Signposts for an urban civilisation

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Wars, terror, counter terror, government terror - all offensive enough. So, should an architectural biennale be the place to step out from our comfort zone?

E. Heathcote claims that “the show offends no one”. Do architects need to face the real world as citizens and confront the realities and our own responsibility?

Signposts for an urban civilisation
By Edwin Heathcote
Published: September 12 2006 17:59 | Last updated: September 12 2006 17:59

Venice is an absurd city, a city of incomparable loveliness sinking into its own stinking canals, a city in which, as Italo Calvino points out in his Invisible Cities, we can see anything we want reflected, from decadence to decay, immorality to sublime beauty. It is the proto-heritage city, the first urban theme park, a city insistent on exhibiting itself and one that exists more in the imagination and memory than it does in reality. It is, then, the most potent place to hold architecture’s biggest visionary event and even more perfect that it should host this year’s particular theme of cities.

The Architecture Biennale has, for a generation now, been a forum for newness, the place where professionals pick up on the new theories, aesthetics and ideas from around the world, a place where architects can congratulate themselves. (....)

Burdett’s show is more earnest. It is a supreme effort to bring architects back to the reality of the streets, to reintroduce the tough issues of poverty, transport, politics, immigration, crime and so on. But ultimately, the show offends no one. The statistics are over-familiar, the solutions are too general, too glib. The show tells us cities are diverse. They are getting bigger. Olympics will happen in some cities. Cities are full of people. Transporting people publicly is good. Corruption is bad. This much we already know. (....)

Most of the rest is rubbish, at best a diverting one-liner. Perhaps the biggest problem is a lack of bite. Beyond some staggering photos of urban horror in the main show there is too little criticism here. If the idea was to kick architects up the behind, to make them think about the world beyond the edges of their own models, there should have been more grit. It is easy to criticise anonymous far eastern people-coops, harder to criticise the home-grown superstars who are churning out abysmal sub-modernist pulp and congratulating themselves on how they are transforming cities. And finally there is a fatal avoidance of the bigger issues. Where is Baghdad? And Lebanon? How is terror changing cities, borders? The Israeli pavilion, almost unbelievably, is a show of memorials to dead Israeli soldiers. In setting up a show on cities, Burdett opened up the potential for real, radical political debate, which is ultimately lacking. No one, except a few flouncy architects, has been offended, and they’ll be back next year anyway.

This Biennale is not a lost opportunity but a good beginning. (....)

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