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Playing with scale … Switzerland’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2018.
Playing with scale … Switzerland’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2018. Photograph: Italo Rondinella/Francesco Galli
Playing with scale … Switzerland’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2018. Photograph: Italo Rondinella/Francesco Galli

Cosmic chapels and an estate agent's nightmare – Venice Architecture Biennale review

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Bijou chapels from the Vatican, a mind-boggling house from Switzerland, and a load of scaffolding from Britain … our writer braves architecture’s answer to the Eurovision song contest

It seems fitting for a biennale curated by Irish architects that the pope should loom large. As Ireland went to the ballot box last weekend to vote overwhelmingly in favour of legalising abortion, red-sashed cardinals sauntered between bijou chapels on a wooded island in Venice, launching the Vatican’s first ever contribution to the architecture biennale.

“It is a path for all who wish to rediscover beauty, silence, the interior and transcendent voices,” said Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the pontifical council for culture. Fresh from posing for photos with Donatella Versace and Anna Wintour at the Met Museum’s Heavenly Bodies fashion exhibition in New York, Ravasi has commissioned 10 architects to build small chapels, so that visitors to the biennale might find space to pause in “the loneliness of the woodland, where one can experience the rustle of nature, which is like a cosmic temple.”

The rustle of guests searching for drinks was the main backdrop at the opening party, by all accounts. But if you were lucky enough to avoid the scrum, where hundreds were left to queue for the ferry while the cardinals were whisked over in their own speed boats, you were indeed treated to a rare moment of calm away from the hubbub.

Soon to be engulfed with flowers … Norman Foster’s timber trellis chapel. Photograph: Mirco Toniolo/Errebi/Rex/Shutterstock

Occupying newly landscaped woodlands behind the Palladian church of San Giorgio Maggiore, the chapels range from a subtly tapered stone box by Eduardo Souto de Moura, to a rugged concrete cylinder by Smiljan Radic, and a curving timber trellis by Norman Foster, soon to be engulfed with jasmine flowers. Modesty and simplicity were the keywords of the brief, which has led to some pleasantly spartan enclosures to sit and rest in; but it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to indulge in the kind of camp theatrics of which the Catholic church is so fond.

A young practice such as Space Popular, whose work revels in frenzied pattern-clashing and eye-searing colour combos (sadly confined to a small model in an exhibition across town) could have added a dose of gaudy glory to the rather solemn proceedings. Since minimalism has become the language of luxury, it all felt a bit too much like a spa retreat.

Nonetheless, the soul-cleansing of the papal pavilions was welcome after being subjected to the architectural equivalent of the Eurovision song contest. Sixty-five countries now compete with ever more impenetrable displays in the Giardini and at the back of the Arsenale, making the challenge to see them all in a couple of days an act of supreme endurance for even the most devout architecture enthusiast. As ever, there is a lot of rubbish, punctuated by occasional moments of brilliance. The rest could be of some interest, if the subject matter were given more space to breathe in a dedicated exhibition of its own.

British Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018. Photograph: British Council/Cultureshock Media

This year’s standout genius is to be found in the Swiss pavilion, where a group of young architects has concocted a surreal stage set of the ubiquitous show home, creating a labyrinthine sequence of shifts in scale. There are Lilliputian doors leading into Brobdingnagian kitchens, corridors that taper to nothing and ceilings that rise and plunge from room to room, inducing agora - and claustrophobia by turn. Decorated with a generic palette of plasterboard walls, skirting boards, wooden floors and off-the-shelf fittings, it has an eerie clinical neutrality. It feels like a place where estate agents might go to die, trapped in an endless purgatory of oversized kitchens, minute bedrooms and corridors to nowhere. The Biennale jury rarely picks my favourite, but this year Switzerland rightfully won the Golden Lion.

The British pavilion received an honourable mention too, which is richly deserved for its premise, but perhaps less so for its execution. Working with artist Marcus Taylor, architects Caruso St John decided to leave the pavilion entirely empty and erect a great scaffolding structure around it to support a new public space above, through which the building’s tiled rooftop pokes like a lonely island. It sends a powerful message about Britain’s increasingly isolated position in Europe, and neighbouring countries have been invited to host their events inside the empty building, but the result feels a bit half-baked.

“Once we had the idea, it simply designed itself,” says Peter St John, explaining that they used whatever proprietary systems were to hand, with as little “design” as possible. Their sunbaked plywood plaza isn’t a particularly pleasant place to sit, with clumsy white netting ringing the tiled rooftop, a muddle of stools, cafe tables and yellow parasols, and the special view of the lagoon blocked once you’re sitting down, due to the height of the balustrade. Even the symbolic gesture of performing the traditional British ritual of afternoon tea on the roof has been fumbled, with only lemon verbena on offer – “because it was too difficult to have a fridge for the milk,” says Taylor. If you’re going to do a one-liner, you have to get the details right.

