The stones of Venice - View

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2002 by Catherine Slessor

Truman Capote once observed that 'Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go', a sentiment that might equally apply to the city's eighth Architecture Biennale, arrayed in all its customary pomp and pretension in the Castello Gardens and the great ropeworks and munitions sheds of the Arsenale. This time the press vernissage coincided with the tail end of the Venice Film Festival, so an intoxicating menage of cinematic and architectural luminaries could be spotted on assorted corniches, landing stages, restaurants and hotel lobbies. Native Venetians, who have had their fill of tired and emotional visitors (from the Queen of Cyprus and Napoleon to Byron swimming in the Grand Canal), remain admirably unmoved by such brushes with celebrity, stoically wrapping binliners around their feet to wade through the equinoxal acqua alta in St Mark's Square. (Many stars from both film and architectural firmaments still cherish the illusion that they actually can walk on water...)

In the Biennale director's chair this time was Deyan Sudjic, current editor of Domus, who kept instructions to his vast cast of architects, exhibition designers, cultural commissioners and general hangers-on simple and was rewarded with one of the more interesting and coherent shows of recent times. Sudjic's unifying theme of 'Next' had a strong whiff of branding about it (What Comes Next, Up Next, Next Generation, Next Technology, Next Places), but was essentially an attempt to track the progress of architecture over the first decade of the twenty-first century. It was also elastic and accommodating enough to sustain different interpretations and the familiar flummoxing diversity when representatives from over thirty countries, from Austria to Venezuela, are invited to make some kind of grandiose arid definitive architectural statement.

Crammed into the leafy acres of the Giardini, the familiar array of national pavilions jostled like eager contestants in a beauty pageant. Britain threw all its eggs in the Foreign Office basket, with a sophisticated multimedia presentation of the Yokohama Port Terminal, perhaps the first landmark building of the new century. At times it was like being in a Mayfair disco or Warhol Happening, as drawings, photographs and digital images slowly teemed, swarmed, morphed and mutated over walls and ceilings. Concentrating on the work of a single practice (and even more specifically on a single project by that practice) marked a distinct departure from previous British shows, which had hitherto embraced a wider range of work by several different architects (the last British Pavilion boasted a line-up of Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield, Nigel Coates and Will Alsop, AR July 2000). But the FO exhibition had an undeniably seductive power despite its disconcerting penchant for ultra-violet light that makes people's teeth go funny. And the terminal itself looks truly extraordinary.

Like Britain, Ireland exhibited a singular focus, with a modest but finely judged exhibition on Limerick County Hall by the talented American/Irish partnership of Merrit Bucholz and Karen McEvoy. A series of 6m long fibreglass moulds used to form the floor slabs were assembled to create a giant gilled sculpture; building components as art. The Brits seemed to be on course for the Golden Lion (for Best in Show), but instead it went to the Netherlands for Fresh Facts, edited highlights of a biennial award organized by the Netherlands Architecture Institute for the best building by a Dutch architect under 40. Conceived by Herman Hertzberger, the exhibition had a lucidity and economy admirably suited to the spare, luminous interior of Gerrit Rietveld's pavilion.

France also concentrated on its emerging younger generation, embracing a formal diversity that ranged from the (largely unbuilt) digital provocation of dECOi, to the intriguing proposals of Du Besset-Lyon (who worked for Jean Nouvel and Frank Gehry). Their (built) library at Troyes sported a gorgeous undulating metal mesh ceiling, a section of which was diligently mocked up for inspection. The French delight in and preoccupation with doing interesting things with materials seems almost British in its Heath Robinsonian ingenuity and conceit.

At the Finish Pavilion, visitors were greeted by the soft squelch of sand underfoot to reinforce (in an appropriately phenomenological way) the exhibition's concern with Africa. Learning from Roots was devoted to work in Senegal and Guinea by young Finnish architects, bridging huge geographical, cultural and social gulfs to work with local communities in ways that go beyond simply designing buildings. Hollmen Reuter Sandman's Women's Centre in Senegal (AR July 2002) sensitively challenges Western preconceptions about the place of architecture in society. Another low key but equally compelling national contribution came from Brazil, showing ways in which Brazilian architects were attempting to assimilate the country's huge, sprawling, illegitimate favelas (home to the marginalized and dispossessed) into the formal fabric of cities. Low budget projects for shelter, sanitation and roads were timely reminders of the transforming potential of architectural imagination.