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Architectural Review, The, Nov, 1996 by Catherine Slessor

La Serenissima had scarcely recovered from the annual assault by its Film Festival when Grand Canal restaurant terraces were again bulging, this time with the world's architects brought together in hedonistic communion through the Venice Biennale. Vaporetti groaning with luminaries churned their way to the Biennale Gardens at the eastern end of the city, full of newly spruced pavilions. The Biennale's loosely interpreted theme was 'Sensing the Future - The Architect as Seismograph' which proved ironically prophetic on the gala opening Sunday, when a rally by the Lega Nord (a right-wing political alliance that advocates secession by Italy's rich northern states from the impoverished south) effectively shut down the Biennale site for fears of civil disturbances shortly after the opening ceremony. Politics, it seems, will always trump architecture.

However, for those who managed to negotiate the cordons of carabinieri, there was much to savour. Dominating proceedings was the cavernous International Pavilion, housing projects by a coterie of international superstars from Ando to Utzon. Connections with the theme were, at best, tenuous and the atmosphere evoked preparation for an end-of-term crit, the arrangement of panels throwing up some curious juxtapositions. An arid trio of Existenzminium schemes by Herzog & de Meuron had the misfortune to be placed beside the deconstructed slug proposed by Peter Eisenman for the Max Reinhardt Haus in Berlin; Leon Krier's reconstituted Classical idyll of Atlantis-in-Tenerife sat uneasily beside Eric Owen Moss's spaced-out dissection of Viennese gasometer, and in one alcove a vast, sprawling model of Gunther Domenig's still-in-progress Steinhaus slithered ominously toward a set of Teutonically precise panels by Karljosef Schattner.

The International Pavilion also hosted three smaller exhibitions - 'Italian Participants', an unpleasantly labyrinthine and largely unfathomable exposition of Italian contemporary architecture, 'Emerging Voices', featuring Bolles-Wilson, Kei'chi Irie, Michel Kagan, Ben van Berkel (and, somewhat implausibly, Glenn Murcutt) among others, and 'Radicals', housed in a long gallery crammed with custard-coloured panels commemorating experimental projects and happenings from 1960 to 1975. A family tree charted architectural and cultural progress from the early '60s to the present day; from the Brutalists to the Essentialists in one jolly, seamless evolution.

The cluster of national pavilions (joined this year by Korea which boasted the only new pavilion on the site) displayed predictably varying expressions of architectural consciousness. Most proffered orthodox configurations of models, drawings and photographs under the loose auspices of typology or biography. Spain, for example, presented a survey of historical and contemporary theatre buildings, including Ignasi de Sola-Morales proposals for the fire destroyed Liceu Opera House in Barcelona, a project close to Venetian hearts as La Fenice, the city's much loved eighteenth-century theatre (in which Rigoletto and La Traviata had their premieres) was gutted in a terrible conflagration last year, the cause of which still remains unsolved.

The British Pavilion explored the changing nature of libraries, through an exhibition entitled 'The Architecture of Information'. Curated by Michael Brawne, it ranged from the national and monumental (British Library) to the particular and jewel-like (the new Ruskin Library at the University of Lancaster by Richard MacCormac, p78). France's theme was 'Fracturing the Monolith', an investigation of the continuity between recent and distant French Modernism; and also a Gallic pun on Andre Bloc (founder of L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui in 1930), whose organic, sculptural buildings are now being credited with influencing the current generation of French architects, including Odile Decq and Benoit Cornette, Jean Nouvel, Claude Parent and Frederic Borel.

Among those individuals made the subject of national exhibitions were Luigi Snozzi, Switzerland, Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil (who along with Philip Johnson and Ignazio Gardella were awarded Golden Lions for lifetime achievement) and a beautiful and coherent display of Juha Leiviska's work in the Finnish Pavilion. The five Nordic nations also collaborated in a special exhibition entitled 'The New Generation of the North', a well structured and topical exposition of recent work by young Scandinavian practices held in the serene, luminous volume of Sverre Fehn's Nordic Pavilion. A range of formal and material preoccupations were apparent, from Studio Granda's Iceland High Court in Reykjavik, to Gert Wingardh's huge research complex for Astra Hassle in Gothenburg (AR September 1995).

Few countries broke with museological convention, yet those that did stood out. The Netherlands Pavilion contained geomorphic piles of tiny wooden houses, one million exactly, representing the number of dwellings the Dutch government has pledged to build within the next 10 years. Against this overwhelming tide of houses, alternative landscape and colonisation strategies were proposed by West 8 and Andriaan Geuze, attempting to embody the emptiness of Holland's artificially generated, polder landscape. But perhaps the most profound (and literal) interpretation of the seismographic theme was to be found in the Japanese Pavilion, which recreated the appalling destruction of the recent Kobe earthquake through a combination of building rubble transplanted from the city itself and Ryuji Miyamoto's huge photographs of the devastation. The effect was both moving and extraordinary (to the extent that the Japanese won the Golden Lion for the best pavilion), but more importantly it provided a salutary reminder of man's precarious hold on the planet. As Miyamoto noted 'Cities can and do die in this way. Who knows how many cities built by humanity have been erased just like that?'