Venice Architecture Biennale 2016: director of Zaha Hadid Architects Patrik Schumacher has made a critical interview about the 2016 Biennale theme.

2016 Patrik Schumacher’s interview extract:

If you can make an organisation the most prosperity driving highly sophisticated organisation, then you know you have something to offer (as an architect) whereas the slum developers know what they need: electricity, water… All of this is already layout, so, it is false to presume that this is our task. That is my message.

My message is: close this Biennale because it is really confusing, for us and the general public about the task of contemporary Architecture.

– Patrik Schumacher

It is not the first time Patrick Schumacher is critic with this event. In 2014 he used Facebook to launch an attack on political correctness in architecture and a perceived trend for prioritising art over form-making during the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012 .

2014 Patrik Schumacher’s Facebook post in full:

STOP political correctness in architecture. But also: STOP confusing architecture and art.

Architects are in charge of the FORM of the built environment, not its content. We need to grasp this and run with this despite all the (ultimately conservative) moralizing political correctness that is trying to paralyse us with bad conscience and arrest our explorations if we cannot instantly demonstrate a manifest tangible benefit for the poor – as if the delivery of social justice is the architect’s competency.

Unfortunately all the prizes given by the last architecture biennale where motivated by this misguided political correctness. STOP political correctness in architecture! And yet, architecture is not a l’art pour l’art discipline. Architecture is NOT ART although FORM is our specific contribution to the evolution of world society.

We need to understand how new forms can make a difference for the progress of world civilisation. I believe today this implies the intensification of communicative interaction with a heightened sense of being connected within a complex, variegated spatial order where all spaces resonate and communicate with each other via associative logics.

– Patrik Schumacher