Memo 002

Laboratory of Whose Future?

Nicholas Chung, 8 June 2023


Amongst the fanfare surrounding the Venice Biennale’s opening this May, it is hard to dismiss Patrik Schumacher’s (Zaha Hadid Architects) scathing critique of Lesley Lokko’s The Laboratory of the Future. I do get where he is coming from, the sensational lack of the usual suspects of these architectural curations, in tandem with a general feeling that I’m at a creative short film festival instead of the Architecture Biennale, did leave me underwhelmed. That said, I was left to wonder about why Schumacher said what he said when he said it. Biennales are historically spectacles of power, and from the very first moment when Roberto Cicutto (President of the Biennale) appointed Lokko as curator (right off the heels of her controversial departure from the City College of New York’s School of Architecture in 2020), the political tension between practitioners, educators, and the avant-garde artists was destined to undertone this particular Biennale.

Lokko is an educator, and her invites to showcase are predominantly extended to fellow educators or avant-garde artists, in clear juxtaposition to the practitioners camp that Schumacher and ‘the establishment’ fall into. To address a few of his argumentative fallacies: Schumacher writes that the national pavilions “refuse to show the work of their architects, or any architecture whatsoever”. Though admittedly there are lazier entries in the mix, what he doesn’t tell you is that a good amount of the pavilions have work by practitioners who, unlike Schumacher, is not only interested in the building of commercial architecture. For instance, the list of exhibitors for the Spanish Pavilion include landscape architects, architecture offices, and ecological researchers; the United States is represented by a cohort from Columbia University; South Korea has work from NHDM (who practice and teach in New York); the Belgian Pavilion has a fully occupiable mycelium interior (a more sustainable material science that is gaining traction in both academia and practice)… the list goes on. Of course, there is a legal delineation of what it means to be an architect, and institutions like NCARB or RIBA gatekeep the use of that term, but how does that somehow endow Schumacher with the right to authoritatively gaslight the commissioners and exhibitors by undermining their work as ‘not architecture’ or irrelevant?

It doesn’t take a cynic to see when Schumacher says the Biennale’s soul is “up for grabs”, he is just one sentence short of nominating himself to get the job done, shifting the event’s powerbase back to a more capital-driven agenda. (There isn’t enough space to flesh it out here but I’m tempted to think about how Schumacher blindly praises entries from certain corners of the world, and whether ZHA’s vast amount of ongoing projects/capital investment in those regions influenced that opinion)

The questionable conflation of professional practice as the whole of architectural discipline aside, Schumacher does raise a good point in that this Biennale, and the Biennales of late, are thematically convoluted. During the Force Majeure: a Conversation symposium, an audience member asked about the conceptual underpinning of “decolonization” – one of the two key themes Lokko set forward to frame her curation. Lokko’s response touched on the etymological difference between colony and dominion, and that what they are talking about concerning issues of “territory, language, and belonging” is actually “de-dominionizing, not de-colonizing.” Admittedly, it was a bit jarring when the captain of the ship begins to undermine the hull’s integrity. But herein lies the problem: inaccuracy, inconsistency, or too much ambiguity. We are in a milieu that encourages creative interpretation and horizontal dissemination, but the atomic coding/base element/intention of the Biennale cannot already be so convoluted and illegible – otherwise you will never get a biodiverse ecosystem that has synergy between independent exhibitors.

The absence of an organized agenda is also evident in the overabundance of screaming, petulant silence, and lack of calculated complexity in both the Giardini and the Arsenale. When Lokko asked her panel of Adjaye, Kamara, Hood, Benimana, Diabaté, and Davis what this gathering of practitioners across the African diaspora meant to them, the response that everyone seemed to agree on is that “we could just be.” The reclamation of the marginalized in neutralizing the white, Eurocentric worldview and rejecting a need to actively undo their victimization is, under any circumstance, a profound moment worth celebrating. But when given the curatorial responsibility of telling the outside world what the state of architecture is, where it is going, and where it should be, this laissez-faire approach that suggests a lack of urgency in a time of crises just isn’t enough. Especially given the title The Laboratory of the Future, I found it difficult as a future architect, academic, or any other type of practitioner to see how this Biennale is relevant to the world we will soon inherit. When I asked the panel what they wanted the next generation to take away from this Biennale, their response could be easily summarized into the following: develop your practice on your terms, be courageous and confront your fears, and take the emergence of the African continent seriously. All very thought-provoking but again, I am still left to wonder how is that relevant to the work on display?

Sidenotes:







”Venice Biennale Blues”, Patrik Schumacher
link to original text










"No talk about 'architecture as expanded field' can convince me that we are still in an architectural event when the scene is dominated by documentaries, critical art practice and symbolic installations while architectural works are nowhere to be seen in 99 per cent of the exhibition space."



















Carnival: Force Majeure: a Conversation
link to event recording

“So, I agree with you. I think decolonization is not exactly the right term, but in the same way laboratory and workshop are not exactly the right term, it seems to me that there is a language here both materially, formally, spatially, in terms of capital – that is waiting to be born and all the ingredients are here for it.