Australian Pavilion for the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale

Since the announcement earlier this year that Neil Durbach, Camilla Block and David Jaggers had been jointly awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Institute of Architects, a good number of reflections have substantiated the Institute’s choice, returning fresh attention and a deserved sense of celebration to a significant body of work in Sydney, where their practice is based, and well beyond.

In recent months, and before the announcement saw any corks pulled, my mind has been drawn to one project of Neil Durbach’s in particular—a collaboration not of Durbach Block Jaggers, but rather with graphic designer Vince Frost and architects Wendy Lewin and Kerstin Thompson and curator and artist Gary Warner. That, namely, was the curation of the Australian Pavilion at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale under the theme Abundant Australia (reviews in Architecture Australia are archived here).

Their direction of the Australian entry resulted, literally, in a stage (or, rather, a proliferation of stages) jam-packed with representations, models, of the vast landscape of Australia’s contemporary architecture at the outset of the twenty-first century. This was set against a visual account, supplemented in the catalogue with an exposition by Conrad Hamann, of “something of the history that this contemporary work emerges from” (as he therein wrote). In reality, he works hard to orientate this history as a predicate for the experience of Gallery 2: the forces acting upon buildings and cities since the nineteenth century, and the sources and tactics that bring ideas and techniques into play and see them normalised over time as something “Australian.” In the pavilion, they gathered around 300 models by around 200 individuals, teams and studios, including students, academics and practices, each placed on standardised round platforms. Models represented completed works as well as unrealised designs and competition entries, conceptual explorations unmoored from specific commissions (lots of “a this for them” titles), and experimentation with digital fabrication and parametric design consistent with that moment, especially among the university entries. A review of the catalogue, which extends the formal device of the standardised disc into the profile of the spread page, includes entries speaking to projects that have become important markers in the recent history of Australian architecture, but alongside many, many long since absorbed into a moment that has now passed.

From the interior into the surrounding grounds, a strikingly and highly visible yellow treatment ran through the old pavilion building, designed in 1988 by Philip Cox as a temporary structure that served for a full generation. Its two-gallery structure played out, too, in Abundant Australia, with history and the present placed in counterpoint with one another.

In Gallery 2, the uniformity of the discs on which each model sat lent itself to a dramatic lit staging. The vibrant, optimistic colour coding of the pavilion reached out from the interior into the surrounding grounds, and thence with the catalogue (also yellow), circulated across the biennale grounds. The idea of abundance with which the curators worked reached into a past laid bare, and declared its hope in the future to come. It surfed an attitude of endless opportunity, embracing a maturity and security played out across the nation’s cities and suburbs since the turn of the century, undergirded by a stretch of economic prosperity propped up by the 00s mining boom.

The Cox pavilion has long, now, been replaced by the dark form of the Denton Corker Marshall iteration of Australia’s claim on the Giardini, completed in time to house Fiona Hall in the 2015 art biennale. And much water has passed through the canal that runs alongside its edge. The historical moment to which Abundant Australia belonged, though, and the architecture that substantiates it, had a long reach.

This is, perhaps, better exposed not by the curation of the team led by Durbach, but by another pavilion on the other side of the Giardini, which serves as its unintentional counterpoint. The Belgian pavilion, too, pondered the prospects of the future by assessing with a now trademark cynicism the present in a flow of time. Named After the Party, curators Kersten Geers and David van Severen (of Office KGDVS, with Jan Lenaerts, Andrew Power (Memo Architecture contributor) and Michael Langeder) enclosed their national pavilion in a seven-metre-high wall made of reflective aluminium, changed the point of entry from the conventional doorway signalled on the public façade to a side entrance, and covered the floors with a layer of colourful confetti, and distributed standard aluminium chairs available throughout. The work won the curatorial team the Silver Lion. The official photographic survey of the project by Bas Princen is widely known, and one of Princen’s images adorns the cover of Christophe Van Gerrewey’s Something Completely Different (2024)—a Belgian answer to Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness (1960), and a signal of the importance of this show as a moment of pause in what the curators argued was an overheated critical market for Flemish architectural culture of those years, itself an echo of the Superdutch 1990s.

The general theme of the biennale in 2008 was “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building.” It was curated by Aaron Betsky in what Michael Stanton in Archis called an exercise in vanitas. Both these pavilions were, in their own ways, likewise introspective, having something to say about the possibility of this “beyond” without actually leading there. With Abundant Australia, Durbach and co. arguably pointed to all that we had to lose; the Belgians seem to have woken abruptly from the night before, hangover already in play. Neither pavilion, of course, was conceived to confront the events of the September week of that year’s vernissage, coinciding as it did with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the opening lines of the Global Financial Crisis. In retrospect, though, both index that moment.

In recent architectural history, this event has increasingly been taken as a marker of change: a boundary between an historic era vaguely and variously called contemporary and postmodern, and that of our present (which I’d be a fool to label). In his 2024 book The Mannerist Mind, Spanish architect and critic Francisco Gonzáles de Canales argues that the repercussions for the construction industry of the collapse of financial markets were met in Europe by such practices as Lütjens Padmanabhan and Office KGDVS and 6A and MAIO with an approach to a suddenly constrained field informed by deep knowledge of architecture (its history, its conceptual bases, techniques of construction, material possibilities, and so on). This, he writes, resulted in a series of projects realised under trying economic conditions, in which a constrained environment informed highly inventive formal, planimetric, and material responses that together rendered the difficulty of that moment legible and coherent, even if only in a handful of European nations, and these with a degree of cultural consistency. To the extent that each of these practices was testing limits, however, they did so from within architecture as a discipline and an institution that was, at the same time, being put to the test by the circumstances of the day. These offices, Canales claimed, evidenced qualities consistent with what modernist critics and historians of architecture observed of architects in the sixteenth century: bound with a degree of elasticity to the habits that formed around their present, inculcated enough in the rules that makes them available to bend, deliberately, but not so committed to total change that they sought to burn the world down and start from scratch. (Let’s say, more like socialism than communism.)

