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He is hugely respected in Italy — he’s extending Venice’s cemetery island, San Michele — and he champions a very different kind of architecture from the flamboyant sculptural structures of some of his contemporaries, one that is arguably better suited to these recessionary times.
No such sensory experiences this year, sadly. The theme set by Chipperfield is ‘common ground’, by which he means the influences and cultural values that architects share and which set them apart not simply from artists but also from more lowly professionals in the building team, such as the project manager. He made it clear, too, that he didn’t want an endless parade of new opera houses or the expensive apartments that grace the pages of colour supplements. Chipperfield doesn’t approve of funny shape-making, and those architects famous for designing ‘icons’, such as Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind, are notably absent this year.
His theme does not exactly make the pulse race. Architects have always collaborated and borrowed ideas from each other — copying is historically how they found a common language — and one of the more light-hearted installations, by the London-based architects Fat, makes this point: it’s a 5ft-high model of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda, the world’s most copied building, reproduced in insulation foam, while on the walls are examples of its replication, from Chiswick House in London to a private house in the Palestinian Territories built for the former Jordanian cabinet minister and Arafat aide Munib al-Masri.
But as the Swiss architect Herzog & de Meuron suggests with an installation about Hamburg’s new Elbphilharmonie concert hall, which it has designed, ‘common ground’ can become fraught when politics and money get in the way, which they invariably do. Blown-up newspaper front pages chronicle the project’s rising costs, disputes, legal action and eventual halt.
A group calling themselves Urban-Think Tank with the British journalist Justin McGuirk also tackle the riskier subject of contested ground with a provocative installation, part functioning café part film, about Torre David, a 45-storey skyscraper in Caracas that has remained uncompleted since the Venezuelan economy collapsed in 1994. It’s now a vertical squat, home to 750 families, but it’s an uplifting story nonetheless that punctuates this rather sober show midpoint and was well deserving of the Golden Lion Award, the Biennale’s top prize.
But, generally, it’s the quiet, thoughtful installations that offer the most pleasure, like the one on Tempelhof, nicknamed the ‘mother of all airports’ by Norman Foster, whose buildings were used as a concentration camp by the SS before becoming a symbol of the Berlin airlift. Now, the airport is being transformed into a large public park.
Elsewhere, beautifully observed drawings by young architects Gort Scott show how even seemingly mundane high streets are suffused in history, in contrast to London’s latest landmark, the Shard, portrayed as dominating the skyline in a film by Robert McKillop.
But to keep a theme going — even one with as much latitude as this — would challenge the most experienced curator and explains why there’s an overreliance on big photographs by the German artist Thomas Struth.They’re deadpan, peopleless and rather grim; blink and the recently constructed Olympic Village in east London could be on the outskirts of Moscow.
Reaching the end of the Corderie there are two choices: the national pavilions or the wonderful Arsenale gardens at the furthest corner of the complex. There is really no contest. The gardens, inaccessible unless either the architecture or art biennale are on, play host to the understated Portuguese architects Alvaro Siza and Souto de Moura, who respond to the crumbling walls and water with two installations that are little more than walls and window that frame this extraordinary view.
If your stamina and shoe leather can hold out, head to the national pavilions in the Giardini but be prepared for disappointment. They have lost their edge in recent years as the centre of gravity has switched to the Arsenale and this year is no exception.
The British Pavilion rises magnificently above France’s and Germany’s, which flank it on either side. Its long flight of steps and colonnaded terrace suggest that what happens inside should be grand and uplifting, but once again we have failed to shine. Far from celebrating commonality, the British pavilion is filled with examples of how other countries do it better. But given that national pavilions are an excuse for some cultural flag-waving the idea is odd, and as an exhibition it’s dull; any post-Olympic idea that Britain is once again a proud leader has suddenly vanished.
Japan took the top prize for a worthy but unmemorable pavilion that addresses architecture post-tsunami. But the award for stand-out pavilion belongs to the Dutch for a giant curtain. At the opening party it glided silently along ceiling tracks reconfiguring the empty room as a DJ on turntables played bossa nova. It was a brief respite in what is a sombre, serious, backward-looking biennale. And what better common ground is there than an architecture that makes you smile and dance at the same time?
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