For all the dreamy beauty of Venice and the grace of the stately Giardini, with its centenarian laurel and plane trees, the Architecture Biennale is often the scene of fierce, if polite, architectural battles, including career assassinations, hostile intellectual take-overs, and ritual Oedipal stabbings. Since its founding in 1980, curators take positions, their agendas displacing the status quo.
In this year’s Biennale, “Freespace,” the curators, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, founders of the Dublin firm Grafton Architects, pursued “the generosity of spirit and sense of humanity at the core of architecture’s agenda.” But under the kinder, gentler, humanist umbrella of this seemingly benign mission statement, they basically staged an architectural Brexit, a Biennale that rejected the globalization practiced today by computer-driven starchitects in favor of localization practiced by architects with smaller operations rooted in communities, not served by jets.
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