Charles Jencks on the Biennale

I was involved in the 1980 Biennale, which Pallop put together called The Presence of the Past, and before he called it that, it was called Postmodernism, and it was based on my writings and book. But because of Robert Stern and Venturi and others, there was a shift towards the past, and The Presence of the Past overcame my definitions of postmodernism. But I say all that because Rem Koolhaas, in this Biennale, the 14th Biennale, has changed the paradigm. We've had 13 Biennales, which have more or less tried to predict what's going to happen in the next five years, because in our time, we have a compulsive desire to learn the next step. In fact, Dan Sudeik's Biennale was called Next, like the Fashion House, and people are so interested in fashion, they can't think of anything else. And so, The Presence of the Past was going to the past, and the past of the present is what this show is about. So, in a way, Rem, who I invited to the 1980 Biennale, has turned it on its head and looked at 5,000 years of architectural evolution through 15 elements, the elements of architecture, and seen where they're going. And he finds certain obvious trends, which are towards lightness, towards thinness, towards instantiality. All the arguments that I was trained in by Siegfried Gideon, mechanization takes command, Rem has understood. But unlike Gideon and the modernists, he understands correctly that the evolution of these elements is discontinuous with each other. So his story is one of destabilization as well as stability. If you look at modernism that I was trained in with Gideon and Corbusier and so on, the idea was, in a sense, to create universal elements of architecture that would be unchanging. That's what Nervi said. You can't get better than a Georgian spoon for eating soup. So, Corbusier's view of evolution and Gideon's was that there was an evolution towards types. Nervi's work was completely based on that idea. And what Rem has showed in the show and his students at Harvard have shown is that almost all of Nervi's buildings are crumbled, changed, dislocated, destabilized, and destroyed. I mean, it's a really sad story of how the building itself, something that didn't happen. And so, Rem is like his work on the metabolist looking at these elements evolving at different rates and saying some are disappearing, like the fireplace. He shows that, you know, has evolved into it with a digital technology is, will be heat sources that follow you around the house. And the role of the fireplace, which Frank Lloyd Wright put at the heart of modernism, the hearth, the home, the center of family life, has disappeared and turned into a television set. I think also the notion that, as Leonardo da Vinci and Rem have shown in Corbusier and the great creators, is that research can be creative. I think that's probably the single most important shift that Rem's work shows. And when I questioned him about that, he said, well, you know, I don't have a choice. That's in my bloodstream. That's what I do anyway. Well, Rem has always played on a paranoia. He said of his method of research, he made the connection, which I know is true, between Salvador Dali's paranoid critical method. If you don't know the paranoid critical method, PC, you might not appreciate this, but Dali said, you know, the mind works in a paranoid way and it puts forward a conjecture and then it seeks confirming evidence. And Rem is always seeking the sinister buried in the happiness. And he knows that that edge inspires us, upsets us, gets our attention. So, it's intended to slightly disturb you, but I think, I wouldn't say it's overwhelming in the case. I mean, about the doorway, for instance, he says, the security door frame is what has now become ubiquitous in all airports and in all corporations. You go through a security check at, say, the Gherkin. You have to go through that. And we live in that architectural element, the era of that digitized architectural element. And that's a kind of paradigm case. But what's so interesting is he shows in some of the rooms on the door, the fortresses, how in a castle you had portcullis and, you know, 17 checks as you went through the castle. So, it's hardly new and we are fascinated by that, you know. You and I, we go to castles and we always have a frisson of excitement when we see a portcullis coming down in our imagination on someone. And I think the national pavilions, I don't know if you've seen the French pavilion, which is one of the best. And at the center, Jean-Louis Cohn has put that incredible film of Mon Oncle, of, you know, Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati. And there the doorway goes down, snaps shut, the doorway of the garage, the automated doorway. That was filmed in 1958 and it's a terribly funny film about a paranoid house where the eyes rotate like this. And everything in the modern house, think of 1958, where a super modern house at the time and everybody is a kind of automata of fashion. And it's terribly funny. It's a Corbusier house. Well, so, Tati, the filmmaker, and Rem, who was a filmmaker, when he was young, are playing on the humor embedded in the mechanistic. And I think we're all frightened, necessarily so, by mechanism. And his argument is that mechanism is taking over from us. And so, when he presented with Silicon Valley, I don't know if you saw that. He's designing with Silicon Valley, the man who sold his company to Google for three and a half billion dollars, you know? Do you know Nest? Anyway, yeah, so, Nest takes a thermostat and applies it to everything, the chair, the door, the window. So, every, you know, your whole house will be sensing you, will be measuring your health, telling you to sit down, telling you to go to sleep because you're burning up too much energy that you're, the greenhouse effect. I have no paranoia about all these elements taking over our life. But Rem loves to play on that, and he debated Google and, you know, this man, and he made it sound