The Sanremo of architects

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There’s something for everyone this year at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective”. A professor at MIT in Boston and at the Polytechnic University of Milan, curator Carlo Ratti has wiped out the entire discussion on the smart city, so central in the last decade, with a stroke of the sponge, replacing it with a tripartite and therefore much more inclusive theme. If in the first two days of the vernissage the professionals of written architecture made their voices heard, in the academies and museums, then the professionals arrived and finally the laymen. Some treat the Biennale like the Sanremo Festival, so the latest edition is always the worst . Others like Joseph Grima find that the great generosity of the curatorial selection – over 700 projects – is a sign of democracy while in Portoghesi’s time there were just thirty or so guests. The Arsenale is certainly full of installations, side panels, materials and every now and then some fascinating projects like that of the Chinese Vector. There is the denunciation of the permanent climate crisis, of the global south, there are vegetables (see the Belgian and Mexican pavilions) and rarely is there irony as in the Carosello of the Italian-American group of John Lin and others, a rotating peep show, or in the Albanian pavilion which is also simple, clear and rigorous thanks to its brief but truthful urban history presented by Anneke Abhelakh.

In general, Western criticism and guilt towards architecture, responsible for the extraction of materials, colonialism and a profession with a large male majority, justifies the presence of numerous installations in the style of Bernard Rudofsky, that is, anti-modern and vernacular – see for example the dozens of tents and huts – which coexist peacefully with hi-tech elements such as robots and AI processing, which is also responsible for the summaries in the texts in the room. The section of innovative materials is also substantial, such as the central one curated by the Polytechnic of Milan, namely Ingrid Paoletti and others, but not only: wood (Bjarke Ingels), stone (Andre Jacques), 3-D printers, concrete capable of creating electrical energy like a battery, facade panels with fungi, mold and bacteria capable of lowering the temperature by a degree or more and so on – a Leroy Merlin 2.0 in short, but at the time it was the same accusation leveled at Fundamentals by Rem Koolhaas.

Inevitably, the Arsenale has filled up with works in spite of the Gardens where the restoration of the central pavilion formerly owned by Italy, in addition to the closure of Russia, Israel, Venezuela and the Czech Republic for various reasons, has instead brutally thinned out the offer which nevertheless converges towards now shared practices such as the recycling of materials and architecture in general, even elephant dung . This explains the Golden Lions to the Holy See (inevitable in the week of Leo XIV) and to Great Britain, self-critical of its colonial past, including Gaza. All psalms end in glory, in short, the richness of the exhibition and events will remain available until the end of November, with all due respect to the pseudo-Marxist sarcasm of the Guardian that calls for more public construction without indicating concrete ways forward, while Michael Obrist's Austrian pavilion takes care of doing so, strong in the tradition of urban welfare of Red Vienna, the only alternative to international building speculation and gentrification that even involves the Gardens given the new Qatar pavilion under construction in front of the bizarre US pavilion still pre-Trumpian, that is, in wood, dedicated to public space and minorities.

In general, American history is a bit missing, a history that is present at the Fondazione Prada on the Grand Canal where “Diagrams” by Koolhaas/AMO presents rare documents of architectural, social and landscape representation, the very man who wrote about smart cities at the time of his Biennale: “Why does the intelligent city only offer improvements? What about the possibility of transgression? And instead of rejecting the urban intelligence accumulated over the centuries, we should explore the relationship between what is considered intelligent today and what was in previous eras of knowledge” . What is not missing, however, is the sore feet pre-established not only by the dozens of exhibitions and pavilions, but above all by the hundreds of fortuitous encounters in the streets and squares with operators in the sector who come from half the world, oh well.

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