This year’s edition is different from the earlier ones because it is based on pragmatism. Here reappear the specifically architectural instruments: plastic models, measures, sketches, surveys. Few space is left to audacious cross-breedings with art. Another peculiarity is that almost all presented projects are really feasible. It is an attitude that does not indulge in dangerous interactive alliances, if not for strict necessity (some videos, many photographs). Focus: the future of urban city; aim: monitoring the extremely quick morphogenesis of the megalopolis in which more than 50% of the world population is concentrated, not without contrasts. Urgent questions are asked: how much do we pollute? How much are we linked? The mega-cities with more than 20 million inhabitants are the critical core around which turns the “global reflection” of the 10th Biennale Architettura, called not by pure chance “City. Architecture and society.” The role of architecture? This edition’s director, the English town planner Richard Burdett, keeps repeating it: “to improve the transforming city”, almost a slogan.

His exhibition at the Corderie of the Arsenale disentangles a “nightmare-like” itinerary between overflowing cities, monoliths designed by Aldo Cibic give voice to the emergency of oversaturated spaces: Shangai, Bogota, Caracas and its barrios, Mexico City and its suburbs, are between the sixteen global cities pitilessly represented as gigantic, gothic tridimensional diagrams. At the Giardini, the Egiptian Pavilion includes Cairo in the monster-cities, proposing a reflexion on the sustainable future of these cities-symptom of so many discomforts, with the title: “the shadow of Cairo’s formal and visible city”. Other possible strategies come also from the transformation of another place with high population density, São Paulo. The first room of the Brazilian pavilion shows the transformation of the original place of the city’s basin through its technical construction. Charts, maps and aerial views deal with the different ways to take possession of the territory. There are also imaginative parts; an enormous plush jacket made of fibre, obtained from the recycling of plastic drink packages, suspended inside the Canadian pavilion, becomes a lodging with a spacious and soft orange interior. When visitors enter the gigantic jacket, they are welcomed by a series of digital screenings with images of Vancouver. The US pavilion focuses on the display of planning forces for the reconstruction of New Orleans after the disruptive fury of the hurricane Katrina.

The real novelty of this Biennale edition is the work by the roman architect Franco Purini, situated in the last part of the Tese delle Vergini: the new Italian pavilion at the Gaggiandre (in Venetian dialect, literally, tortoise shell). Rational white boxes contain the projects by 20 Italian architects under 40, each one of them has worked on a part of Ve-Ma, new imagined foundation city in the axes Venice-Mantova: “A city of foundation, but also an ideal and utopian city – but of the utopia of reality by Ernesto Nathan Rogers – situated near the crossing of the European railway corridors Lisbon-Kiev and Berlin-Palermo” explains Franco Purini. Reproduced in plaster dust on a wide plastic model, it stretches in the sidereal space and does not neglect the power of genius loci. Ten projectors towards a big white oval recite uninterruptedly the history of Italian architecture as if it were a fascinating popular novel. The effect is alienating: the text has been written by Purini, the voice is by the dubber of John Malkovic. Director Croff ‘s appeal to fill the almost empty coffers of the Biennale has been answered by many: Inarcassa, Italcementi, Moroso (that did the nice plastic chairs for the forced breaks), Fantoni. The group Risanamento Spa is showing at the Corderie of the Arsenale two huge projects regarding Milan. The architecture project of Milano Santa Giulia has been given to one of the most renowned names of contemporary architecture: Norman Foster. It will be realized in one of the most modern neighbourhoods from a structural, architectural and functional point of view. The area stretches along a surface of 1.200.000 square metres: “the model of Milan Santa Giulia is the solution to problems of the big metropolis, because it puts together city and country in an ideal synthesis. It is a city in the city, with all the services and infrastructural links, while the countryside is wellness and life quality for the individual: a mix made possible by giving the city or the suburbs the same services given to who lives in the cities in one project Milan Santa Giulia is a contemporary utopia, born from errors of the past: the suburbs converted into ghettos, or the garden cities without services used as dormitories”. This is what Foster frankly declares. The project of Renzo Piano is thought as an open urban scheme; it connects all parts of the city which were until now separated by the railway and the former industrial areas Falck and Marelli.