I was also in Venice for the inau­gu­ra­tion of the 11th Venice Archi­tec­ture Bien­nale. Unlike the other mem­bers of Dys­turb, this was the fourth time I have attended the open­ing of the bien­nale (in 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008). So, for me, it was dif­fi­cult not to com­pare Aaron Betsky’s work at the Arse­nale to the work that had been done by the pre­vi­ous inter­na­tional cura­tors (Bur­dett, Foster, or Sudjic) of the other bien­nales. On top of this, the Venice Bien­nale is the main case study for my PhD thesis: the 1st Venice Archi­tec­ture Biennale.

I have to say that when I left the Arse­nale after seeing the exhi­bi­tion, my enthu­si­asm was luke­warm: on the one hand I thought, as Darrel did, that the theme chosen by Betsky was loaded with intel­lec­tual poten­tial and open­ness of inter­pre­ta­tion and that over­all, the show was well curated due to the com­pact­ness of the man­i­festo format. (In the past years the Arsenale’s bom­barded the vis­i­tors with an over­load of images, infor­ma­tion, texts, and so forth.) But at the same time, many of the instal­la­tions and accom­pa­ny­ing man­i­festos remained obscure and slightly too artis­tic for my own tastes, and likely for the taste of many architects.

But now I see the light…

It was partly because I was curi­ous and all together crit­i­cal about the idea, and partly because I thought that maybe I could found out some­thing that I did not already know about the Archi­tec­ture Bien­nale, that I decided to buy “The Making of the Biennale” with Aaron Betsky. It is a DVD on sale for 15 Euros at the Bien­nale wherein Betsky explains his ideas for the exhi­bi­tion while walk­ing through each of the 20 instal­la­tions of the Arsenale’s exhibition.

I finally under­stand what the Coop Himmelb(l)au machine is for, or what the Zaha Hadid sculp­ture rep­re­sents. I also realised that the Peneznic and Rogina instal­la­tion is made of moving parts, or that the Philippe Rahm piece sim­u­lat a minia­tur­ized gulf stream made of hot and cold poles. I even realised that I missed the last instal­la­tion by the Gustafson Porter group, the Towards Par­adise garden, a piece refer­ring to Voltaire’s last phrase in Can­dide: Il faut cul­tiver notre jardin.

If there is still time, I rec­om­mend you have a look at this video before vis­it­ing the Bien­nale; because even if we don’t like to admit it, there are times when we need a bit of didactics.