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The whole exhibition is the work of a group called muf (‘modern urban fabric’), whose most famous project to date is a ‘town square’ in Barking, east London, complete with an urban arboretum. In terms of new buildings, muf has so far completed one: a small single-room space to house a Roman mosaic. This might strike some people as a rather slight body of work to be representing Britain at an international biennale.
Vicky Richardson, the newly appointed director of architecture at the British Council and the ‘commissioner’ of this year’s pavilion, said she has been ‘swept along by muf’s intense intellectual and practical exploration of Venice, by their sense of ambition and their refusal to compromise’.
Drowning might be a rather more apt description as visitors search in vain for some explanation of why, for example, the council has paid for a Street Training Guide for local children ‘to explore paths of joy and safety’, or why there is a room full of old archive photographs pinned up next to copies of Ruskin’s drawings marked with the words ‘done’. Captions are ‘too didactic’, I was told. In other words: if visitors can’t work out that it’s all a commentary on cultural imperialism, well, poor them.
A salt marsh tank displaying some of the native flora and fauna that manage to survive in the Venice Lagoon is in its way rather wonderful, although quite what it’s doing in the exhibition remains baffling. Some of the pavilion’s other exhibits bypassed me completely. I failed to visit the feminine undercroft — the only ‘specifically feminist presence in the Pavilion’ — and I mistook a giant puddle outside for a puddle, when apparently it is a paddling pool for local schoolchildren.
It’s maybe unfair to compare Britain’s offering in Venice with the British Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo — expos are, after all, glorified trade shows — but it shows what could be done. In Shanghai, there is a three-hour wait to get into the British pavilion (and no puddle). Inside, Thomas Heatherwick’s shimmering cube composed of 60,000 Perspex rods is without question the main architectural marvel of a six-month, £35 billion event.
On one level the message is ecological — a riposte to the world-polluting Chinese, who set the expo theme of Better City, Better Life. But the more important one, according to Sir Andrew Cahn, chief executive of UK Trade and Investment, is that Britain is no longer a ‘land of swirling fog and cobblestones, old buildings and old attitudes’.
There has been astonishment that the UK was prepared to spend £25 million on a temporary building 5,000 miles away that won’t even be recycled once the Expo closes at the end of next month. But Britain had a lot to prove. It’s not simply that the Chinese think of us as a fogbound heritage park with characters from Upstairs, Downstairs, it’s that our efforts to rebrand ourselves have always ended in dismal failure. Remember Tony Blair’s repackaging of Britain as Cool Britannia?
That’s why we choose to play safe, and why, at the Olympic handover ceremony in Beijing two years ago, the most edgy idea anyone could come up with was the X Factor star Leona Lewis arriving at Beijing’s stadium in a red bus. It was a moment, but not one anyone trying to do business in China cares to remember.
With such a serious image problem abroad, there was a strong case to be made for Heatherwick’s ingenious Seed Cathedral and, unusually, civil servants did not panic when he announced he didn’t want enticing British exhibits inside, or a film about the royal family or Harry Potter mugs. He wanted the pavilion empty.
Since it opened in April, the Chinese have been entranced by the UK Pavilion.Some, to be honest, are puzzled that after queuing for three hours all they get to see are thousands of seeds embedded at the end of the 60,000 fibre-optic rods. But it’s a big simple arresting image — unlike the British Pavilion in Venice — with a message. And it doesn’t need captions to be understood.
And it’s true that you look at what Britain is capable of in Shanghai and wonder why Venice can’t get a slice of that, too. Partly, it may be because the more experimental strand of British architecture — the strand championed by the British Council — is in a fallow period, a poor relation to the energy and verve of Eastern Europe, without the intellectual precision of Belgium or Switzerland.
In Venice, standing behind a well-dressed Italian couple in the queue for a fortifying espresso, I overheard them discussing the British Pavilion. ‘Inglese,’ he said, shaking his head sorrowfully, and then he made one of those Italian hand gestures, which I took to mean: ‘What planet are they on these days?’
The answer, sadly, is not this one.
Villa Frankenstein, British Pavilion, Giardini di Castello, is part of the Venice Architecture Biennale that runs until 21 November 2010.
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