ARTS

Architecture

Far pavilions

Gavin Stamp finds the buildings as interesting as the exhibits at the Venice Architectural Biennale

Venice, the ultimate heritage centre, keeps modern architecture at a safe dis- tance: in public gardens way to the east of S. Marco beyond the Arsenale. And it is only allowed to appear, briefly, every four years. This is one such leap year, for the pavilions in the park built for the Interna- tional Exhibition of Modern Art have now been spruced up to house the Fifth Inter- national Biennale of Architecture.

Most nations lucky enough to own a Biennale pavilion are using it to show off their architectural wares. Spain's exhibition is devoted to showing how poor Barcelona is coping with the horror of the 1992 Olympic Games; Italy displays a rich selec- tion of the work of a wide range of differ- ent, stylish architects. Countries dominated by an introverted, smug architectural estab- lishment have exhibitions more narrow in scope. The United States pavilion is taken over by two of the biggest pseuds in the international architectural culture of the glossy magazines: Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry. We must be grateful that the British Pavilion shows the work of as many as six modern British firms.

Three, of course, are utterly predictable — the same Big Three who enjoyed a mas- sive public relations promotion at the Royal Academy a few years back. They now reveal their talents through minimalist displays which assume, a little arrogantly, that the visitor knows all about them in the first place. James Stirling (with Michael Wilford) shows a familiar selection of his architectural drawings; Sir Norman Foster is represented by a few photographs and drawings of recent projects like Stansted Airport, while 'Sir' Richard Rogers, as we must now learn to call that resolutely anti- establishment thinker and Man of the Six- ties, exhibits a few Utopian doodles and a project model made of Meccano. Perhaps this is a knowing, self-deprecatory joke; perhaps not. More interesting are the second three. There is Nicholas Grimshaw, the High

Tech architect of the elegant Financial Times printing works in Docklands and the not-so-elegant Sainsbury's train shed-cum-

supermarket in Camden Town. There is Michael Hopkins, who seems to me a good and resourceful architect who can use both metal and masonry well and who, alone among the High Tech stars, seems to have a truly aesthetic understanding of historic structures. And then, thank goodness, there is one maverick: John Outram, designer of the polychromatic pagan tem- ple on the Isle of Dogs which also serves to pump storm water.

To the British visitor, there is a depress- ing feeling of déjà vu about this exhibition. So who chose these six as representative of modern British achievement? Why, that

quintessential upholder of the English vice of approval of what is approved of, my Lord Palumbo. There is a great deal more than this going on in Britain today, in for better or for worse — a wide variety of styles. In his introductory essay about national characteristics which redeems the rather dreary catalogue, Fulvio Irace notes that, 'The present selection probably repre- sents only the emerging tip of a genera- tional establishment. In the background, or rather providing a contrast, are the fluctu- ating and often eccentric energies of a rest- less, creative and evolving magma: Piers Gough, Nigel Coates, David Chipperfield, Leon Krier, Pierre d'Avoine, Julien Powell- Tuck and Jeremy Dixon — the list could be considerably longer.' Yes, indeed.

A possible glimpse of British architecture of the future is given in another section of the Biennale in Venice's magnificent old Arsenale which, at long last, is slowly being transferred from military to public use.

Here the work of British architectural schools is represented by London's Archi- tectural Association and Glasgow's Mack- intosh School of Architecture. But it requires stamina to see these — a long, long walk past a multitude of decaying, stuccoed brick Doric columns — for the displays lie at the far end of what must be one of the longest buildings in the world: the Arsenale's superb former rope factory.

Indeed, the real architectural interest of this Biennale is not so much the exhibitions but the structures they are housed in. The Biennale has been going since 1895 and the pavilions exhibit a wide variety of contem- porary styles and national characteristics. Several are by great names: Hoffmann: Aalto; and our own James Stirling has just completed a green copper-roofed pavilion

for Electa Books (which I trust will not leak). Russia's whimsical pavilion was built in the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, while countries like Canada and Norway are rep- resented by strange and interesting new structures. Italy's big pavilion has a fine Fascist façade and indeed several of the pavilions date from that period. I was in Venice because I had spoken at a 'seminar' on Classical architecture of the 1930s in Europe and America which the Palladio Centre for Architecture had bravely organ- ised, and the Biennale pavilions provide proof — if proof were still needed — that a modern monumental Classicism was not the monopoly of totalitarian states but the true international style of that troubled decade. The United States, Germany and ourselves are all represented by porticoed Classical structures.

As far as I was concerned, the most worthwhile display lay behind the stripped, fluted, square piers of Germany's pavilion (by Troost, or Speer?), for this was not contemporary but historical. Perhaps because it would he difficult to show the new architecture of a newly united Ger- many, or perhaps because his work lies mainly in the old GDR, Germany's contri- bution is an exhibition of drawings and photographs about Heinrich Tessenow (1876-1950). Tessenow is less well-known today than many other 20th-century Ger- man architects, but he enjoyed a high repu- tation in the 1920s, when he managed both to seem modern through his severely abstracted forms and yet hold on to Ger- man vernacular traditions. He was influ- enced by our own Arts and Crafts movement and designed careful, subtle gar- den cities and sweet, practical little houses, while using a severely geometrical vocabu- lary. In 1930, Tessenow beat Behrens, Poelzig and Mies van der Rohe in a com- petition to convert Schinkel's Guard House in Berlin into a national war memorial. For this work in particular he was attacked by both left and right, modernists and tradi- tionalists, which now seems much to his credit. During the Third Reich he was pro- tected from persecution by his former pupil Albert Speer, and he survived long enough to criticise the plans for the post-war rebuilding of Lubeck as being primarily in the interest of motorists.

In short, Heinrich Tessenow is not an obscure historical figure but a man with much to teach today. As Vittorio Magnano Lampugni writes in the exhibition cata- logue, in his work 'there is order without dogma, stylisation without mechanicism, classicism without pathos. Of all things, it was precisely the stubborn rejection of innovation for its own sake that brought about a durable innovation free of the whims of fashion'. That is something both our British architectural establishment and our architectural schools could usefully learn from.