In any case the project showed a strong start, and all sights immediately turned to a second edition. The expectations for this year were different, since the debate had shifted from the institution itself to the content and its effects on architectural discourse as a whole.
The event, curated by Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee was presented under the title Make New History. In a context lacking a broad discourse to unite the discipline, the question of history was imagined to be well-aimed, and it hinted at a discourse that might close the ranks of a disperse profession. The event, however, has proven problematic in both its format and its aims. On the one hand, it can be read as an attempt to restore disciplinary discourse based on a certain nostalgia or idealization in response to the uncertainty of the present and the future. On the other hand, it attempts to lend a cultural patina to the growing banalization and digital mediatization – Instagramization, if you will – of many young postmodern practices. Significantly and somewhat paradoxically, in taking up such a critical and complex question – the role of time and accumulated culture – the production appears, in its immense majority, to have been approached by many participants in a fairly immediate way.
I am afraid that the three goals of the biennial – reflecting on the discipline, constructing discourse, and disseminating the discipline – have been sequestered by the institutional steamroller of architecture in the United States today. Although it was not the directors’ intention, the growing divorce between professional practice and American academic practice resulted in this biennial shifting away from the unstable and fruitful balancing act between academia and the profession in favor of the former. And it crudely revealed the contradictions that abound in that realm in the United States today. In theory, the space that should be characterized by the greatest cultural ambition and the highest capacity for experimentation, and a bucking of the status quo, has been turned into a consumer environment with media value and its own hand in protecting the system. What should be a territory for debate has become a mirror held up to the existing powers. The exhibition is a reflection of academic hierarchies, with young architects (Assistant Professors) doing in photographic restoration exercises in the room called Horizontal City, emerging practices (Associate Professors) doing tower exercises in the Vertical City room and more established architects (Full Professors) doing free exercises (Option Studios). The call launched by the curators – answered often with ingenious responses, with varying degrees of ability in standing out from the crowd – was reduced to an exercise in collective celebration that made many of the projects seem fatuous and superficial. It is not surprising that the most interesting proposals were those on the sidelines or the periphery of the exhibition, and they were the least photogenic. The transformation of the hallways by Camilo Restrepo with Camilo Echeverri and Camilo Echavarría, or the room showing work by Carsusso St John and Thomas Demand, or the exhibition on the Planta project for the Sorigué Foundation by Ábalos Sentkiewicz with Armin Linke, Five Rooms by Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner, or the chapel by Yunya Ishigami were all areas with a refreshing intellectual autonomy that stood as oases in a panorama of proposals that were, in many cases, utterly replaceable.