Architecture as Building, Object, and, Curatorial Project: Retracing the History of Architecture Exhibitions at the Venice Biennale

Abstract

Every two years, the Venice Architecture Biennale hosts a unique spectacle of architecture. Architectural designers, historians and curators meet within a large-scale exhibition of architectural work from many different parts of the world. The discussions that arise provide a unique opportunity for architecture to interact within the discipline and with a public audience. Undeniably, the Biennale’s recurring nature has always made its scope a victim to its own ambiguity: is it supposed to show the architecture of the future, the past, or the past year? This remains a persistent question. While it is instinctive to describe the history of architecture at the Venice Biennale as a series of discontinuous themes and points of view, I am interested in a more subtle ambiguity. Each Biennale gives a different answer to the relationship between history and practice. I am interested in tracing these relationships at three scales: the curatorial project, the architectural objects, and the buildings of the Biennale.

Each chapter of this thesis explores the question of La Biennale’s relationship to history, to the city of Venice itself, and to the formal typology of the Biennale’s spaces. This thesis begins with the 1980 exhibit, which appropriated the Arsenale’s linearity into the design of an interior street that staged the mingling of past and present architectural references. It goes on to examine the 1991 exhibition, which while aiming to increase the international presence at the Biennale, the curatorial project closely referenced strategies of the preceding four Biennales. Lastly, this thesis studies the 2010 exhibition which seems to betray the self-historicism of the early Biennales in favor of phenomenological experience. Upon closer inspection, as I will argue, each exhibition demonstrates an extensive knowledge of past Architecture Biennales and their curators.