Architecture Biennale: "Reports from the Front"

"We believe that the advancement of architecture is not a goal in itself but a way to improve people’s quality of life" (Aravena)

the slightly elevated view: Biennale poster

There seems to be so much that is more urgent than writing about the artistic joys of architecture, even when  this year's architecture Biennale in Venice itself conveys urgency with its rather breathless title "Reports from the Front".

This isn’t a report from Venice nor is it my intend to write a critique. Instead, this article assumes that the front is everywhere, especially in Baltimore. The article, then, is intended as an exploration of the tension between artistic impetus, user participation, pragmatism, crisis management, social pragmatism and long-term visionary thinking. 

It looks as if Biennale Director Aravena himself and the US Pavilion with its exhibit about Detroit are good cases for this inquiry. I will explain why.

Pritzker Prize winner and Biennale Director: Aravena

First about Aravena, the architect: This year's architecture festival is directed by the Chilean architect and 2016 Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena, who as a person and with his Biennale theme, shows that architecture, indeed, can be more than a pleasure for the senses. Aravena has become the go to person for providing relief in moments of catastrophe and mayhem. That reputation started when he quickly and decidedly came to the aid of the small Chilean town of Constitución which had been ravaged by an earthquake and the flood wave that followed.

“We don’t think of ourselves as artists. Architects like to build things that are unique. But if something is unique it can’t be repeated, so in terms of it serving many people in many places, the value is close to zero. We go into fields where the chance of failing is higher than average. We make mistakes. “In the name of artistic freedom, architects made themselves irrelevant. I think we may look back and see this as a tipping point.” (Araveno as quoted by the New York Times)

Mayhem is anywhere.  Reports from the front can come from Detroit (as is the case in the Bienniale's US Pavilion) but they could just as well come from Columbine, Orlando, Ferguson or Baltimore, or from Paris, Aleppo or Istanbul. The front, like mayhem, is everywhere.

Aravena incremental housing: Before and after

It is nothing new that architects are jumping into the breach. They descended in great numbers on New Orleans after the city had been decimated by Katrina. Architects design for climate change, they volunteer after tornadoes. But none of this has protected them from the persistent suspicion of self aggrandizing that always seems to be right around the corner.

Araveno himself is no exception: the British Guardian writes about his hairdo and puts him in line with all the other "starchitects".

Certainly Aravena has some of the trappings of a starchitect: a high media profile, a globetrotting, lecture-giving lifestyle, a carefully cultivated look, a bizarre hairstyle (think desert roadkill) that seems to get spikier and more top-heavy with every transcontinental flight.(The Guardian)

But in his own country he has become a people's hero for his focus on social housing. He is the inventor of incremental housing, a phased approach described by the New York Times this way: "Residents get what they couldn’t easily build or pay for on their own: a two-story, two-bedroom home, with roof, kitchen and bathroom — plus an equivalent empty space next to it. Residents complete the second half, if, when and as they can." Design around scarcity instead of abundance, for the poor instead of the rich, yet still with joy in mind.

“Scarcity of means requires from the architect an abundance of meaning. The power of architecture is the power of synthesis, to say what you want in two words instead of three, to achieve a solution in as few moves as possible." (Aravena).

But it isn't even that role reversal from what is expected of a typical star architect that sets Aravena apart. Instead it is his inclusion of the public. His Constitucion repair did not begin with design but with a question. A question his office asked not of government but of the survivors of this town. (Rebuild the town in the same place with a big sea-wall or build a shoreline park and relocate residences further inland on higher ground. The people went for the park). The discovery was twofold: people acting on their behalf will not only make better decisions, but in the right process they can also build equity for themselves and thus break out of the cycle of poverty. (Homes in a high-risk zone have low equity to begin with and unlikely to appreciate). 

With his incremental housing the architect provides just a platform, a shelf, an armature. The residents provided the added value themselves. The lack of equity in housing of the urban poor in the US is one of the rarely told causes of why poverty is so entrenched here.  

Giving Aravena the Pritzker this year and the Biennale possibly marks the same tipping point in the profession he himself described.

Now about Detroit. Following the exhibit title of Report(s) from the Front, the US Pavilion titled its exhibit Architectural Imagination and features four sites in Detroit. sponsored by the State Department and curated by Cynthia Davidson and Monica Ponce de Leon, the idea was that various Detroit sites, selected with the help of an extensive advisory board, would show a variety of speculative design options developed by a set of architecture firms distilled from a national request for proposals. An additional objective was that designs should be also applicable in other cities with declining traditional industries. Detroit's planning director, who also served on the advisory board for the exhibit, didn't think of Detroit in the context of ruins. According to CityLab, Maurice Cox said:

Associating Detroit solely with urban decay is like thinking in the past tense. The Biennale, allows urban planners and designers to pivot the conversation toward how architecture can help the city can move forward. And it puts that conversation on a world stage. One of the things I was looking forward to was a desire to solve real problems and not simply showcase the brilliance of the architects One of the things.(Maurice Cox, Planning Director Detroit)

