The Venice Architecture Biennale, the world’s biggest and most prestigious architecture exhibition, struggles to know who it’s for — the professional architect or the interested public — and indeed why it exists at all.
This is partly Venice’s fault. To spend one’s time looking at architectural models, drawings and, this year, photographs and film when you could be slinging back Bellinis in an 18th-century palazzo seems perverse. Added to which, the Biennale organisers have now decided the vernisagge — the private view — should take place in late August, when Venice is at its hottest and the Corderie, the former rope-making factory of the Arsenale where the main exhibition is held, becomes a vast wooden greenhouse.
Yet everyone comes. For three days water taxis and vaporettos ferry 10,000 architects, critics and journalists from the swanky hotels around San Marco to the Biennale, which is divided between the Arsenale — the atmospheric former naval buildings — and the Giardini, studded with permanent national pavilions. They come out of curiosity, to see what the big shots are up to, and to see which country can still pack a punch. There’s an added reason to visit this year because the curator is the British architect Sir David Chipperfield.
He’s an architect who until recently was rather better known outside the UK. Now, though, with the Turner Contemporary in Margate, which opened in 2011, followed by the Hepworth, Wakefield, he has two galleries in his homeland, the latter on the short list for this year’s Stirling Prize.
He is hugely respected in Italy — he’s extending Venice’s cemetery island, San Michele — and he champions a very different kind of architecture from the flamboyant sculptural structures of some of his contemporaries, one that is arguably better suited to these recessionary times.
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