Upfront

By Hugh Pearman

‘Out There’ is the theme of this latest iteration of architecture’s never-ending identity crisis. The perennial problem being that Out There is Venice. In a city that can give you perfection in a range from Palladio to Scarpa, how is a hastily assembled monster exhibition of architectural ego every other year – always curated by opinionated men of around 50 – going to begin to compete?.

Perhaps Aaron Betsky, director of the show (happy 50th birthday, Aaron), knows this only too well. Hence his setting a theme which is to do with architecture beyond building – architecture freed from the shackles of clumsy construction, recalcitrant regulations, purblind planners. What does this mean, this notion of pure rather than applied architecture? Unfortunately it allows architects to do what they should, in a just world, be forbidden from doing by international law. It allows them to think they are really installation artists. Bad mistake.

As ever, the Biennale falls into two main sections. The director gets to personally curate the intellectual heart of the show – divided between the dauntingly huge, long echoing chambers of the medieval Arsenale buildings, and the very large, strangely sterile former Italian Pavilion in the Biennale Gardens. The rest is the responsibility of individual curators of participating nations – many in their purpose-built pavilions in the gardens, others scattered in palazzi, art galleries, churches, anywhere they can find a perch across the sultry length and breadth of La Serenissima.

The national curators are meant to adhere to the theme of the show. Many do, some don’t. This year, the British Pavilion ignores it. The British Council is in charge of this gig. Its architectural advisers apparently decided it was time for an exhibition about housing. Their curator, critic Ellis Woodman, has duly delivered a neat and very dour little show of four London-based New Puritans (Mccreanor Lavington, Sergison Bates, Tony Fretton, Witherford Watson Mann), plus a leavening agent in the form of the considerably more cavalier (in a good way) de Rijke Marsh Morgan.

Woodman’s show, titled Home/ Away, is a thinly veiled critique of the state of British housing, contrasting the work of these practices in the UK with what they are doing in mainland Europe. Yes, they order these matters better in France, Germany, Scandinavia – well, everywhere, really.

Leaving aside the almost pathological fear that the London-based British Council and its London-based advisers have of architects outside the capital – they regard them as beneath contempt, worse, a potential international embarrassment – this is actually a rather pleasing, straightforward, even refreshing exhibition. True, it feels better suited to the New London Architecture gallery, say, than the Adriatic sunshine. But the austerity of the presentation, coupled with the back-to-basics architecture of most of the projects displayed (again, with the exception of dRMM’s remarkable engineered-timber tree-like proposed housing towers in Norway) is somehow right for the downbeat mood of the moment. We do need to rethink housing, we do need to be serious about it. We are entering hard times, and this is hard, unforgiving architecture. Dull, even. That’s not a bad thing – we’ve had enough flamboyance. It’s a shame that a very accessible condensed history of British housing since 1870, produced for the show, is confined to a booklet rather than being given the exhibition treatment it deserves. All in all, nobody can accuse the Londoners of selling out to showmanship.

The Scots, however – organised by the rejuvenated Lighthouse architecture and design centre – have gone for impact. The Lighthouse, being light on its feet and unconstrained by an existing Venetian building, ran a competition for a Scottish structure, won by Glasgow-based Gareth Hoskins Architects. They found the most public of sites – right in front of the railway station, on the Grand Canal, near the new Calatrava Bridge – raised the money, built their demountable timber structure, and called it The Gathering Space. Rather than have a blank-box exhibition venue, they have made a very public forum. The Gathering Space is essentially a freestanding ceremonial staircase – a place to sit in the sun and look out over Venice – with a semi-enclosed events space tucked underneath.

Being so very public, this is a tricky space to use – I know, since the first event there was the RIBA Journal debate on the theme of ‘Off Centre’ or new regionalism in architecture. Scotland and Australia met to talk in Venice, in the persons of Hoskins and Philip Follent, government architect for Queensland. Plenty of people turned up to listen and take part, despite the distance from the main venues. But that was almost incidental compared with the clear success of the structure with the public, who clattered up and down the steps above our heads, stopped to look and listen, and generally animated proceedings. Call me partial, but as a Londoner, I’d say Scotland’s gamble paid off handsomely.

This being an Irish issue of the RIBAJ, what of Ireland? They too opted to escape the ferment of the main venues, instead setting up camp in a palazzo at Accademia, also on the Grand Canal. Unlike the Londoners, they stuck to the theme of the Biennale. So no overt architecture, rather ‘the Lives of Spaces’. Buildings in use, then. Nine architects and artists each present a viewing-chamber, usually with film and sound. They range from the specific – Dara McGrath’s photographs of Belfast’s Maze prison undergoing demolition – to the abstract – Tom de Paor’s conflation of viewer and viewed in an installation which literally reflects its grandiose surroundings. As an exhibition needing a bit of time and patience from the viewer, it works all the better for being away from the jostling scrum at the main sites.

So: what’s the best in show? Forget the big-beast installations in the Arsenale. We’ve all seen Frank Gehry and Zaha and Coop Himmelblau before. There was a live naked couple in a French installation, but that was just silly. Among the pavilions in the gardens, a Sverre Fehn retrospective in his masterly Nordic Pavilion is well worth a visit. So too is the large yellow gas pipeline that the Estonians cheekily ran between the pavilions of Russia and Germany. Meanwhile America tellingly eschewed corporatism in favour of a rediscovery of garbage architecture and compost heaps.

But what sticks in the mind most is Kathryn Gustafson’s Paradise Garden, created out of a large patch of scrub beyond the Arsenale buildings. From a spookily overgrown hall of memory through the abundance of a working vegetable garden – complete with comic scarecrow – to the breathtaking expression of enlightenment through gently rippling white fabric suspended above the landscape by balloons, Gustafson blew all the conventional architects away. It’s not possible to see only one thing at the Biennale. But if you could, this would be the one.