by Dish Staff
Sarah Williams Goldhagen lauds this year’s Venice Biennale for its nuanced take on the architectural movement:
In architecture, [Modernism] is commonly understood to have produced a more or less deplorable “international style” that made every office building, elementary school, town hall, and housing project into something resembling a taller or shorter flat-roofed factory. Modernism’s trajectory from the 1920s to the 1980s is held to be one in which misguided architects cluelessly ambled down this technology-smitten path to its inevitable dead end, when architecture, reinvigorated in part by the Historic Preservation movement, remade itself in an efflorescence of eclectic post-modernism. …
The Biennale’s national pavilions offer a completely different and far more accurate account of recent architectural history. Whether we look at Italy, Finland, or Brazil, we find that modernism was never – not in its earliest days in Europe, not in the many countries around the globe to which it eventually spread – an arid, landless, technology-smitten movement that privileged steel frames and concrete connections over the particularities of local geographies, cultural traditions, and human needs. Instead, modernism in architecture was akin to classicism: a highly malleable practice that over time produced a wide range of family-resemblance-type styles.
(Photo: Brasília’s Catedral Metropolitana Nossa Senhora Aparecida (1970) via Wikimedia Commons)
The Dish 
