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-smoked dance floor hadn’t quite filled, but the courtyard buzzed with pan-European posturing—guests clutching cigarettes, canned cocktails, and well-constructed clothing. I clung to my prefrontal cortex and slipped into a corner to dash off a work email. A guy rolling a joint leaned over and asked if the smell bothered me. Then he offered me coke. I’d stumbled upon the party’s drug dealer, who mistook my typing for tweaking. Short on cash, I pointed him to someone who hadn’t blown their budget on change fees.
My friend Andrew had been invited to a mysterious event hosted by PIN–UP and Columbia GSAPP in Piazza San Marco. I got a last-minute, copy-pasted text invite—which I took as a sign that the “meeting of the minds” had waived its MENSA requirements for the evening. The Lobotomy party was fun, but my column needed more story and less stimulant.
Outside, the orderly entry had devolved into a heaving mob, and a waist-high wrought iron fence was all that separated the crowd from their looming lobotomies. I spotted our friend Chris near the front, panini-pressed against the gate, just as a furious woman lobbed a black umbrella over the fence, smacking a bespectacled guest square in the face. Scarcity breeds demand … and assault. Before the Sub-starved sharks smelled blood in the water, we swam through the crowd of crashers—and pulled Chris out with us.
Already late for the midnight meetup, we arrowed toward the art and architecture gallery SMAC. We’d labored across the lagoon—leaving a Berlin-coded brawl—only to be barred entry like a Brit at Berghain. “We’re at capacity,” said the doorkeep. “But we’re on the list,” we insisted. She relented—so long as each of us could name someone on her iPad. After a few educated guesses (Marco? Polo?), we climbed a grand staircase and slipped through a sequence of dim exhibition rooms until we reached a frescoed salon at the end of the enfilade.
Inside, disembodied voices spoke with a situation-room solemnity befitting of the security clearance, but the only crisis I saw was a huddle of hostages who, like me, had probably expected the “meeting of the minds” to feel less like a prison sentence and more like an architectural afters. A few empty Negroni glasses hinted at the possibility of future drinks. Personally, I was hoping to be granted an a-parole spritz.
Architecture had collapsed into lifestyle branding—speculative science filtered through press-friendly packaging—offering bespoke solutions to mass-produced problems.
The next morning, participants and press were welcomed to the Biennale by a blast of hot air in the Arsenale’s opening gallery. Humming AC units hung above a shallow pool of what appeared to be their own condensate. Curator Carlo Ratti’s message that “climate change is not a future scenario, but a present reality” was made uncomfortably clear: Air conditioners might cool individual rooms but collectively, they heat the planet. The rest of the Arsenale was dense with hot air of the linguistic kind: jargon-laden wall texts in Italian and English, each paired with an AI-generated summary. Whether the pared-down prose was meant to proselytize or provoke, the text played itself. If every project could be boiled down to two lines, could the whole Biennale have been an email?
Nearby, a blue-LED-eyed android played steel drums. A robotic arm collaborated with wood-carving monks. An air purifier doubled as a selfie station. A busty mannequin sported a body-hugging space suit. It wasn’t until I heard Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos had hosted their wedding reception at the Arsenale in June that I started putting the dots together. This wasn’t a design exhibition—it was the Bezos Biennial. A curatorial cart full of consumer electronics and Blue Origin couture primed for Amazon delivery.
In the Giardini, I patriotically headed for the US Pavilion. In keeping with its theme of Porch, the neo-Palladian courtyard building had been augmented with a timber canopy offering cover from the Venetian sun. Inside, the work of fifty-four mini contributors were crammed into identical display boxes. A “library” stocked with porch-related titles contributors had been asked to pack in their carry-ons had a books-by-the-foot feel that seemed to exist solely to prove that architects know how to read. For a pavilion billed as “an architecture of generosity,” maybe the organizers should’ve gone with Stoop and left the literature outside.
