Starchitects and squatters

A young man in white overalls and a face mask stands in front of a black filing cabinet. He holds a white, wooden architectural model like a waiter’s tray. He is surrounded by a dozen other young people, similarly attired. We are in the middle of the Arsenale, the main exhibition space of Venice’s Architecture Biennale. Amid a panoply of highly sophisticated presentations from the world’s top architects, here the exercise is reduced to its essentials: a man holding a model.

Except it is not that simple. The young man is Elliott Trujillo, an architecture student at the University of Madrid, and he didn’t design the building he holds — a model for an archaeological museum in Cordoba. The museum was designed instead by Nieto Sobejano, an established Spanish practice. Nieto Sobejano and four other Spanish practices have chosen to spend their Biennale budget on flying out architecture students to present their work for them, and to directly engage with visitors. Trujillo doesn’t expect to design anything himself for a long time. No young Spanish architect does. “There are two realities when it comes to architecture,” he says. “One is our situation in Spain, where there is no work and no future. And the other is the world of amazing architecture we see here: Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster.”

The theme for this year’s Biennale, chosen by its British director David Chipperfield, is “Common Ground”. It is a choice that hints at architecture’s need to refocus on issues such as engagement and communication, on its need to establish shared values. But as the Spanish students show, there are chasms splitting the world of architecture. A divide is opening up generationally, economically and philosophically. The starchitects of Trujillo’s second reality are still here, but the appetite for celebrations of individual genius, and isolated, beautifully crafted buildings, seems to be dissipating. To co-opt the language of the Occupy movement, the big names are starting to look like architecture’s 1 per cent.

Zaha Hadid’s installation in the Arsenale explores the relationship between her own computer-driven geometries and those of 20th century structural pioneers such as Frei Otto and Heinz Isler. The space is dominated by a sprouting tower, made of thin, pleated aluminium.

But go into the neighbouring room and you are literally down to earth, among hand-thrown clay pots, stones, bricks and red soil: a lifesize replica of a south-Indian house, designed by Anupama Kundoo. She has brought local craftsmen and builders with her, many of whom have never left India before. While Hadid has been expanding her structural vocabulary next door, an Indian builder tells me he has learnt something more elemental from his Venice visit: “On building sites in India, we don’t wear shoes, safety glasses or protective clothing.”

The Biennale can be overwhelming. The Arsenale exhibition stretches through what must be a couple of kilometres of atmospheric former naval buildings. Then there are the nearby Giardini, a second exhibition space at the centre of a park studded with permanent national pavilions, each with its own exhibition. It would take the entire three-month duration of the Biennale to see it all properly: room after room packed with architectural models, texts, videos and displays, punctuated by the occasional large-scale gesture. (Exhibitors have often made a trade-off between detailed research and immediate impact.)

There are some surprises. Norman Foster has brought a very unfosterish installation, which again touches on architecture’s divisions. The floor is traversed by digital flows of eminent architectural names, while the walls are covered with rapid-fire montages of global strife, courtesy of filmmaker Carlos Carcas: street protests, Latin American slums, natural disasters, dispossessed people, all against a discordant soundtrack of crashes and shouts. Elsewhere, London-based Farshid Moussavi offers a refreshing sorbet of a room: four walls of ever-changing projections of architectural façade and structures, rendered in simple black-line drawings.

Meanwhile, FAT’s Museum of Copying gets the balance just right, mischievously highlighting the way architects borrow from each other. The British practice’s space is dominated by an arch formed from two portions of a scale model of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda. On the walls around it are further examples of originals and their doppelgänger: a Villa Rotunda in the Palestinian territories, a St Peter’s Basilica in the Ivory Coast.

Meanwhile, invited architects have assembled their own dossiers of copying in all its forms. There is a photocopier and a pile of paper next to this, an encouragement to make further copies.

The general mood is one of turning to the past rather than forging ahead — perhaps inevitable, given that the event is still dominated by Europe. China’s presence is marginal. Africa, South Asia and the Middle East are barely here.

As Europe struggles to see a way through the economic gloom, it is no wonder the mid-20th century looks so appealing. The British pavilion has invited architects to exhibit projects from across the world featuring “ideas to change British architecture”. It is an approach that is both self-effacing in its non-promotion of British architecture (amply represented elsewhere) and yet self-absorbed in its preoccupation with domestic issues. Many other pavilions explore similar themes of re-use, downsizing and introspection: the United States offers hundreds of small-scale, eco-minded interventions; Japan focuses on humanitarian housing post-tsunami, and again questions the cult of the starchitect. (“Are not most ‘architectural statements’ merely egotistical gestures on the part of the architect?” asks the pavilion’s director, Toyo Ito. “Why and for whom are architects making architecture?”)

In this context, the social utopianism of the mid-20th century is seen with something approaching nostalgia. Those were the days: when architects knew what needed to be done and governments had the money to let them do it. Dutch superstars OMA, for example, celebrate the work of anonymous architects in public authorities across Europe from the 1960s and 1970s. As OMA architect Reinier de Graaf puts it, the era was “a short-lived, fragile period of naive optimism before the brutal rule of the market economy became the common denominator”.

In Greece’s pavilion there is similar nostalgia for the “Polykatoikia”, the social housing that evolved in Athens in the 1950s. Set into the sides and tops of the displays are tiny models of individual apartments, with an accompanying photograph and basic information. The most inexplicably moving thing I saw in Venice was one such slide, of the bedroom of an Albanian immigrant couple and their two-year-old daughter: a double bed and a cot crammed into a tiny, bare room.

But it is by no means all doom and gloom. There are moments of sheer delight and amazement here, even in the midst of poverty. “Urban-Think Tank” and “Guardian” design columnist Justin McGuirk have together created a working mock-up of a Venezuelan restaurant. As intended, it has become a lively gathering place, with eating, drinking, music and even dancing. Around the walls are photographs of an abandoned 45-storey officer in Caracas, which has been squatted by some 750 families. This is not a saga about poverty but a celebration of improvised resourcefulness.

Brazil’s pavilion, meanwhile, takes the relaxed stance of an emerging economy. On one side it features a wall of peep-holes, through which observers can spy on the occupants of a luxury So Paolo villa, watching their lives unfold like a hilarious telenovela. On the other side of the room, there are a series of hammocks to lie in and acoustic guitars to strum. The installation features a priceless quote from Lcio Costa, planner of Braslia: “The same people who rest in hammocks can, whenever necessary, build a new capital in three years’ time.” And he did just that. It makes the rest of the world look uptight.

A final highlight was the Russian pavilion, a refreshing blast of op-art that is out of step with the overriding themes, but nevertheless sticks in the memory. Three rooms — two cube-shaped, one circular and domed — are tiled on every surface in a giant, flashing mosaic of barcodes. Visitors are given an iPad when they enter, which they can point at any particular QR code. These all translate into information on Skolkovo — an ambitious project to create a Silicon Valley-style science city outside Moscow. Sure enough, Skolkovo’s designers include a roster of familiar names: Herzog & de Meuron, OMA, Kazuyo Sejima and David Chipperfield. While Europe and America are soul-searching and dialling it down, Russia seems to be saying: “Forget the theory. Look at us. We are going to build something big.”

Should Trujillo and those disaffected students go to Russia? One hopes not. There are other ideas to inspire them here, and bigger problems for architecture to tackle. The ground is not common, but it is definitely shifting.

–Guardian News and Media Limited

The Venice Architecture Biennale runs until November 25.