Austrian provocateur Wolf Prix has hit out at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale for failing to tackle major political themes behind architecture.
In a press release, the Coop Himmelb(l)au likened the international showcase to a ‘product fair’, describing it as ‘hollow, arduous, exhausting, bleak and boring’.
Prix cited controversial plans to redevelop Stuttgart train station, the cost explosion of high profile buildings like the Elbe Philharmonic Hall, political arguments about mosques and minarets and the collapse of the single-family home market in the USA as ‘disputes about the localisation of an idea’ and topics ‘worthy of discussion’.
However, the fact that Herzog & de Meuron’s controversial Elbe Philharmonic hall was displayed in the Arsenale, along with extensive coverage of its overspend, as published in the press, has fuelled speculation that Prix criticised the exhibition without having seen it.
In his statement, Prix labelled the festival an ‘expensive dance of death’, claiming a ‘great’ biennale would have featured forums and themes looking ‘behind the scenes’ at decision-making ‘instead of boring exhibitions’.
Using a Venetian carnival metaphor, Prix said architects were ‘playing on a sinking gondola’ like the orchestra on the Titanic while in the real world ‘our leaky trade is sinking into powerlessness and irrelevance’.
The 69-year-old Jencks Award winner explained: ‘This is because politicians and project managers, investors and bureaucrats have been deciding on our built environment for a long time now. Not the architects.’
vía Wolf Prix attacks Chipperfield’s Venice Biennale | News | Architects Journal.
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