Venice, Italy

Venice & The Architecture Biennale

Venice holds no mystery in her geographical location. Everyone knows where she is. Twenty million tourists visit her stone shores every year, where they come to traverse her myriad canals, to walk in morning veils of mist that shroud St Mark’s square and to capture the moment a gondola glides under yet another brick and stone bridge. 

I wondered if they travelled here just to be rendered speechless. To lose the ability to truly find words weighty or worthy enough to pronounce her beauty, her seduction and her remoteness. Perhaps they used to. Do they travel here now knowing that time, on its eternal forward march, isn’t on her side. 

She is mysterious and mercurial and she is a damsel in distress. 

Venice is sinking. Annually, a long and drawn out form of maternal filicide is occurring as the oak, elm, poplar and ash pencil tipped piles sit lower in the Adriatic lagoon. The water baby is drowning. The islets that make up the city are now home to fewer and fewer permanent residents, more and more tourists, annual film festivals, art and architecture biennales and numerous art exhibitions, all putting pressure on the city’s infrastructure without permanent caretakers to keep watch over the quotidian changes

This years Architecture Biennale, titled ‘The Laboratory of the Future’ sought to address the climate emergency, question the role of colonialism and consider the impact of global colonisation of land and resources within the crisis. 

Set against the backdrop of a sinking city, a floating fish as the vanguard against the sea, the urgency of these debates was heightened. 

South American and African exhibitions and pavilions showed little else except the degradation of once rich lands and eco systems and the interwoven ties the world has come to be formed of. 

As distressing as the imagery of the ‘international exhibition’ (the exhibition made up of the countries not represented by individual pavilions in the Giardini) was, as you reached the giardini’s pavilions hope started to spring. Scenes of environmental destruction of previously rich ecosystems, feeding a global worlds appetite for products of all kind, diagrams of Uighur concentration camps as well as imagery and designs of optimism for a future where we are learning from our mistakes.

The Slovenian pavilion explored energy efficiency and had created a wall of local vernacular architecture showing historic modes of living that used the heat of animals to warm the farmers. Entering a James Turrell like space made up of square panels of mushrooms, the Belgian entry had been grown and compacted the mushrooms to create blocks akin to hempcrete. The fungal forms as beautiful as they were sustainable.  

It seemed bittersweet to move to the western pavilions (countries that have had pavilions permanently in the giardini, such as Great Britain since the early 1900’s) where the degradation and destruction were not shown but there was substantially more problem solving and less overt shows of the actual world itself in crisis. However all was not perfect in the Garden of Eden. 

Well documented by the international design press, the Austrian pavilion’s proposal to allow residents of neighbouring houses into the giardini via a bridge leading to a small portion of the pavilions garden, with no access to the rest of the giardini was refused by the biennale panel. Questions of ownership, private and public access and the over arching debate of the giardini’s privatisation were thrown into the spotlight. A form of controversial and contentious debate the biennale would no doubt have preferred to do without. 

The Grand Canal, the most public site in the city to show the erosion of the constant lap of water, has in recent years attracted fashion house foundations in these ageing palazzi. LVMH has restored the Corsini palace and the Prada Foundation have done the same at a palazzo just down the canal. Each has restored these previously capacious houses into gallery spaces. 

Running in tandem with the Biennale, the Prada Foundation housed the exhibition ‘Everybody Talks About the Weather’, a combination of infographics, diagrams and paintings from various centuries that had the weather at their core. A copy (like most of the paintings on display) of Bruegel’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’, two men walking back over the hills to a snow covered village and people travelling on ice skates, showed the mini ice age of the 1500’s that gripped Europe. This is a painting of environmental history. Monet’s city scapes and views of the Seine in the French Industrial Revolution, created the smog that darkened the skies and gave his paintings a blue haze just as Turner’s scenes of London had done a few years before. Poussin painted in a darker palette as in the years that he was active, a volcano had erupted in the Pacific ring and darkened the skies by degrees. These colour palettes and content were not artistic whims of fancy or figments of imagination, the climate, the weather has been documented for eternity. 

Finally, the Brits are vindicated. These are studies and for the first time, is now cool to talk about the weather? If small talk is a social commentary, the British obsession with the weather should have been documented as citizen science for centuries.

The heft of the exhibitions and topics on display at the Biennale, set against this imperilled city, make it hard to fathom how one could still be in a state of denial about the current crises and yet, with Venice at its centre, it is still unimaginable to think of a world without this floating beauty.

The nature of the debate of her lifespan are likely nothing new. Why should it seem so difficult to imagine this city no longer being here? To walk her canal-ways or sit in a Dorsoduro campo is a privilege for their existence alone. It is remarkable she is here and for decades the city fathers have been considering its future. Flood gates sit at the mouth of the lagoon, cruise ships are no longer allowed down the Grand Canal and for some time the water has been creeping up. 

Architecturally, Venice is one of the greatest feats of human endeavour, skill, science and craftsmanship. Politically, she was an enviable model of social governance that allowed the city to prosper although their expansionism and trade, a perfect example of being hoisted by your own petard. The Western expansion into ‘The Orient’ and trade route openings was the beginnings of the globalised world that now exists, that wants so much and industrialised so fast. This gear shift  have led to this intense pressure on the city. 

Water is not a settling force to live around. It is your safety and it is your lifeline but it is not a reliable friend for as Joseph Brodsky writes in ‘Watermarks’, ‘Small wonder that it links muddy green in the daytime and pitch black at night, rivaling the firmament. A miracle that rubbed the right and the wrong way for over a millennium, it doesn’t have holes in it, that is still H2O, though you would never drink it; that it still rises.’

Santa Giorgio Maggiore, Palladio’s masterpiece, sits at the forefront of the rising tides, on an islet opposite St Mark’s Square. One of the largest monuments in the city and one of the most symbolic of the Venetian skyline, she is the crown in a picture of endeavour of this architectural city complex. With her back to the daily sunrise, it feels uplifting to witness her still afloat and is a symbol of hope for her constancy. 

A city that has already overcome a challenge of this magnitude by testing human genius to create such beauty against adversity should render some optimism even in the most pessimistic. 

To remember her humble beginnings of swampland, rife with malaria and to witness her grandeur, her charm, and unwavering appeal is remarkable but she is remarkable because of the salty water that is omnipresent and omnipotent. She is nothing without her reflections, the echoes in the darkness and the lapping on the Euganean stone steps.

Venice is haunted by waters and it is haunting, that it still rises.