The central conceit of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale is a journalistic metaphor. Alejandro Aravena, director of this year’s exhibition, invokes the war correspondent’s mandate—to understand and convey the political and cultural ramifications of armed conflict—as the basis of his curatorial agenda. Reporting From the Front, the theme that looms large over his own exhibition and the national pavilions in the Giardini and Arsenale through November, posits the architecture curator as a reporter of sorts, tasked with presenting inventive architectural “solutions” developed in response to quality-of-life problems like socioeconomic inequity and environmental decay. In Aravena’s telling, journalists and architects share an ethical obligation to expose the truth; the reporter’s factual accuracy is akin to the designer’s truth to materials.
Aravena, alas, is not a rigorous journalist—nor is he an editor. The Biennale’s flagship exhibition, which he curated, contains a surfeit of projects, presented without much organizational logic or context. The prevalent focus here on beleaguered localities and underserved demographics, so honorable in principle, at times obscures how architecture and development are also used as mechanisms to displace disenfranchised communities. Further compromising is that his own design practice appears to be this Biennale’s gold standard for what constitutes politically engaged architecture. Aravena isn’t a bad architect: As this year’s Pritzker Prize laureate, he has earned an international following for buildings in his native Chile that seek to ameliorate the material concerns of the underprivileged, often by involving politicians and corporate stakeholders in the design process of his Santiago-based firm, Elemental. A number of his projects featured prominently in media coverage of the Biennale; one profile after another praised Aravena’s seemingly humanist pragmatism as a welcome alternative to the flashy ego-driven formalism prevalent in the prerecession years. Several other reductive, dichotomous tropes cycle through this Biennale’s displays and rhetoric: war and peace, vernacular builders and professional architects, hand-built as opposed to digital fabrication, progressive versus reactionary politics.
There are, to be sure, no thoroughly objective reporters. It might merely be a venial breach of journalistic integrity to privilege schemes that share the politics manifest in Aravena’s body of work. Many of his social projects respond to crises with actionable results, and the Biennale often praises scrappy, low-cost proposals that similarly seek immediate, high-impact effects. Yet much of the exhibition, like the director’s own built work, lacks the ambition and critical capacity to expose, let alone redress, the systemic origins of these symptoms. Reporting From the Front valorizes ad-hoc minimalism as a design strategy, but its author appears unaware that his uncritical enthusiasm for such makeshift solutions betrays a lingering complacency toward underlying causes of problems, such as post-2008 austerity measures and the investment-driven logic of real estate speculation.
The Venice Architecture Biennale is a fundamentally reactionary institution, a vehicle for promoting the work and students of the profession’s elite cadre. Aravena knows as much—one of his initial targets is the Biennale itself.
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