A golden stake, and fragments from the gas chambers at Auschwitz: These are some of the things that will represent Canadian architecture to the world.
Welcome to the Venice Architecture Biennale. The fair, which launches this weekend, brings together the architecture world for a summer-long exchange of ideas and prosecco. And this year’s marks a turn toward deeply serious social and ethical questions, not least with the official Canadian entry Extraction and another, The Evidence Room.
The main Biennale exhibition is being curated by the 48-year-old Chilean Alejandro Aravena – the winner of this year’s Pritzker Prize and an architect committed to social housing and collaborative design practices. His theme, Reporting from the Front, implies a series of “battles” for a better world – against challenges “like segregation, inequalities, peripheries, access to sanitation, natural disasters, housing shortages [and] migration,” he said in a statement.
The show, which fills two sprawling complexes of historic buildings in the Italian city, includes 88 entries from architects and historians – among them, Robert Jan van Pelt, a University of Waterloo professor and expert on the Holocaust. He was a witness in the 2000 libel trial of scholar Deborah Lipstadt, when the Holocaust denier David Irving sued her in an effort to question the historical record, and he later wrote a book about the trial and his experience of it.
“It is architecture as forensics,” van Pelt said this week. “Architecture should perform a service and this was evidence in a trial establishing one of the crucial facts of the 20th century.
“Aravena told me that reading the book had really widened his horizon about the responsibility of the architect to play a role in questions of historical justice.”
Van Pelt’s study of the historical record revealed the architects of Auschwitz – in the literal sense of that term – and the paper trail toward the murder of 1.1 million people.
Blueprints, contractors’ bills, detailed drawings of gas-tight doors. “Deniers have wanted to take the sting out of it,” van Pelt says. “My evidence is that these things were created specifically to create a factory of death.”
With The Evidence Room, van Pelt and colleagues – Anne Bordeleau, Sascha Hastings and Donald McKay, along with students from the University of Waterloo – have made an exhibition that includes three “monuments,” reproductions in wood and steel of gas-chamber components; and plaster casts of relevant documents, presented as objects in themselves. It is a dark, quiet space that asks visitors to reflect on how architecture, and the human enterprise, can go badly wrong.
Alongside the Biennale’s main exhibition are the two dozen national pavilions, where exhibitions represent some aspect of each country’s design culture. Among them, Germany’s pavilion will tackle the urban implications of that country’s settlement of millions of Syrian refugees. Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders, author of the brilliant book Arrival City, is serving as an adviser.
The Canadian pavilion this year houses Extraction, a show led by the landscape architect and Harvard professor Pierre Bélanger and his practice Opsys. It raises questions that go to the heart of Western society and particularly Canada’s: the basis of our economy in resource extraction, and a parallel between our colonial history and the current extractive relationship that Canada’s mining sector has with lands and peoples around the world.
Extraction barely touches on architecture, in any direct sense; the exhibition does include images of Royal Bank Plaza, a 1970s skyscraper complex in Toronto’s downtown core whose windows are coated with a layer of gold.
The design, by the firm WZMH, is incidental; to Bélanger, this is a representation of resource extraction’s hold on the Canadian economy and society. (This criticism applies to the complex’s name tenant, Royal Bank of Canada– which is also a sponsor of Extraction.)
And what does the exhibition itself look like? It consists of a survey stake, placed between the British, French and Canadian pavilions. It also includes a film, representing “800 years of empire-building,” shown on a screen set within the earth. (You need to bend over and watch it through a peephole.)
As Bélanger told me a few months ago, our culture “has artificially separated the city from the rural. Our discourse is focused on places of consumption,” he said. “But where does all this stuff come from? Who gives us rights to it? And where does it all go?”
The questions, like those in the main exhibition, reflect a broad shift among architects and urbanists away from purely aesthetic questions. Beauty matters, but beautiful cities are not always prosperous, just, or safe from the effects of nature, especially as climate change proceeds. The state of Venice itself is proof of that.
But there is a deeper turn here as well.
As van Pelt suggests, architects as a profession are inclined “always to imagine another and better world.” And this is, usually, their task. But this desire to improve the world can prevent a deep engagement with the world as it is.
“For the profession,” van Pelt argues, “a sustained reflection on truth would be valuable. Perhaps now is the time.”
The Venice Architecture Biennale runs from May 28 to Nov. 27 in Venice, Italy.