Building block

Britain’s architects can produce the best designs in the world, says Amanda Baillieu. So why aren’t any on display at the Venice Architecture Biennale?

Something has gone very wrong for the British at the Venice Architecture Biennale. This three-month event may play second fiddle to the older and larger Art Biennale, but for architects it is meant to be the only festival where they can let rip, free from the restraints of budgets, planning and bureaucracy. They come to gossip, to see what their rivals are up to and schmooze clients. Even Norman Foster has dropped by to talk up his firm’s plan for Hong Kong’s new £1.8 billion arts district.

Some 30 countries show their wares in national pavilions, slugging it out for punters and prizes. The British pavilion is managed by the British Council, a quango whose remit is to ‘increase appreciation of the UK’s creative ideas and achievements’. When it comes to architecture, however, the council struggles to do that. That’s partly because community participation has become a big part of what architects have to do these days. Too many years of New Labour have turned the profession into a rarefied form of social worker. It’s also because the cosy back-slapping ethos that pervades sections of the architecture world ensures that, year after year, the British pavilion is no more than an exercise in deciding who’s in with the small circle of critics the council consults. The same ethos explains why the Evening Standard’s architecture critic has heralded the pavilion as ‘a triumph — complex, intellectually demanding but politically radical’, not mentioning that he was on the selection jury.

The first striking thing about this year’s British pavilion is that it has been renamed Villa Frankenstein. This is an in-joke for those who know their Ruskin, and refers to his reaction when the architectural details he had so lovingly recorded in The Stones of Venice started to crop up in detached and semi-detached middle-class ‘villas’ around London.