Something of the idea of mannerism and its contemporary staffing as captured in Canales’s book was also in play in London this past January, where he collaborated with Mario Carpo of the Bartlett School of Architecture to stage an event at the Architectural Association on Bedford Square to process two provocations in sequence, both anchored to the periodisation for which he had argued. First, that historical mannerism (as, ostensibly, the art of crisis as it had been conceived by its historians across the 1920s and 30s) might have something to offer a construction of a long present moment initiated with the GFC. Tested here and there, this has in the last decade among some architecture critics been increasingly treated as a periodising historical boundary akin to the Siege of Florence, the Sack of Rome, or the death of Raphael; even if this boundary carries significantly more weight in Europe than elsewhere, especially in places like Spain and Italy, where it forms a major historiographical marker with distinct changes in the pace and nature of architectural production. And second: that historical mannerism (as the art of artifice, the “stylish style,” as John Shearman had it, bound up in technique, self-referential representation, and the ironies and elisions it invites) might help us think more carefully about those new tools of generative representation that have emerged since 2020—where the disrupted compositional solutions of Giulio Romano’s Palazzo del Té or Michelangelo’s vestibule for the Laurentian Library suddenly enter into conversation with architecture’s equivalent of AI slop.

The AA symposium was called “The Inevitability of Mannerism,” which spoke to both a diagnostic sense of cyclic recurrence and to the increased attention given by architecture to this term of period style, cultural categorisation, and worldview in the present, albeit through a set of lenses peculiar to our own moment. For mannerism to be the point of reference for either of these problems—of architecture’s place in the world, and architecture’s confrontation with its tools—is something peculiar to architecture, but peculiar in a recurring way, which makes the question of inevitability doubly suspect. Architecture has, arguably, been doing its own thing with mannerism, independent of the history of art, for the last sixty years, long after art history ceased treating it as anything other than a highly contingent historiographical container of convenience. (It is, perhaps, enough to say that Shearman’s Mannerism and Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture both hit the shelves in 1967.) What makes the term especially odd for architecture is that for much of the last century it has been invoked within architectural culture (in a way informed, but only to a degree, by writing and curation in the history of art) to activate history as a kind of material for the studio. And not always in a way that returns us to familiar coordinates.

There is, naturally, a logic to this preoccupation, even if it is not unassailable. Scholars and students in places like Vienna and Munich and Basel and Berlin took up a form of the Italian term maniera from Vasari as one basis of the stylistic category Manierismus from early in the twentieth century. In doing so, they made it as susceptible as every other critical or historiographical category to the accumulation and manipulation of values through which the past could be appreciated in the present. Erwin Panofsky first floated the idea in 1930 of using Manierismus to describe an architectural composition (by Domenico Beccafumi) in the same way one might use it to locate a painting. He was observing how an architect had self-consciously deformed the rules of composition to which he should have been bound—bending them on their own terms, but also inflecting them with the ghosts of other historical systems. Beccafumi could do this, since the architect-as-insider had mastered those other systems, even if they were not the “public” language of his architecture, or, speaking generally, the early sixteenth century.

Across the 1930s, art historians worried at the edges of this category—probing architecture to see if the scheme held when activated in a field to which it only partly seemed to apply, and which many scholars thought was a forced reconciliation of architecture with ideas of history figured out against painting. In 1933, or 2024, mannerism seemed to name forms of artistic production belonging to a world gone wrong, and hence of the struggle of the arts to hold things together in a world in which it was losing faith. What happened after a stable world gave way to its crises and before everything was torn apart and reconstructed?

After the Second World War, the temptation to think through historical parallels was strong and hard-baked into the intellectual fabric of architecture’s modern movement. Colin Rowe saw Palladio’s compositional strategies recur in the work of Le Corbusier; Bruno Zevi draw parallels between the Sack of Rome and the Holocaust as moments of social destruction provoking the dispersal of people and ideas and demanding of all branches of culture expressions of hope in the future; Venturi clocked the resonance of Michelangelo’s linguistic experimentations in the designs of Edwin Lutyens and other figures of the earlier twentieth century, while claiming them, at the same time, for his own thinking; Arata Isozaki took to direct quotation in his own design while, as Thomas Daniell has observed, he processed in his artistic production the difficult legacy of the so-called “children of the ash.” A loss of stability inside and beyond architecture served as a predicate for succeeding claims upon mannerism. This pattern has, since 2008, seemed to help make sense of the arc of the last two decades.

The idea of gathering interested parties around the question of the use of mannerism for understanding the state of contemporary architecture is, therefore, nothing new; but it has happened time and again for most of the last century. As Betsky’s biennale fades into the kind of historical past for which we might, now, claim critical distance, or even a productive amnesia, how can the pavilions of Durbach and co. and Office KGDVS help mark a moment of change for a period of time that has itself become substantial through the intervention of writers and institutions? Even as they themselves sought to locate their moment in history—the narrative of Hamann in Australia, or the evacuated rooms of Belgium. Does this attention make mannerism inevitable, as the discussion in London suggested? Hardly. But putting the question this way does invite us to return, today, to the larger question of what architecture is up to as a field in a constant tussle with the demands and conditioning of a world that tends, more than not, to be indifferent to its needs.

This review is adapted, in part, from a lecture given by the author at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane on May 1, 2026 (What’s with Mannerism?), which was followed by a conversation with Andrea Bubenik. The author also spoke earlier this year at “The Inevitability of Mannerism” (Architectural Association, London, January 31, 2026) on the state of the question in 1967.