I thought this was a distinctly US/Western attitude, trying to categorize everything as either/or. Our guest, Andrea Dietz, points out that Denmark seemed to struggle a little with showing examples of specifically "socially conscious" or "public good" design, because that attitude is significant in pretty much all of their architecture.
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