Image from ‘A Clockwork Jerusalem’

The British pavilion at the Architecture Biennale has long had a problem with Britishness. Whether it is some kind of post-imperial hang-up or an uneasy attempt to define some sense of Britishness (or more usually Englishness: the Scots now have their own mobile pavilion), it has become a kind of defining theme – or at least a droning background noise.

Last time round, in an apparent attempt to avoid such accusations, the curators sent a bunch of young design types around the world to bring back interesting ideas. It backfired painfully, looking like some kind of patronising colonial project.

So this year’s entry, A Clockwork Jerusalem, with its implied mash-up of William Blake’s strange visionary poem and Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian version of London modern – the British picturesque and utopian influence in modernism – looks right at home. But perhaps, perhaps this year will be different. I have to suggest this because I was on the panel that selected it, so my usual sense of unease is heightened.

The pavilion confronts Biennale director Rem Koolhaas’s theme for the national pavilions – “Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014” – head on. The curators are architects FAT and architectural historian Wouter Vanstiphout of Dutch collective Crimson. This is to be FAT’s last project before the individual members go their own ways. For over two decades they have been the pop conscience of British architecture: irreverent, iconoclastic and enjoyable; their designs and their wit have enlivened the sometimes dour and puritanical strain of British neo-modernism. My hope is that they will bring that incisive irreverence to Venice.

Curators Sam Jacob and Wouter Vanstiphout

I went to meet Sam Jacob of FAT (the acronym, incidentally, stands for “Fashion Architecture Taste”) and Vanstiphout at Jacob’s studio in Islington, north London. “The story we’re trying to tell”, says Jacob, “is of a modernity that begins with the industrial revolution and its founding text is Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ – this slightly unformed, visceral, outsider reaction to the modern.”...Continue Reading

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