Architecture on display

I read the book ”Architecture on display: on the history of the Venice Biennale of Architecture” with interviews of most of the previous curators of the Biennale, in search of some kind of definition of the biennale or a set of subjects related to it, that I could start investigating. Is it an integral part of contemporary architectural culture, does it simply display that culture, does it lead that culture? Is it historical and archival or visionary and theoretical? Obviously the different curators present different views on this, and obviously I did not get closer to a definition, but I did get a better sense of the many directions within architectural culture the Biennale can be linked to.

One of the most interesting discussions which is staged by the interviewers between the different curators is the discussion of how to exhibit architecture and whether this is a contradiction in itself. Baratta, the president of the Biennale, sees a big difference between architecture and art exhibitions since in art exhibitions you show the work of art, but in architectural exhibitions you don’t show the product of the architect – so what do you show? Is it an indirect exhibition? Some of the curators suggest that creating an exhibition of architecture means giving a sense of that architecture, or, like Francesco Dal Co puts it, to tell the complex story of each building. A discussion as to how to tell this complex story takes place especially between the older and the younger generation of curators. Kazujo Sejima mentions in her interview that you shouldn’t be scared of using the spectacular, and the director says explicitly that the theatrical ability of the curator is fundamental, because it is this capability which makes for a good or bad exhibition. But even some of the earliest events, like Portoghesi’s Strada Novissima from 1980, seem to apply or even inaugurate some of these theatrical/cinematic means.

As the architecture biennale started out as an extension of the art biennale in Venice, with unclear overlaps, the issue of what separates architecture and art also reappears. Architecture has its own way of showing it self, and as mentioned before this is partly because it can never be showed as it is. The architecture biennale was a reaction to protests following ’68, and an attempt to do something, which was more open to the world than the art biennale. Interviews show, however, that the first biennales consisted of relatively small circles of participants and visitors, who all knew each other and who were all in the business. Even today, Kazujo Sejimas biennale “People meet in architecture” has been criticized by Fuksas, who says it isn’t people who meet in architecture but architects who meet in architecture. In any case, the architecture exhibition was supposed to be more open to the public, probably because architecture reflected urban issues, and urban issues reflected people. But still it seems that many of the curators have struggled with the issue of how to make the exhibition accessible for everybody; that drawings are too complex, for instance, and that the biennale itself must somehow compete with the surrounding city of Venice with all its historical layers.

From the end of the nineties the curators talk about the influence of technology in visualisation processes, screens, three-dimensional possibilities. The use of technology also reflected the influence of technology in everyday life, and the processes creating architecture. And with this, the biennale seems to have become more and more about engaging with the “real world”, and speaks about architecture with the exact same language as you use to speak about the world – the idea that architecture shouldn’t be a specialized language seems to be recurrent for the newer curators. Massimiliano Fuksas sees information as the confrontation between architecture and the world. His biennale attempted to go beyond the internal logics of architecture to question where we as a society are heading and what our responsibilities might be.

The place of Venice itself has played different roles; sometimes as competitor, other times as motivator. Some curators have invited people to study the problems of the city and to use them to create the occasion for a project, as was the case with the legendary Molino Stucky from 1975, when an architect first was asked to curate the art biennale and kick started the idea for a separate architectural exhibition that in a sense started with the question of the heritage of the city of Venice. The idea that the entire use of a section of the city is transformed to serve the biennale is in itself really interesting. The exhibitions even spread beyond the restricted area and into galleries all over the city.

Finally an important discussion, which is more related to the change over time perhaps than the different temperaments of the curators, is whether the biennale is becoming less crucial to the exchange of ideas and information with the raise of the digital age, speed etcetera. This question also implies a question of new ways of displaying, ways to work out how to represent architecture in a way that has to be experienced spatially; to have some sort of contact with the materials on display, as Sejima aims for in her biennale “People meet in Architecture”. The internet takes away the novelty the biennale once had, in a way the internet puts everything on display continually, according to Aaron Betsky. In this year’s biennale, Kazuyo Sejima seems to really incorporate this problem by working with the information society as a kind of starting point. In the interview with Baratta, the director, he says, “a problem which is an inevitable problem disappears as a problem”.

The biennale doesn’t seem to be stuck simply between architecture of use and architecture of display, but also between historical documentation with its importance for contemporary practice, and imagination and the building up of utopias. Many of the curators see the biennale as a creative work of art (or architecture) in itself. Fuksas even believes that if you do a biennale, it has to change something. Others, like Kurt W Foster, describes the biennale as a popularisation of architecture. It is described as an attempt to fix time on the one hand (Fuksas) and on the other hand, according to Hans Hollein, as an attempt to predict time, to show how the architect is like a seismograph.