ARCHITECTURE: Missing people

Few cities are as suited to holding an international architecture exhibition as Venice. And with its waterways, bridges, palace gardens and squares – which include the grand yet intimately beautiful Piazza San Marco – it is particularly eloquent on the subject of public spaces.

The Venice Architecture Biennale takes place from late August to November on even years, and is part of the larger Art Biennale (the core part of which happens on odd-numbered years). This year, the theme for the architectural event is "People meet in architecture," and it seeks to explore, in as relevant and fresh a language as possible, the way we interact and communicate in our shared spaces.
    
This is, of course, a topic crucial to our time, as our population approaches 7 billion, our resources are being depleted and pollution becomes, well, stratospheric. So it’s rather strange to see so many of the pavilions leaning toward the abstract and conceptual, looking more like art installations than architectural proposals. To be sure, nobody is asking for display after display on public housing, which would bore us to tears. But many of the works don’t deal with people at all.

The Chinese pavilion, for instance, is full of birds. Not real ones at that, but model birds that are suspended near the timber rafters of its Arsenale venue, so the creatures look like they’re about to soar through the roof. It’s haunting and lyrical, but what does this have to do with architecture? And where do people come in?
   
Another national pavilion that features birds is the British one at its habitual Giardini venue. Here the birds are stuffed and put in glass cases, in a display that showcases John Ruskin and his treatise on Venetian art and architecture, The Stones of Venice. Ruskin’s notes and sketches line the walls and, along with the stuffed birds, these give the pavilion the air of a botany exhibit. But the display at least puts the question of public space front and centre and, with its emphasis on scholarship, has an endearingly old-world, nerdy feel about it.

There’s also a section dedicated to a wooden 1:10 scale model of the London Olympic Stadium. What, after all, grapples more with the challenge of fitting lots of people into a fixed space than the Olympics? (It does, though, sit rather bizarrely next to the birds and makes the British pavilion seem somewhat schizophrenic.)

Far, far more esoteric are exhibits such as Cloudscapes, by Transsolar and Tetsuo Kondo Architects, which features a huge room filled with a nimbus of mist. It’s very pretty and playful, and visitors can climb a spiralling pathway to feel the differing temperatures as they ascend and descend the cloud. But how this concretely addresses the theme of human beings meeting in architecture is anybody’s guess. If anything, people are more likely not to meet, due to the foggy conditions.

Then there’s the exhibit where there are fountains of water intermittently lit with strobe lighting, and another with 40 state-of-the-art speakers that surround you with the choral music of Tallis – all very enjoyable and poetic, but you guessed it: where are the people?

To be sure, there are some pavilions, mostly the national ones, that deal head-on with the issue of humanity in urban spaces. The Japanese pavilion takes a re-look, 50 years on, at the idea of cities having a metabolism. The French pavilion, made up of walls of cinema screens, explores the phenomenon of already-large towns grouping together to form massive belts of metropolises. The Singapore exhibit is a minimalist yet thorough study of how the city-state has managed to intersperse its skyscrapers, residential blocks and factories with green spaces and “vertical gardens”. 

In the end, it’s such pavilions that tend to be the most interesting as well, proposing as they do practical solutions to the vexing question of how, simply put, we are all supposed to live with one another.

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