A good example of a simple idea, carefully executed, can be found across the water in the Greek pavilion, curated by Xristina Argyros and Ryan Neiheiser, which looks at the architecture of the “academic commons”, picking up on this year’s theme of “freespace”. Taking inspiration from Raphael’s fresco, The School of Athens – where teaching appears to be conducted while sprawled across steps and leaning on plinths – they have modelled the communal spaces of a number of universities around the world (including some famous unbuilt plans). Supported on a delicate forest of columns, their beautiful white models create a floating field above a stepped space, revealing a surprising amount about different institutions’ approach to the (in)formality of how and where learning should take place. These are the corridors, staircases and quads where the gossip, arguments and chats happen, made visible.

Greek pavilion at Venice Biennale 2018. Photograph: Italo Rondinella

At the back of the Arsenale, another young duo, Nicholas Lobo Brennan and Astrid Smitham of Apparata, have made a space where chance encounters might happen. Commissioned for the Bahrain pavilion, they have erected a startling aluminium framed structure that fills the room, creating a walkway around the edge and a large “charged void” in the centre. Held up on just two points by big trusses, the frame is clad with a translucent skin, cut off at the knee, so you see people’s disembodied legs circulating before they enter the space, while the spectral noise of Friday sermons recorded from across the Muslim world fills the volume. It comes as a welcome balm after the long slog of the Corderie.

It is also worth traipsing to find the Chinese pavilion, which this year focuses on the countryside. While western commentators bemoan the incessant pace of China’s urbanisation, they might have failed to notice that the current big challenge is rural. Many of the megacities have become so unliveable that China is seeing a wave of reverse migration to the country, a trend encouraged by the government through initiatives from agri-tourism to manufacturing.

Chinese pavilion, Venice Biennale. Photograph: Francesco Galli

Curated by Li Xiangning, the exhibition features a number of accomplished rural projects by a new generation of Chinese architects. There is an elegant concrete wood kiln in the porcelain capital of Jingdezhen by Zhang Lei, a bamboo raft factory in Fujian by Trace Architecture Office, post-earthquake housing in Sichuan by Rural Urban Framework and impressive bamboo structures by Philip Yuan, which fuse traditional craft with digital modelling to create buildings that are at once ancient and futuristic. Together, it cements China’s transition from being a playground for the whims of foreign architects, to an emerging architectural powerhouse of sensitive, contextual architecture in its own right.

Other highlights include the Czech pavilion, where artist Kateřina Šedá has transformed the space into the headquarters of the fictional UNES-CO company, whose aim is to return “normal life” to the deserted town centres of Unesco world heritage sites. She has offered a number of families free housing in the centre of Český Krumlov, a quaint town of 13,000 that is now visited by over a million people a year, and paid them to bring back a semblance of everyday life to the empty stage set that the town has become. A series of live camera feeds on a large screen will relay the results throughout the duration of the Biennale.

The Czech and Slovak pavilion at Venice Biennale 2018. Photograph: Italo Rondinella

While tourism is the scourge of the Czech freespace, the Israeli contribution focuses on how different religious groups attempt to coexist, by putting five contested holy sites under the spotlight. A pair of videos depicts the absurd ballet that takes place in Hebron, where the Herodian building known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi mosque and to Jews as the Cave of the Patriarchs is divided in half for the separate use of the two communities. On 20 days a year, however, the site passes hands for 24 hours, under close military control, when all of the prayer mats are packed away and the menorahs brought out of locked cupboards, then vice versa, when the whole building is turned into a mosque. Another animated diagram shows the evolution of the site of Rachael’s Tomb in Bethlehem, once a remote place of pilgrimage but now encircled by an eight metre-high concrete security wall, making it only accessible to Jewish worshippers. It is as neutral as a government-sanctioned exhibition on the topic can be, so the critical lens remains in the eye of the beholder.

Finally, once you’ve had enough of the main venues and are looking for some truly free space, head across town to the garden of the crumbling Palazzo Zenobio in Dorsoduro. Here, Scotland’s contribution takes the form of a community garden, where the young hands-on architecture practice Baxendale has erected a festive boardwalk-cum-climbing frame, as an armature for others to come and add to the structure and stage their own events. When I visited, an army of children was busy tangling themselves up in a cat’s cradle of colourful ropes, others were embroiled in a cape-making workshop before preparing to join a local parade, while another group was setting up a projector for an al-fresco film screening.

The Happenstance. Scotland’s contribution to the Venice biennale Photograph: Bash Khan

“One neighbour initially came over to complain about the construction noise,” says curator Peter McCaughey. “But by the time they left, their daughter had decided to come and host a piano recital here.” It’s a modest project, but it demonstrates the power of architecture, however rough and ready, to bring people together in an open, messy, joy-filled space.

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