On the piano nobile of the Fondazione Prada’s Ca’ Corner della Regina in Venice, nine black tables march in a row, cold altars repudiating the room’s rococo encrustations. In the enfilade spaces on either side of the hall, standing monoliths reflect the glare of top lights and the glow of the Mediterranean sun seeping through gaps in the well-worn palazzo shutters. Together, these mute vitrines display something like the entire sweep of modernity.
With Diagrams, whose run in Santa Croce coincides with the architecture biennale over in Castello, Rem Koolhaas writes himself into the canon of information visualization. Such is the entitlement of the curator (AMO, the research offshoot of Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, or OMA, is credited as the organizer), but swagger doesn’t come as easily to the starchitect emeritus as it once did. It is a little jarring—almost risible—to move from, say, reproductions of the quietly devastating sociological charts W. E. B. Du Bois prepared for the American Negro exhibit at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair or Charles- Jose…