Popular appeal

Last time it was cows, this time it’s sheep. I’m not talking about an agricultural show, but about the London Architecture Biennale, which begins today when Lord Foster will be herding sheep across the Millennium Bridge towards Smithfield Market. In 2004 it was cows approaching Smithfield from the opposite direction, down St John Street, and, appropriately, across Cowcross Street.

Peter Murray, the director of the Biennale, has a knack for eye-catching publicity and, since his earliest student magazine productions in the 1960s, has worked tirelessly to make architecture less boring. It is hard to think of anyone more dedicated to communicating what is still seen as a difficult and unpopular subject, and the Biennale runs back-to-back with the longer-established Architecture Week, until 25 June.

Architecture Week is a national event, but even the sum total of its London events combined with the Biennale’s is staggering: some earnest, some frivolous, but all more or less adapted to attract people not normally interested in architecture. Both are largely based in London around the poles of Clerkenwell and Southwark, currently the epicentres of cool, whether in architecture or eating opportunities, two categories that the Biennale is trying hard to merge. June for breadth — depth is better kept for winter nights, if we can find it then. The Biennale tone is that of the fairground barker — amazing, sensational, innovative — but beneath this there seems to be a foundation of everyday practicality, or at least the semblance of it, and for the most part the event seems to be avoiding some of the more sensational and amazing mistakes of the past.

Dead on cue, the Barbican Art Gallery, a short sheep’s amble away from the Biennale, is offering Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956–2006 (until 17 September) to show us just how disconnected from reality architects can be, and in many cases still are.