Venice Biennale: Architecture

Emily King: How did you choose the theme of your exhibition ‘Cities: people, society, architecture’?

Richard Burdett: The Biennale’s Board of Directors decided that the next architecture exhibition should be about cities. For too long the Architecture Biennale has focused on the object, rather than the relationship between the object and society. This exhibition will look at not just the physical aspect of cities, the architectural aspect, but also the relationship between the form of cities and their social dynamics.

EK: Why is this theme important?

RB: I don’t think it’s talked about nearly enough. Architectural education around the world tends not to deal with these issues, and often some of the most well-intentioned and beautiful pieces of architecture fail at a fundamental social level. Think of contemporary housing, think of contemporary attempts to create a piece of city. Canary Wharf, for example: is that a piece of city? The answer is probably ‘No’.

EK: What form will your exhibition take?

RB: In a nutshell, the exhibition will be an account of roughly 18 cities. It will include obvious candidates such as London, New York, Shanghai, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin, but also large cities that have done remarkable things – for example Bogotá, a city of 6 million people. Over the last eight years the city’s two successive mayors have transformed the transport system and created some amazing public spaces that the local residents respect. Civic pride has gone up enormously, and this has had a significant impact on the crime rate. I also want to commission a series of projects for some of these cities, new projects that deal with major problems. For example, in Mexico City the key problem is water, or its absence. The city is crumbling from beneath because all the lakes have been drained. I want to use the Biennale, which is a wonderful public platform, to commission a project that will look at this issue and will hopefully have an impact on what happens there. It won’t be the thing that gets built, but it may generate a discussion. Instead of putting together a panorama of what’s going on and saying, ‘Here’s a show; you make what you want of it’, I am creating an exhibition that will be political, with both a small and a big ‘p’.

EK: Is this exhibition particularly timely?

RB: Over the last four or five years the population of the world has become more than 50% urban. A hundred years ago it was 10%, and within the next 25 years it will be 75%. (Of course, it depends how you define a city; for me it means the whole metropolitan region rather than just the central core.) It is a good moment to look at this urban surge and its social impact. Does bringing people together create greater tension or greater cohesion? There are also environmental implications. Clearly bringing people to live in cities is a more efficient way of using energy. This needs to be discussed and understood.

EK: How are you going to turn these issues into a show?

RB: I think that describing cities across the world can be extremely visually stimulating. It won’t be an exhibition full of architectural models, but it will be very rich in terms of film, photography and sound. I want to involve people who are thinking about what I call the soul of the city – not just the design of the city, but its raison d’être.