Architecture has hit a nadir at the Venice Biennale

Much of Venice’s Giardini this year was as boarded up as a British high street. The Israeli pavilion was empty, apparently awaiting refurbishment. (At the 2024 art biennale, the curators had closed it in the face of pro-Palestinian protests, prompting the latter to demand it should be opened, presumably so they could protest its closure.) The Russian pavilion has been shut, by order of the Biennale, because of the Ukraine war. The Venezuelan pavilion was closed (‘Go look at nature instead,’ said the workman when I approached it.) The Czechoslovakian was shut, the turns taken by the two independent nations faltering during Covid. The French was closed for refurbishment, although given the political and artistic climate this seems to be an opportune strategy rather than a pressing heritage need. Expressing oneself through the nation, the largest political collective available to the artist, seems to be a problem at the moment, from without but also within.

But there was nothing to see here in another way. The closures go hand in hand with a current trend among curators at the Venice Architecture Biennale: making the pavilion about the pavilion itself. The Finns showed off a recent paint job on theirs. The Koreans used their building as a device to look at the world around it, periscope and all. The Japanese pavilion featured a clunky animation in which different parts of the pavilion engaged in a deeply unrevealing conversation with each other. The curators of the Swiss pavilion imagined an alternative pavilion by the country’s first registered female architect, overlaid on the one built by Bruno Giacometti (brother of Alberto). The result is a very large number of walls. Most emblematic, in many ways, was the Danish pavilion which simply presented the renovation of the building frozen halfway through, an impeccably delivered act of nothingness.