Maurice Cox, a Harvard School of Design graduate is maybe exhibit #1 of the concept how architecture and planning "can help the city move forward". He is an excellent choice for the position of Planning Director of Detroit. Cox, last a professor for community engagement at Tulane University, has previously been the director of the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) and has planned for New Orleans. About this new role as planning director in Detroit he told the Detroit Free Press:

"My challenge is to ask them to dream along with me, to raise the bar, to not settle, to recognize that this is a community that has not been afraid to aspire to be a great American city," Cox said. "We have evidence of it all over the place, so people know that it's a part of Detroit's DNA. I think we just have to feel confident that we can realize it again, not just dream about it, but actually get it done." (Maurice Cox, Planning Director Detroit)

My city, Baltimore should have been so lucky or so astute as to have him here as planning director! We only got him once on invitation of AIA Baltimore to advise in a lecture how not to lower your expectations, even if in crisis. (Baltimore had won one of the Our City NEA grants at the time).

Legacy city: The abandoned Packard Plant site

The Detroit approach to the Biennale exhibit, though, may have been derailed by the dual approach of trying to be at once site specific (four sites in Detroit) and at the same time applicable elsewhere. It is questionable if the Detroit site designs presented in the US Pavilion actually solve real problems and whether it is even possible to transport the Detroit issues in any meaningful way to Venice. From Stroh's to prosecco, a transition frought with peril. 

The idea of re-using the once proud Packard Plant for vertical gardens seems a rather frivolous suggestion, the implied retro step from indutrial manufacturing to agricultural is just too ironic. The accommodation of refugees picked up on a theme that was, not surprisingly, pervasive at the Biennale and a topic in the exhibits of many countries. But the Detroit design seemed impractical, to say the least. The letter to Obama, part of the exhibit, asking for more Syrian refugees to be accepted in the US and to then settle them in Detroit is a nice touch, though.

The Packard plant as a vertical botanical garden (Photo:Allen architect)

Araveno as the director and Detroit as the US contribution represent good examples of what Biennale curator (yes, there are many) Ricky Burdett summarizes in this video as the motives of the show. Burdett  recites all the major global challenges including how much of the much-touted urbanization will actually be unplanned development often without even basic services. In part urbanization is fueled by the fact that in an industrial or post-industrial country it is much harder to earn a living in the rural regions than in the urban ones. We still see these intra-national migrations here in the US and much more acutely in China, in which the hinterlands are being vacated in favor of the urban regions often located along the coasts . In part urbanization is fueled by the gigantic global migration streams resulting from war, oppression and lack of opportunity. Detroit's (and US legacy city's) conundrum of the dwindling city, is an exception. The much more typical problem is the exploding megalopolis. The perverse condition is, of course addressed with the idea to direct refugees to Detroit.

In either of these conditions tactical self-help is often what happens, architecture without architects, executed on the level of basic needs by those who are in need. One could say there isn't much left for architects in that situation except expanding on the low-tech solutions and elevating them artistically. That is the case in several Biennale exhibits, including the brick arches that low-skilled workers can erect just like they have for all the ages. 

:DIY architecture: hand made brick arches

As welcome as the focus on the "front lines" and the desire for social architecture is, it is hard to see how self-help and simple improvisation can make much of a dent in the problems arising from the concentrations that internal and global migrations cause, even if, as one of the Venice exhibits reminds us, "3 billion people live in buildings made of mud". Solutions for the 20 million resident city must come from technology as well. Technology is needed to provide density. Density, in turn is needed to prevent the world from duplicating the US model of dispersal which has helped to destroy Detroit, but has nevertheless taken the world in storm, even though is utterly unsustainable.

Aravena's South America and Detroit represent two sides of the global urban coin: The post-industrial decay of Detroit, a once proud city now in search of people and the overflowing metropolises such as Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Bogota. In both cases improvisation and tactical urbanism may be adequate initial responses, but for long-term survival, especially the mega cities of the world require more than what a free pair of hands can stack up and they can't do with just self organization. Tackling the disparities between abundance and starvation requires better governance, better practices, and new approaches. Aravena alludes to the many forces that are beyond the purview of architects in his Biennale introduction:

The always menacing scarcity of means, the ruthless constraints, the lack of time and urgencies of all kinds are a constant threat that explain why we so often fall short in delivering quality. The forces that shape the built environment are not necessarily amicable either: the greed and impatience of capital or the single mindedness and conservatism of the bureaucracy tend to produce banal, mediocre and dull built environments. These are the frontlines

Venice: La Biennale giardini

A lot to battle, for sure. Architects are only a small part in that struggle. Nevertheless, that an architecture festival in a city like Venice, more a museum than a thriving city, can also be not frivolous is possibly a symbol for the tipping point Aravena noted.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
edited by Ben Groff, JD

Monocle film: Biennale 

http://www.archdaily.com/789469/monocle-films-report-from-the-national-pavilions-at-the-2016-venice-biennale?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ArchDaily+List