The Porta Magna, entry to the Venice Arsenale

Painting by Canaletto (1723)

It was a queer thing, even a compromising thing, for a Party member to have in his possession. Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect.

          — 1984, by George Orwell

The glass paperweight purchased by Winston Smith at a prole antiques shop in the 1949 anti-totalitarian classic was vaguely suspect. More than vaguely suspect would be a beautiful building at the 2008 Venice Biennale, the festival of modern architecture, held every other year. A building that merely looked like a building would not have been permitted at any recent biennale, any more than a lover of buildings that look like buildings would bother going. This year, even buildings that don’t look like buildings are few and far between.

The theme for the 11th biennale (Sept. 14-Nov. 23) was “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building.” The biennale curator, Aaron Betsky, declared in a forward to the exhibition that “we need some icons and some enigmas.” To judge by the exhibits, that appears to mean wacky furniture and naked ladies — in Betsky’s loose translation: “We need an architecture that questions reality.”

Modern architecture already ignores reality. Instead of questioning reality, modern architecture should question itself.

The biennale is always held in Venice’s Arsenale, whose main gate, the Porta Magna (circa 1460), was the city’s first classical-revival structure. A custom that fêtes modern architecture in one of the world’s most beautiful cities is a custom that rebels against common sense. It should be questioned, interrogated, indeed tortured. Too bad the Doge of Venice isn’t around to kick these Vandals out.

In a video available on YouTube, Betsky tells attendees: “You will come into this biennale and you will find beautiful, disturbing, troubling, strange forms.” A former employee of the celebrity architect Frank Gehry, the über-orthodox Betsky defines the first word, beautiful, in terms of the next three.

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Beauty is Disturbing, Troubling and Strange. George Orwell’s Big Brother would feel right at home at this year’s biennale.

One attendee who did not feel quite at home was Kieran Long, editor of Architect’s Journal, a reliable party organ in London. In a review, “Venice architecture biennale is like nerds talking about sex,” Long quotes Greg Lynn, who won a Golden Lion for furniture made of recycled children’s toys. “It is irresponsible,” said Lynn, “not to focus a biennale on buildings.” Long responds, “Lynn means this last statement ironically, but I’ll take him at his word. The 2008 biennale is the year that the avant-garde finally disappeared into its own darkest recesses.”

Long describes another piece of furniture, the Lotus, by Zaha Hadid. It “integrates a circular bed with a mess of tendrils swooshing around to form a desk, chair and shelving.” He quotes Hadid factotum Patrik Schumacher comparing the Lotus to “a Russian matryoshka doll performing a striptease.” Long replies: “If Schumacher’s idea of eroticism is a fat Russian woman taking off her aprons to brassy trumpet music, then I think we’ll have less of it.” No. I’m afraid we’ll certainly have more of it.

“The Arsenale is full of pieces like this,” Long continues, “by people who are getting old and have a pressing need to reassure each other that they are artists. The only highlights for me are Barkow Leibinger’s garden of laser-cut steel poles (which at least had something to do with craft and technique) and maybe Philippe Rahm’s room, which changes temperature as you walk through it. Unfortunately, the Frenchman ruined it by including some naked people lounging around and playing the saw (I’m not joking). At a stroke, this turns a physiological experience into a sleazy spectator sport.”

The most appalling thing about this and every biennale, this holy pagan rite of the modernists, is that it is held in Venice. Why not in Houston or the Hague or Brasilia, the planned modernist capital of Brazil, built in the 1960s without the least concern for the locals? The perversity of holding the biennale in Venice calls to mind that many modern architects live in traditional houses. They refuse to suffer in their own lives what that they gleefully inflict on others. To celebrate in Venice may be modern architecture’s most Orwellian hypocrisy.

Another Architect’s Journal article, “10 things to see at the Venice architecture biennale,” points out that the architects of Beijing’s sinister Bird’s Nest stadium, Herzog & de Meuron, contributed a model of “soaring pyramids of bamboo chairs.” The same villains plan to inflict a 180-meter pyramidal building on Paris. Sacre bleu! Doubleplusungood!

“The Ministry of Truth — Minitrue, in Newspeak — was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air.”

George Orwell’s greatest novel captured the spirit of totalitarian communism, and, perhaps incidentally, that of modern architecture as well.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal’s editorial board ( dbrussat@projo.com).