My journey to the Venice Architecture Biennale began on Air Europa, a Spanish airline I’d never heard of but—after $350 in change fees and a $95 upgrade to a middle seat—already hated. Red-eye ready, I popped a Benadryl and put on The Brutalist (2024), briefly catching a glimpse of Adrien Brody’s pulsing prosthetic before my peepers petered out.
Landing hard at Marco Polo Airport, I planned to take the ferry to Venezia, recalling a line from Death in Venice that “to arrive by land … was like entering a palace through a back door.” But at the info desk, I was told that the bus was faster and cheaper. Perhaps the attendant could sense I was no stranger to back-door entry.
After settling into my Airbnb, I joined a table of limp-wristed writers for dinner, casually sizing up our assigned pieces. We caught a vaporetto to Giudecca for the Lobotomy party, hosted by the Berlin-based firm Sub—a cheeky counterprogram to the Biennale’s official Intelligens theme, promising something gayer, cooler, and less afflicted by architecture’s chronic self-seriousness. Inside, the fog-s…