By Johanna Agerman Ross

Architecture’s failures. That’s what seems to be the overarching and rather bleak theme of Rem Koolhaas’ Venice Architecture Biennale, Fundamentals. At least that’s the feeling I get as the projects presented within it linger in my mind.

In Koolhaas’ biennale architecture’s failures are manyfold. Its key functions to preserve, protect, bring together, and represent are subverted such that they become annihilation, oppression, division and perversion. These traits are represented by projects like La Maddalena in northern Sardinia, the now abandoned and polluted building site of the half-finished conference centre designed by Italian architect Stefano Boeri for the G8 summit in 2009; modernist housing in Drancy outside of Paris that was used as an internment camp in the 1940s; or surveillance films produced by Mansfield Police Department in the USA in 1962 to entrap and convict “sexual deviants” in a public toilet. But it all starts with a false inner ceiling – a seemingly benign contraption that contrives to contain all of the negatives listed above.

As you enter the central pavilion, where the Koolhaas-curated Elements of Architecture exhibition is on show, the first thing you see is a false inner ceiling suspended over half of the room. Its air-conditioning ducts and cables are fully visible above the square ceiling tiles and high above this is a beautifully painted cupola. It’s this void between inner ceiling and actual ceiling that Koolhaas asks us to consider. It’s a space off-limit to architects, a silent, untouched area that can quickly become the stuff of nightmares when in the right hands – ponder Danish director Lars von Trier’s spirit-filled hospital in The Kingdom or the final raptor-filled scenes of Jurassic Park.....Continue Reading

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