“The Laboratory of the Future” Is a Time Machine
Three takes on this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale
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Half of the Future Is Buried in the Past
To make the biennale a futurity test bed, we must travel backwards.
by Mimi Zeiger
Amid the vernissage spritz swilling, the usual cranks grumbled that there wasn’t enough architecture. A dullard’s cry. Given that of the eighty-nine participants, more than half are from Africa or the African diaspora and those included skewed younger and more female than ever before, the complaint carried the sour grapes of entitled white male architects feeling left out. Exclusion cuts in two, unequal ways.
A Ghanaian-Scottish architect and writer, Lesley Lokko is head of the African Futures Institute. She named her Biennale contribution The Laboratory of the Future—a think tank–esque title that suggests a particular kind of forward-looking utopianism. World fairs, those bastions of globalization, capitalism, and extraction, are notorious for conjuring speculative visions: the World of Tomorrow, Futurama, etc. And what is a biennale if not a showcase of the newest and brightest ideas in the field—a predictor of what’s next for design? But Lokko’s exhibition, which fills the Arsenale and Giardini, is not so much about what lies on the disciplinary horizon as it is about architecture’s capacity to reconcile past trauma.
The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House
Lesley Lokko’s curation of the Central Pavilion offers a bright future.
by Ruth Lang
Following the opening of the current Venice Biennale, plenty of representatives of architecture’s old guard have quietly (and not-so-quietly) criticized curator Lesley Lokko for, in the words of Patrik Schumacher, “not showing any architecture.” The Zaha Hadid Architects principal seems to have been referring to the shiny images and models of finished buildings that have dominated previous incarnations of the Biennale. But Lokko’s curation doesn’t turn its back on architecture. Rather, it places it under almost unbearable scrutiny, forcing an examination of both the practice of architecture and the production of buildings.
The term “radical” is often over (and mis-) used, but here its literal meaning rings true: this Biennale comes from a different root. It is not asking for a nudge of the status quo, but rather demanding a wholesale dismantling of the previous colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal structures within which architecture has operated, and the substitution of said structures with an equitable framework for future practice. It does not want to expand the canon—it wants to question who determines what the canon is and what might be considered “other” in the first place.
Shopping for Ideas
A tour through the Venice Biennale National Pavilions
While standing between ceiling-height shelves, I notice a person adjusting the products. He is a perfectly believable supermarket worker; only the suit reveals him as Biennale staff member. That, and the fact that the products on the shelves are printed cardboard copycats, generated via AI. We are in the Latvian Pavilion, where the curators dug into the archives of the Venice Architecture Biennale and transformed previous national pavilions into household products. Chile’s 2014 Monolith Controversies project appears as a box of cookies; Singapore’s contribution from 2010 cosplays as laundry detergent; Pakistan’s 2021 Mapping Festivities pavilion becomes a bottled strawberry smoothie. There are drinks, snacks, vegetables, breakfast cereal, and a frozen section— it is “a supermarket of ideas.” As she shows me around, Austra Bērziņa, the pavilion’s project manager, tells me that “architects think a lot about homes and workplaces, but nobody thinks about supermarkets. We thought, ‘Why not use the supermarket?’”
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our Editor is Samuel Medina and our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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