like 1984, you know, that you would be a slave of your automated building, the smart building. And I think, you know, I applaud the strangeness of bringing Salvador Dali's paranoid critical method to architecture. I applaud its unlikeliness, but I think Rem is the number one world communicator through architecture, and he's an incredible breath of fresh air. He is the Corbusier of our time, and I wasn't aware of, to the extent to which, like Corbusier, he's managed to clone himself through research. In other words, Corbusier, you know, ran his office of patient research, as he called it. And therefore, people doing primary research, very distorted in Corbusier's case on the city, had an effect on modern architecture, which was unbelievable. And I think Rem is having that effect. Not altogether it's good, but that's another case. The carnival is the archetype of Venice, where everybody comes to celebrate, make love or not, or whatever the case is. So, one expects that, and all the previous Biennales have had that problem. There is no continuity. In fact, ours in 1980, when we had the street, I thought ours had the continuity of street. You know, the new street, Strada Novissima, in 1980, was a coherence. And I think that's important, but it's lost in this sequence of cacophony. And I think, you know, that cacophony exists here, as well as a whole lot of elements which you can question. I question, for instance, democracy. I don't think the exhibition on democracy, which is the third one you hit, you come in, is right. It compares democracy to theater, to a semicircular space. And of course, that's important as against the British system of oppositional space, with two sides of the house. But that's only one, and the most important aspect of democracy, of course, is the public square, the agora, the way people congregate in public realms and take their own decisions and influence politics that goes on in semicircles. Semicircles are controlling spaces, but real political events occur in squares, in fora. So he had, you know, there was no real communication of that fact. Rem, when I criticized him on this, said, oh, you didn't understand all those dancers were the squares. Well, give me a break. How could you understand that? Maybe a greater critique of the Biennale is that it doesn't get the public realm centered in one space enough where there can be creative discourse, which you get the leading artists of the world together, and then the next generation of architects to challenge them and get a dialogue of the elite architects, both the super architects or superstars, and the younger generation who are challenging them, and then the people. I mean, you know, that would be more productive in a way that the World Architectural Forum, which goes on in Singapore and elsewhere, shows a discourse at least at the lower level. What they're lacking is the upper level. So, you know, this is a bit of a trade show, which is a cacophony, because these elements can't speak to each other. There's no obligation towards the difficult whole. There's no obligation as Venturi called it. How do you put the 15 elements together? Who's going to do it in what way? It begs the question. Yeah, I think you can level all those criticisms, and they're valid criticisms, but, you know, I think it would be wrong to not think that this is a very positive new paradigm, and it puts the question, what is going to come to the next Biennale? It's a hard act to follow, and the next architect will have to take this into account, and so therefore can build a maybe more profound synthesis. This is about analysis, and yet it's interesting to propose a theme for each of the national pavilions, so the next director will have the question, should we do that again? Should we say, okay, all the national pavilions now can allow architects back in, but should they have a common theme to address? I think it would be a good idea. Theory as research, as Rem shows, is hard. He's got all these students in his office, OMA, behind him, so you have to build up this incredible discourse in your mind if you're going to change architecture the way he has or the way any of the big shakers and movers do. On the other hand, you have another problem, is you have to have a practice which is successful, which is some, occupies another part of your brain, you know, so I don't underestimate the incredible challenge that you have to change the practice on the one hand, your own practice, and the theory simultaneously, and if there was an easy way to do it, you know, it would be great because we could teach it, but I do think those are two different things, and usually you can make a contribution to theory or practice, but to make them simultaneously to both is bloody hard, and the problem is you get married to architecture, and your personal life collapses, and you get a divorce or whatever, and you get, you know, with all the tragedy that that implies, and I think it's a wonderful profession, but bloody hard, you're underpaid, and you have to race. On the other hand, I found through my 50 years of being involved, it's a much better profession than doctors, lawyers, bankers, accountants, and all the other options, so, you know, we're part of an incredibly creative profession. You'll never find another profession who asks the basic questions, gets underpaid for answering them, but enjoys it, so I think, you know, keep your enjoyment, but beware that, you know, you do pay a personal price, and, you know, stand on the shoulders of the previous generation. One of the things, to get outside of architecture, which you have to do to make a contribution of architecture, one of the things I, if Corbusier wrote a book called If I Had to Teach You Architecture, if I had to teach you architecture, or the young, I would say, you need a lever to change architecture, and the only way you can get a lever is another discourse outside of it, so you can't just change it from within, you have to rethink it from, you know, culture.