The 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale

The Architecture Biennale, which takes places every two years in Venice, is one of the main events in the architecture world. The biennale is composed of two parts: a main exhibition, curated this year by Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima, and 62 national pavilions, each managed individually. Alongside these exhibitions, there are a whole host of architectural events taking place throughout the city.  The main exhibition is itself split between two primary venues: the Arsenale, which has been both the military and then the industrial centre of historical Venice and famously has peeling walls, brick columns and a hefty dose of atmosphere, and the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, a late-nineteenth-century building constructed specifically for exhibitions, with white walls and square rooms. In these widely varied spaces, 47 participants were invited to consider the theme chosen by Sejima for this 12th biennale, ‘People Meet in Architecture’. 

Architecture exhibitions inevitably have to tread a thin line between creating a direct experience of space and providing a background for the process of making buildings. In this iteration of the biennale, most of the participants seemed to take the theme as a directive to privilege the human relationships fostered by architecture over an explanation of the process of making it, an agreeable situation for any visitor tasked with absorbing over 100 individual installations. 

But perhaps the most important effect of this focus was a feeling of being welcome: of being invited into the spaces and objects on display and of being asked to participate in them, whether physically, intellectually or perceptually. This was sometimes explicit, as in the Bahrain pavilion where participating architects offered up figs and a spot to rest in relocated fisherman’s huts, and was sometimes just a feeling, as in Studio Mumbai’s installation, loosely based on their workshop, which appeared like an architect’s toy-box just waiting to be used. This welcome was extended beyond the visitors to the exhibition, with the British pavilion set to play host to drawing classes for Venetian schoolchildren for the next three months and a set of full-day discussions set for eight Saturdays through the autumn with the past directors of the biennale.

This feeling might also stem from the amount of control participants were granted in creating their installation. A stroll through the exhibition felt like a visit to a series of different domains, each with its own concerns and its own distinct style. Co-winner of the Prizker Prize this year for the work of her firm SANAA, Sejima embodies two overdue firsts for the influential role of curator of the biennale: the first woman curator and the first from Asia. In addition, she is the first practicing architect to take on this task in a decade. Several of SANAA’s most distinctive designs, like the 21st Century Museum of Art in Kanazawa, are characterized by distinct, physically separated rooms that, despite being bounded together in a single building, each maintain their own identity. As she curated this exhibition, Sejima seems to have brought the same light touch to this disparate group of designers, and the result is a generous and optimistic exhibition.

By Sara Goldsmith
Project Editor, Architecture & Design, Phaidon