Critique: Rems Rules

In the Central Pavilion in Venices Giardini, Rem Koolhaas and his curatorial team have broken down architecture into 15 basic elements. The Ceiling display pairs the dome in the pavilion, painted in 1909 by Galileo Chini and newly restored, with its contemporary counterpart, the dropped ceiling.

Rem Koolhaas, director of the 14th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, casts scorn in myriad directions in this three-headed hydra of a show, ambitiously entitled Fundamentals. His approach, we learn from the torrent of print drenching the pavilions, advances various socio-critical goals. National identity, a notion that underlies the very Biennale concept, is deemed obsolete in a globalized world. Previous Biennales, heavy on form, are implicitly condemned. Architecture is exposed as thoroughly constrained by how inextricably embedded it is in other social phenomena. Architects are declared largely impotent to affect the economic, political, and social forces shaping buildings. We may posture as geniuses, Koolhaas writes, but we play our assigned role in the uberscript of modernization.

Photo Serigo Pirrone

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The 2014 Biennale, which opened on June 7 and runs through November 23, has three parts. For the national pavilionsclustered primarily in Venices Giardini, a Napoleon-era public garden, and Arsenale, a former shipyard of the Venetian NavyKoolhaas instructed curators to investigate how the countries they represent have dealt with modernization under the umbrella title Absorbing Modernity: 19142014. In a second section, also in the Arsenale, Monditalia curators developed an achronological multimedia extravaganza highlighting Italian architectures cross-fertilization with other forms of cultural expression in a display of architectural, artistic, and intellectual oddities and glories from Ticino to Sicily.

For the third section, exhibited in the Central Pavilion among the national presentations, Koolhaas collaborated with students and faculty from the Harvard Graduate School of Design as well as other institutions and industry experts, presenting what they deem the 15 Elements of Architecture. Each, we learn, will be the subject of its own book. Thus Koolhaas, his research office AMO, and the Harvard team position their 15 new books as superceding Vitruviuss five and Albertis 10. So you dont miss the point, copies of these and other canonical treatises greet you as you enter the show.

The Venice Biennale has typically showcased projects and installations that curators select for formal elegance, technological innovation, or both. At worst, it serves as architectures Fashion Week, an uncanny carnival of decontextualization crammed with preciously made models, artful photographs, and installations by big-name stars of the show. Form ber alles.

Koolhaas is correct in pointing out that this elides and mischaracterizes critical issues in contemporary practice: it belies architectures invariably collaborative nature; it ignores the multiple ways in which design is constrained by economic, political, and social contexts; it glosses over the irrelevance of nationalistic preening in an ever-more-networked, globalized world. Whats important, Koolhaas insists, is not architects but architecture.

True enough. But when you entitle the most lavishly funded and heavily curated architecture exhibition in the world Fundamentals, expectations get raised. Whats fundamental about how countries have absorbed modernity? Why 15 elements of architecture, not 11, or 20? What is Koolhaas trying to say? Should we listen?

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Critique: Rems Rules