Venice Architecture Biennale 2021: Lost in tokenism

The pandemic edition of the biennale is designed around the curatorial question ‘How will we live together?’ yet offers visitors few practical solutions

Bold questions about architecture find a natural home in Venice: the city has long both defied and embodied the dogmas of urban planning, with its ancient stones seemingly floating on the lagoon waters and its pedestrian-only narrow streets intersecting with a capillary network of canals. But there’s bold, and then there’s inconsequential. Much of the twice delayed 17th Architecture Biennale, which has just opened in the northern Italian port city, often crosses over into the latter. Participants from 46 countries tackled the arduous, vast question asked by Hashim Sarkis, the Lebanon-born dean of architecture and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who curated this edition: “How will we live together?” “We are asking architects… because we’re not happy with the answers that are coming out of politics today,” Sarkis said. “We need a new spatial contract because we can’t have a social contract. Irrespective of the huge problems that we’re facing, we can’t bring society together.”