Building Excitement

City of lights: A Danish-Chinese exhibit at the Venice Architectural Biennale proposes a new design for the Chinese city of Chongqing. (Dansk Architecture Center)

Once you get past the entrance to the 10th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale — with its colossal cubic video screen flashing images and letter-play in your face — things improve dramatically. That’s because a shocking and wonderful thing has happened: for the first time since its inception, the world’s most important design and architecture exhibition is not primarily a showcase for big egos to flaunt blueprints of trophy buildings, but a dynamic, wide-ranging and vital look at how people shape cities and how cities shape our lives.

The theme is the brainchild of Richard Burdett, the Rome-raised-and-trained British architect and urban planner, and it couldn’t be more relevant. A century ago, 10 per cent of the world’s inhabitants lived in urban areas. Today, more than half do. The United Nations predicts that by 2050, up to 75 per cent of all people will live in cities — cities that will look a lot more like Mexico City and Shanghai than Toronto or Vancouver. The world is urbanizing at a breathtaking clip, and nowhere as fast as in Asia, South America and Africa (in that order). As these cities swell, the need to fight poverty, curb cultural tension and fend off environmental collapse will only get more urgent. Those who live in and design cities need to sit up and pay attention to what looms on the horizon — now.

This year’s Biennale is a clarion call to do just that. The entries are divided into two sections: the park-like Giardini area, where several dozen national pavilions show their official selections, and the Corderie dell’Arsenale, the former Venetian shipbuilding docks that hold the exhibit Cities, Architecture and Society, curated by Burdett himself.

The Corderie is didactic, but in the best sense of the word. It takes 16 cities on four continents and conveys in a clear display of text, models, photos and videos how everything from designing decent public washrooms (in Mumbai) to incorporating, rather than razing, shanty towns in the city centre (in Caracas) has improved people’s lives.

Surprises abound. I’m surely not the only one amazed to learn that Bogota, Colombia (with a population of almost eight million), is an international trailblazer in planning city bike paths. Almost 200,000 Bogotanians bicycle to work each day, and so far one-third of the city’s planned 355 kilometres worth of paths have been constructed. Bogota also has a highly functional bus system designed specifically to get people to and from work faster.

More inspiration comes from Sao Paolo, Brazil (population 18 million). The city’s young architects joined forces several years ago to build a hundred new public schools designed to be open after hours. The mandate is to give people the right to access places that promote active citizenship and are an alternative to violence. Crime rates have dropped in the neighbourhoods around the schools, as they have in Caracas and Mexico City, where libraries, sports and cultural facilities have been built.

The displays on Mexico City (at 19 million, the world’s second-largest city) and Los Angeles (12 million strong) show all the pitfalls of urban sprawl, from environmental issues to increased crime to the emotional toll that long commutes take on friends and family. Barcelona, on the other hand, is accommodating larger numbers of people by intensifying development in the downtown core, all the while remaining one of the most beautiful and livable cities in Europe.

Live and work: In the French pavilion at the Venice Architectural Biennale, 30 architects and artists took up residence in the space they are helping to design. (Megan Williams/CBC)

The Giardini section of the Biennale, whose national exhibits were also given the cities-and-people mandate, was less expressly informative, but just as fascinating. France took the theme and sliced it, creating a vivacious work-in-progress called Metavilla. Conceived by Patrick Bouchain, an innovator in temporary shelter, the idea was to let 30 architects and artists move into the pavilion for six weeks and design, build and live 24/7 in the very space they created. (In an ideal world, this would be a job requirement for architects.)

The result is a wall-free, light-filled space bustling with people, with a big, open kitchen that can be viewed from above. Bedrooms consist of beds separated by hanging sheets with closet space; a sauna and mini-pool on the roof overlook the Venice lagoon. After spending an hour watching the Metavillians do their thing, including making lunch, I felt like phoning home and telling my kids I’d see them in a month.

Romania also managed to convey the issues it’s facing — gentrification, extreme poverty, the development explosion since the ouster of dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu in 1989 — in a fresh and involving way. Using nine oversized dice, visitors choose options written on the sides of the dice to questions like “dream house?” or “what kind of nature?” Once you choose your answers (there are nine questions), an aerial view of your city is projected onto a screen with your values summed up. The goal of the game is to get people to take the first step toward becoming responsible citizens and to form opinions — beyond our personal interests — about the space we’d like to live in.

The Danes used their national space to show designs co-created by Danish architects and Chinese urban planners for building sustainable cities, sub-cities and neighbourhoods in China. The four models feature dense, energy-efficient and stylish neighbourhoods. The plan for Chongqing — which, with an annual influx of 1.2 million people, is the biggest municipality in the world — is a series of mountain-shaped high- and low-rise buildings that reflect the city’s natural surroundings. It also maintains design traditions of Chinese neighbourhoods.

In contrast, the two Chinese entries felt strangely off the mark. One is a mediocre display on housing in Hong Kong. The other, by hotshot Chinese architect Mi Qui, features the historic city of Tong Li, “the Venice of China.” One element is a shallow, rectangular pond with old photographic images of China projected onto gliding goldfish. It’s hypnotic and meditative, but the exhibit feels like a nostalgic glance at the past, with a glimmer of tourist promotion. Tong Li is protected by UNESCO and thus facing no threat of extinction; but there are thousands of other historic sites in China that are in danger of environmental upheaval due to urbanization.

Israel’s exhibit on commemorative and memorial buildings, given the confusing title Lifesaver, is also out of step. Its main feature is a series of somewhat sinister-looking black-and-white drawings and plastic models of memorials for fallen soldiers. Despite all the talk in the accompanying blurb about how the monuments convey “history, death and pain, while simultaneously shaping another gaze directed toward the future,” you’d have to be on some very good drugs to make those links on your own. It was, however, interesting to learn about the high number of memorial monuments and sites throughout the country. There are more than 1,600, an architectural reflection of Israel’s attention to past loss and future fragility.

This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale has admirable intentions: to show places that stimulate democracy, justice, sustainability, tolerance and functionality. Just like a favourite city, this exhibition is diverse, challenging and full of discoveries. It just goes to show what can take place with little posturing, few inflated egos and putting people and context before objects.

The 10th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale runs until Nov. 19.

Megan Williams is a Canadian writer living in Rome and the author of the short-story collection Saving Rome.

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