Venice AFTER A FEW DAYS walking around Venice, my mind full of reflections and my boots full of water, I remembered that change is not always benign--as Kafka told us in The Metamorphosis, when his character Gregor wakes up to find himself transformed into an insect.
I was there for "Metamorph," the Ninth Architecture Biennale, perhaps the grandest and most widely touted such event, a multilayered world's fair mounted to tell us where architecture is heading and what changes we will find in tomorrow's world. There does not exist a better venue to see a collective vision of the future of architecture than the magical antique city of Venice--an aqueous marvel of enchanting entropy and dilapidation, itself a metaphor of physical uncertainty and change, especially during its flood season. But Kafkaesque remains the word for what the architects and architectural theorists gathered in Vienna think is coming for us all.
This new Biennale was divided between the Giardini (a major park a few blocks from San Marco Square) and the Arsenale (a very long rectangular building in which rope was made for the Venetian Navy). The Giardini exhibition consisted of pavilions where each participating country tried to demonstrate why it is the supremely best place in the world--mostly through quite arty installations that would be right at home in Manhattan's Chelsea.
The exhibitions often overreached and dove into obscurantism, and the United States' pavilion was, alas, one of the worst offenders. Occasionally, there was wit, as in the Danish pavilion, which installed a large conveyor belt upon which an endless series of look-alike Monopoly buildings marched across the land like Lemmings from Levittown. For gravity and balance, there was the unassuming proposal to cut and paste Greenland's vast fresh water icebergs to thirsty, parched Africa.
The most unabashed critical self-awareness was displayed in the Japanese pavilion, which was completely taken over by a presentation of "otaku," described thusly: "The term otaku was coined to signify a new personality that had emerged as a reaction to the loss of future. Otakus were, by nature, formerly ambitious boys who are particularly affected by the loss of faith in science and technology." The otakus took the sweetness of Disney and turned it into super-saccharine big-eyed cartoon characters who express erotic and violent behavior. Japan culture-watchers have seen the movement creeping forward since the 1980s, but its insertion into an international exhibition of architecture was ominous and prescient.
Meanwhile, the Arsenale's offerings were far more juicy. The building was organized by a seemingly endless series of votive-like, vaguely gondola-shaped white armatures upon which projects were bracketed up or suspended--a subtle and facile design element itself.
In fact, nearly all the Biennale was aesthetically impressive, with projects keenly presented, lit, and organized: precisely sharp models, gorgeous graphics, and astonishing renderings that could only be done on today's computers--all composed and choreographed to take your breath away. To think that Michelangelo did what he did by hand is downright humbling.
Still, architecture is an art grounded in practical reality, and much of the Biennale was concerned with transforming architects into "artists," free to shed boring old imperatives like buildability, utility, site, and clients with their pesky budgets. Curiously, that freedom in an otherwise unfree art produced presentations that hid their function or purpose; indeed, a too-frequent question was "What is it?" sending the visitor to the side walls where abundant text awaited, where the word "iconic" was used so often it could only be perceived as punctuation, interspersed between typical architectural writing's $10 words like "anamorphic," "parametric propensity," "ephemerality," "lapidary," "nanotechnology," and "mobius strips"--maddening writing where the prominent new contorted forms were unexplained while the text prattled on about community spaces, which were invisible.
Yes, if architects were good writers they wouldn't need to draw anything, but what they have drawn (or, rather, what they have mouse-clicked) revealed a lot more than their wordatecture. Hosted as red-carpet "artists," the architects were impelled further into the loud silence of noncommunication.
IN 1975, postmodernism reigned supreme. But now postmodernism is so dated that not a breath of this history sullied this year's purity. A more self-confident avant-garde would have acknowledged its origins, avoiding the taint of insecurity running throughout all the rampantly delicious creative experimentation. Fashion cycles these days seem to require dancing on the grave of the immediate predecessor, and today's buzz eventually becomes tomorrow's noise. This is well known by preservationists, but preservation, or the use of anything existing, was so poorly represented that the only example I could find was a design that showed a knifelike glass shard stabbed through an old building, metaphorically killing it.
So what does this latest Biennale say our buildings will be like in the next fifteen-minute moment? Formalistically, the traditional square corner of architecture--the 90-degree angle that built Western architecture--is on vacation. Acute angles are now standard, applied to some Brobdingnagian projects that, even though they are furiously zipped and zapped like lightning bolts, seem in the end as totalitarian as some of the worst public housing projects of the 1960s. Curves (promoted inaccurately with bogus references to Renaissance master Borromini and early modern favorite Erich Mendelsohn) were usually just the rounding of the corners of essentially rectangular compositions; large curves were generally rendered in staccato straight sections, their inherent sensual fluidity suppressed.
The muse of the exhibition was Friedrich Kiesler, who in his lifetime built almost nothing except a temporary gallery in New York, in which (like those of his famous "Endless House" proposal) the walls, floors, and ceilings curve into each other in a continuous flowing form. As it happens, the result was quite beautiful. Unfortunately,various Biennale projects misappropriated Kiesler's direction into biological/organic/protoplasmic imagery designs--which too correctly simulated gastrointestinal tracts, imminently ready to ooze.
The core prognostication proffered for tomorrow seemed to be denial, preceded by rejection. It sometimes manifested itself into the form called a "blob": basically, a shoe-box shape, curved by removing its air so it sags like a slab of fat on a table. Some of the proposed impositions on the defenseless landscape were observably without windows or doors.
Back on the gorgeous graphics wall text, the absence of a single definable entrance to the proposed buildings was touted as a project which could receive people from all directions, the fact that we live in an age of security and controllable entrances notwithstanding. Clear entrances were absent from virtually every project. The question "What is it?" was always followed by "How do I get in?"
THE STRONGEST and most interesting trend derives from the "Blur Building," a tour de force temporary structure by Diller and Scofidio of New York for a fair in Europe. Its perimeter projected a large number of nozzles to spray mist, making the building look like a cloud having no defining edges. In these exposition projects, various devices like netting and screening were used to blur shapes and perimeters, often supporting vines and plants draped over the hard forms, and those blobs sagged into no readable shape.
The most popular strategy seemed to be taking the building and blending it into the landscape, so one could not determine where the hill left off and the building began. Using naturalistic shapes, many projects were underground--or at least looked like they were trying to go underground. The pervasive trend in all this was not a return to the hut, but to the cave, and caves, as a general rule, don't have many windows. Like entrances, windows, except for great gashes of glass for skylights, were a casualty of the exhibition.
The result of this consistent attempt to hide the buildings--to cloud them, to have them recede into the landscape, with no recognizable form which could be appreciated or criticized--suggests a profound unease and pessimism, a retreat into a pseudo ecoworld refuge. Even the biological forms tried to merge with nature in a deliberate will to camouflage and hide.
The choice to blur and obscure, to burrow into the ground, to submerge biologically, to dispense with readable identity, utilitarian penetrations, and--most significant for a creative profession--to deny the creator's own creation and possible applause (but avoid criticism), is denial of the self and a positive future, recalling the Japanese phenomenon of the otakus.
VENICE IS A PARTICULARLY INTERESTING PLACE to make such a surreal claim about future architecture--a city whose buildings were very much designed to be seen, applauded, and easily read as what they are. Hope for the future at the world's most prestigious architecture show might embrace a perspective that involves the recent past, the long past, and the true reality of the present.
Arthur Cotton Moore is an award-winning architect, painter, and furniture designer, and the author of The Power of Preservation.