Rem Koolhaas's excellent Biennale sets new sensibilities against old, and maps out Italy's history of grandeur and brutality

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Decorative or functional? The ceiling installation in the Central pavilion represents two different ideas about the point of a ceiling. Photograph: David Levene

Welcome to the Future of Air Conditioning, says a poster at Venice airport, straight after passport control. Next to the words is an image of a composite Shanghai/Dubai-like city, made of sealed towers of the kind that would be impossible without artificial air. Any association with this year's Rolex-sponsored Venice Biennale of Architecture is coincidental, but the poster is an eloquent exhibit of the event's main theme. This is: thousands of years of architectural history are being changed utterly by modern techniques of constructing and servicing buildings which, predetermined by technical considerations, make architects marginal to their making. If, for example, a fireplace was once an occasion for social gathering and ornamental embellishment, there are now sensors that can track an individual and provide heating specific to that one person. The provision of heat becomes a solitary, dematerialised and invisible affair.

The point is made in the large central pavilion at the heart of the Biennale's gardens. Here, this year's director, Rem Koolhaas, together with students from Harvard and a considerable team of collaborators, has installed a series of rooms which represent the elements of architecture – doors, stairs, walls, balconies and so on – and their contemporary versions. It is a 3D Google of what buildings have been and are now.

Just after entering, you reach the pavilion's domed hall, whose rich blue and gold decorations from 1909 have recently been restored. Below, Koolhaas has installed a section of ceiling such as you might find in a modern hospital, in which a layer of dumb panels separates off a zone of ducts and machinery, in volume as large as the lower space inhabited by people.

The progress of doors is traced, from decorative and ceremonial frames to the disembodied beep of modern security. A marvellous wall of windows, from the Brooking Collection of such things, looks on to a testing machine borrowed from the Belgian Sobinco window factory, which, with relentless rhythm, opens and closes to infinity....Continue Reading

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