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Cycling home in London last week,
I was struck by a Christian Aid poster outside a church: “15-21 May. The Week We Love Every Neighbour”.
Which begs the question: what
happens in the other 51 weeks of the year? Do we love just our chosen
neighbours: you know, the ones that are like us, other Christians maybe? And if
we love only those ones, then what is our relationship with others? Hate,
possibly? And why is it a week? Could it be condensed into a massive lovefest
of one day, or would it be possible to spread it over a month without emotional
burnout?
It is questions such as these
that this seminar at the Palazzo Widmann may ask of architecture. If, as the
title suggests, this 2016 Biennale is about good intentions, then what are all
the others about? Bad intentions, obviously. And if this Biennale is just part
of a cycle of architectural jamborees, is the implication that we are somehow
bound to behave ‘properly’ for this limited period, suffer all this worthiness
for a bit – like taking medicine that tastes bad but the doctor says is good
for us – and when it is all over get on with what we all really enjoy and want
to do, all the irresponsible fun and high testosterone stuff of Real
Architecture?
This seminar condenses the simple
binary narrative that is already being played out in the twittersphere and
reviews, namely that Aravena’s proposition is in some way worthy, even
fascinating, but a mere pause before we get back to the hardcore architectural
values. Aaron Betsky has just now dismissed it all as ‘boring’ and clearly
cannot wait to get back to the interesting. Even Tom Dyckhoff, normally the
most patient and generous of critics, admitted defeat in his twitter: “Now I LOVE a bit of architectural worthiness. But,
it seems, I do have a limit”, accompanied by the hashtag
#lessethicsmoreaesthetics.
The same thing happened in 2006
when Ricky Burdett turned the Biennale over to an exploration of cities, and I
filled the British Pavilion with the sounds and stories of Sheffield, much to
the fury of the London architectural crowd who could not see themselves
anywhere (as if they don’t have their own stories). I remember well a dinner at
the Dark Side Club (an elite dining club hosted by Robert White) where big name
architects berated Ricky, declaring him more or less a traitor to architecture.
“But where are the buildings?”, they asked. Well, the exhibition was about
cities, so the buildings were of course everywhere. But they were not
foregrounded, not fetishized, and (most importantly) not identified as the
beautiful children of their famous parents. It was a Biennale without
architects and so, the logic goes, a Biennale without architecture.
It was almost inevitable
therefore that the pendulum would swing back in 2008, when Aaron Betsky curated
an exhibition of sheer excess. Greg Lynn won the Golden Lion for making toys
out of recycled furniture. Or maybe it was for making furniture out of recycled
toys. I forget. And don’t really care. However, the citation took architectural
hubris to a whole new level:
“…(Lynn) advances the digital-form problem to a new level that
intrinsically engages traditional architectural concerns such as meaning,
aesthetics, and advancing fabrication technology with the recycling, an issue
of broad, immediate and pressing concern.”
Isn’t that heartwarming? You can
be aesthetically and technically progressive, and save the planet at the same
time! In Technicolor!!
Now the pendulum has swung right
back. A Biennale apparently full of the architecture of good intentions. First,
let’s look more closely at the phrase (which I am increasingly disliking) “the
architecture of good intentions”.
How could an architect set out
without good intentions? No architect sets out to make the world a worse place,
but as I argue in Architecture Depends,
the definition and values attached to the word good are too often misplaced.
Good is normally defined on architecture’s own terms as a matter of aesthetic
delight (beauty), formal innovation and/or technical progress. We have had much
of this from the previous speakers, with their emphasis on salvation through
beauty or innovative form. And so when I hear about this year’s Biennale, as I
have all too often, “but it doesn’t look like much”, what I am really hearing
is, “it doesn’t look like our definition of good”.
Probably the most extreme example
of this disjunction of values could be seen in the US Pavilion, in which a
number of famous architects (including Greg Lynn) have released their architectural imagination onto the fabric and souls of Detroit. The narrative
appears to go:
Those people in Detroit are real poor
They must be miserable
Let’s cheer them up by cluster bombing them with gratuitous form
That should do it.
Now, I am sure all those
architects operated with the best of intentions, but their means were too
removed from the political and economic context within which they were working,
and so their ends come across as unfortunately decadent. As the activist group Detroit Resists note in their statement on the US Pavilion: “We fear, however, that the U.S.
Pavilion, precisely as an attempt to advocate ‘the power of architecture,’ is
structurally unable to engage this (urban) catastrophe and will thereby
collaborate in the ongoing destruction of the city.”
So the first point is to discuss
what is meant by ‘good’, what are the political and social contexts within
which the ‘good’ is located. The second point is to understand what might be
meant by ‘intentions’. If the intention is merely formal, then it is reasonably
easy to realize, in so much as it pushes to one side all the complexities of
the social world. “My intention, Mr. Client, is to design you a building that
is blue and blobby”. And sure enough that, to a greater or lesser extent, is
what is delivered. It is for this apparent ease, and wish fulfilment, that
architects tend to invest their intentions in the formal.
But if the intentions are broader
in their social and political engagement, then they become more contested, and
in this more difficult to fulfil. The Cordiere is full of these not-completely-realized
intentions. This, however, does not at all mean that they are failures, but
rather they are a recognition of the contingency of all intentions – namely
that they might turn out otherwise. What is really interesting about this
Biennale is its open engagement with something outside of architecture. And if
architecture (as object and process) sometimes looks fragile and modest in
these engagements, then that is simply an honest representation of the limits
of architecture in the face of its dependencies.
There is a certain bravery in
facing up to this engagement with others – to deal with ecocide, migration and
inequality. This is not about ‘good intentions’ but about the world we live in.
We can’t engage with it just for a week (like the Christian example), or six
months (like the Biennale), but have to see it as an ongoing project of the
application of spatial intelligence to social conditions. The alternative is a
retreat into architecture’s hubris of form and imposition, and with it further marginalization.
I shudder to think that in the swinging pendulum of Biennales, 2018 will do
exactly that.
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Jeremy Till
Architect,
writer and educator. Head of Central Saint Martins and Pro Vice-Chancellor of
University of the Arts London.
Edition notes
Transcript of a talk given
at a day long seminar of the same title: Palazzo Widmann, Venice 26th May 2016.
Published in Punkto with permission of the author. The original can be read in Jeremy Till website.
Images
1. Opening ceremony of
“Extraction”, curated by Pierre Bélanger (Canada Pavilion’s curator), OPSYS.
Friday, May 27th, 2016. Image © Laurian Ghinitoiu (via: archdaily).
2. A Conversation With Rem
Koolhaas, Norman Foster, Alejandro Aravena, Andrew Makin, Grupo EPM, Joan Clos,
Paolo Baratta, at the Biennale's First "Meeting on Architecture"
(Image via: archdaily)
Publishing date: 12.06.2016
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