Francesco Galli/La Biennale di Venezia Venice

The first installation to greet visitors entering the Central Pavilion of the 14th International Architecture Exhibition delivers an eloquent slap to the face. A richly embellished domed ceiling in royal blues and glistening golds depicting a mélange of religious themes and styles (by Galileo Chini from 1907-1909) is partly hidden from view by a section of that most depressing feature of modern architecture, the dropped ceiling, concealing a viper's nest of air ducts, mechanical piping, plumbing and electronic wiring.

In one articulate swipe, the tableau raises questions about contemporary architecture's subservient role to increasingly elaborate technologies and its complicity in an overall impoverishment of the experience of space.

Architects usually come to this biennale to see the latest big projects by the newest and best talent. But this year they have come in droves (attendance at the opening increased by 35% from the 2012 biennale) to see what is on the mind of Rem Koolhaas, architecture's intellectual seer and this year's director. And the Dutch architect pulls no punches, installing a three-part exhibition that rarely touches on the contemporary and embraces not a single famous living architect nor modern masterpiece. But what sometimes looks like a wholesale rebuke is more like a wake-up call.

Prone to inscrutable conceits ("the legitimacy of mediocrity," for instance) that are catnip to the young and the ambitious intelligentsia, Mr. Koolhaas proclaims that this biennale will focus not on architects but on architecture, and not on the contemporary but on "the inevitable elements of all architecture used by any architect, anywhere, anytime" in order to "generate a fresh understanding of the richness of architecture's fundamental repertoire, apparently so exhausted today."....Continue Reading

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