I rendezvoused with Chris and his boss, WXY principal Claire Weisz, who was raving about the Polish Pavilion and insisted we head there next. I was pretty sure it was in the opposite direction, but Claire’s charm could’ve convinced me to charrette myself off a cliff. Arriving at what we thought was the Polish Pavilion, I was surprised to find a fag-forward football fantasia. We were, in fact, in the Dutch Pavilion. Sidelined, designed by Gabriel Fontana, explores sports as both spatial practice and social structure, rethinking competition through a queer lens. That’s my attempt at an AI summary—but mostly, I just felt seen. A gender-fluid foosball folly, shady superlative trophy case, and newsprint zine seemed tailor-made for a jock columnist with a soft spot for ink and a low tolerance for architectural austerity. Finally: a pavilion not trying to save the world—just rewrite the rules.
Next door, the Belgian Pavilion promptly killed the mood: a slideshow of academic research in one room and imprisoned indoor plants in the other. From queer utopia to corporate atrium in under thirty seconds. Bring back the Cruising Pavilion!
If every project could be boiled down to two lines, could the whole Biennale have been an email?
In the evening, we linked up with a rotating cast of Euro gays and NAFTA gays LARPing as Euro gays, then darted through the Venetian alleys toward the Fondazione Prada for the opening of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s show Diagrams. Plied with drinks, we drifted from display (a 1506 uroscopic wheel) to display (a German diagram of the body-as-factory), but the prosecco was putting my pancreas out of production. I peeled off and headed back to my Airbnb for much-needed maintenance.
I didn’t leave the apartment until 4:00 p.m. the following day. Killing time before dinner, I stopped at a thrift store and picked up a pair of gold-rimmed, red-lensed sunglasses. I’d planned to drop Chris at a work dinner, but Claire waved me into the restaurant, where I found myself seated at a long table in high spirits—and not just because the wine was free. Whether it was my new rose-colored glasses or WXY’s congeniality, my scorn had begun to soften.
After lingering goodbyes, I swung by the MIT party. Peering past the prosecco, I was drawn to a charming diorama depicting a drop city on the rocky coast of Capri, whose denizens, buck-naked bubble boys under the spell of Reyner Banham, are swarmed by press, protesters, and peeping Tommasos. In a sea of seriousness, this sunny fictive scene thrilled the exhibitionist in me. I was done being a choleric critic. I wanted to join Banham to bask in the buff.
Canal Café Benoit Tardif
By Saturday, the pavilions had started to blur into a bad mood board of good intentions. Nordic: Trans. Korea: Cats. Canada: Bacteria. Uruguay: Water. Brazil: Wood. Australia: Sandbox.
I arrived too late at the Arsenale to try the Biennale’s beloved brew from Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Canal Café, which had already been anointed with the Golden Lion. The installation—an espresso bar fitted with a theatrical filtration system—was reportedly brewing coffee with purified lagoon water. But rumor had it the baristas were subbing in bottled water, and the science was more vibes than verified. A Chemex of canal swill calibrated for content, it felt like the last gasp of algorithm-friendly artisanalism. The other Golden Lion winner—Heatwave, the Bahrain Pavilion—was just as aspirational. Its low-slung, high-concept lounge was designed to be cooled by a geothermal well that was never drilled. Instead, according to the project statement, the cooling system “relies on mechanical ventilation, drawing air through a canal-facing window and guiding it through a network of ducts and nozzles to create a controlled microclimate.” Congrats, Bahrain! You invented AC.
Architecture had collapsed into lifestyle branding—speculative science filtered through press-friendly packaging—offering bespoke solutions to mass-produced problems. Are architects designers, scientists, or just very expensive tastemakers? I skipped Diller Scofidio for a more experienced firm: Starbucks. Nothing clears my carnal canal like the brute strength of American cold brew—except maybe actual lagoon espresso (or cholera).
Somewhere over the Atlantic, I returned to The Brutalist. Slumped in my seat, I gazed through my Aperol-filtered eyewear at Adrien Brody’s critically acclaimed, artificially aggrandized, press-friendly package—finally, architecture that could bring me to my knees.