This year's Venice Bienale demolishes the popular notion of modernism in architecture

Determined to avoid the Biennale’s tendency to devolve into architecture’s Fashion Week, Koolhaas insisted that curators explore how in the past century their countries had “absorbed modernity” in light of the twin phenomena of modernism and globalization. His initial curatorial brief regurgitated the soggy postmodern notion that despite modernism’s claims to mitigate capitalism’s social externalities by advancing a progressive social agenda, in practice it had served merely to perpetuate the global spread of capital, steamrolling over the particularities of local cultures from center to periphery and “flattening” the built 
environment everywhere.

Most of the curators of the national pavilions embraced Koolhaas’s challenge to reconsider their countries' architectural history, and most ignored or deliberately undermined his polemical and ideological agenda—as Koolhaas himself had come to recognize by the show’s opening. As a result of this unanticipated and welcome rebellion, this year’s Biennale offers an unforgettably wide-ranging, if scattershot, survey of modern and contemporary 
architectural history that will forever demolish the popular notion of what modernism in architecture was.

It is ironic justice that Koolhaas’s very failure to control the message in the national pavilions is precisely what makes this year’s show the most illuminating and important exploration of architectural culture in recent history. The national pavilions from Albania to Uruguay swirl with architectural splendors and revelations. Who beyond its borders knew of the rich modernist tradition in Mozambique, with one foot in south European and especially Portuguese avant-garde trends and the 
other in Africa’s thatched huts? Or that Pier Luigi Nervi, the Italian engineer famous for elegant long-span bridges and stadia, designed a spectacular cathedral, abbey, and monastery for the Benedictine order in western Australia from 1958 to 1961? (Alas, it was never built.) How many have recognized the importance of South Korea’s deep modernist tradition, which produced dozens of buildings that are innovative, 
beautiful, and good?

...

The Biennale reveals that modernism was never a style. It was a cultural, political, and social practice: the practice of making buildings suited to certain exigencies of life in a rapidly changing and developing world. And since, by definition, the question of how and what it meant to “make something modern” changed over time and space—different in Finland than in Morocco—so also did the design of the buildings that emerged from it, which were strongly inflected by local geographic conditions, political and economic circumstances, and social norms and values.

Throughout modernism's history, its buildings could look different and be modern, because the practice of modernism is always situated in its place and its time. Situated modernism may be harder to imagine, at least in the form of an iconic stereotype, than the canonical modernism of flat roofs and steel beams, but it far more accurately accounts for the realities on the ground.

This also greatly clarifies—for the first time—the main contours of contemporary practice. A number of the national pavilions, including Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Japan, Morocco, and Spain, juxtapose recent projects by contemporary architects with historical ones. Buildings from the late 1950s to the 1980s, an era that has been far less intensively studied than earlier periods, are especially well represented in Venice. At the opening of the Biennale, a number of architects acknowledged the enormous influence that buildings from this period exert on their own practices. One New Yorker who has designed dozens of large and prominent buildings around the world wryly observed that the period from the late 1950s to the 1980s is “where 
everything we do starts.”