“Mock Up, Beijing” Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei, Biennale di Venezia 2008

The 11° International Architecture Exhibition “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building” curated by Aaron Betsky is, as its title suggests, one of change.
It differs from the previous editions because this time building, as the substance or end result in architecture, is out of the picture.
An unorthodox and stimulating vision that is somewhat similar to the topics that Cluster magazine has sought to explore to in recent years.
The catalogue’s foreword penned by the curator confirms that this Biennial is focused on «a secret history of architecture that resists the notion that designing, making, and interpretation of buildings is a productive manner of serving our society with useful artifacts».
The exhibited works and theory of the participants, however, deliver a vision of architecture that in many ways renounces individual responsibility and lacks the complexity implicated by the curators’ invitation.
The problems lurking in the background are the huge challenges of the early 21st century: accelerated urbanization, climate change, sustainability, globalization… an exertion in the representations of figures, graphics and so on give a pretty clear illustration of today’s nightmares.
Interactive and dynamic sound installations, and new materials give life to alienating atmospheres that are more commonly found in the context of an art biennial, but they are often based on the fascination of new technology and the hope that new innovations may save us.
The overall message is optimistically positive: more design, more waste control and improved skills in interaction and collaboration all prefigure a pacified world with an equilibrium between individual, society and environment.
The exigencies to spectacularize, typical of big events, are betrayed by an excessive rhetoric in the use of technology that actually gives more satisfaction to the spectator’s sense of recreation than it does coherence to the content, but this is a syndrome of our times.
It’s an international exhibition for thousands of architects that arrive in Venice by plane wearing smart outfits and attitudes that cries-out with the radical anti-consumer messages of numerous projects but it couldn’t be and we wouldn’t want it to be any different.
The effort made through eradicating building to surface problems, even weaknesses, and the vacuity in the architects’ response opens an interesting debate that will find fertile ground in the next few years and hopefully encourage new solutions that today still seem premature and unconvincing.
What is worrying is that while the architects appear latitant building is in full force all over the world, urbanization has never reached these levels, and rarely have we assisted such a rapid increase of consumption and exploitation of raw materials. An example is the installation of Herzog and de Meuron a framework of flying chairs suspended by bamboo canes within which the shapes of a massive three-dimensional graphics are found; function put to question, the use of poor material, an almost dematerialized aerial composition. A surprisng proposal from the architects of the Beijing National Stadium “Bird’s Nest” an icon at the core of political and social polemics that celebrates the technology and economy of major events.
In summary, we find the curators proposal extremely stimulating, controversial and honest, a Biennial to be seen that will make its mark, that poses clear questions not to be left without answers – it just remains to be seen if it will be the architects to provide them!
www.labiennale.org