The two exhibitions, Aaron Betsky’s “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building” and Francesco Garofalo’s “Housing Italy,” in the Arsenale for the Venice 2008 Biennale could not be more diametrically opposed in terms of their positions in contemporary architectural practice today.

The Betsky-curated exhibition brings together signature installations by branded global architects such as Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Coop Himmelblau as well as by emerging and polemic designers such as Philippe Rahn, An Te Liu, MVRDV, and others in an array of digital media, fabrication technologies, and construction.

We stop at Diller and Scofidio’s video which presents views if the Venices of world – Italy, Las Vegas, and Macao – from a gondola. Perfectly positioned to stem the flow of visitors, it provokes us to question the meaning of where we are.

After being super-saturated with stimuli including the 360 degree dance/pleasure/lounge of Nigel Coates, we arrive abruptly at “Housing Italy” in the Italian Hall at the terminus of the Arsenale. Garofalo has traced the history of housing as the central project of modern architecture in Italy through the discourse of the Italian media along the perimeter walls.  Twelve selected design teams responded to his invitation to make speculative projects addressing urgent issues of housing in Italy today, ranging from social implications, cultural identity, forms, availability, to affordability. Not a single computer-generated image exists in this exhibition: a deliberate decision to return architecture and its formation to acts of thinking, drawing, and model building. One of the exhibition’s most engaging projects re-inhabits the skeleton of an uncompleted Aldo Rossi building for affordable multiple residential units, cleverly playing with a colorful kit of toy-block infill components.

The projects present contemporary thinking about the possibilities of providing housing for everyone. The future of accommodation is addressed by an animated video in a stand-alone theatre; it presents the challenging statistics of the magnitude of the ongoing problem, ironically, through the work of an MTV video producer.

Later, in conversation with Garofalo, I learn that a high-ranking government official toured the exhibition and was inspired to go back to the Italian government with a proposal for a new program to address the urgent housing questions.

The Italian press responds to the two Arsenale exhibitions by choosing sides: they champion Garofalo’s exhibition, generating a debate and a degree of tension even before the exhibitions were opened to the public.

Not only does the dichotomy of Garofalo and Betsky focus the realities of the existing and growing gap in the practice of architecture today – represented on one hand by the Italians for whom building is and will always be the fundamental outcome of the architectural project; and on the other, architecture as a project of research, experimentation, and development. Betsky’s position is valid on one hand – in his words, architecture “must go beyond buildings because buildings are not enough. They are big and wasteful accumulations of natural resources that are difficult to adapt to the continually changing conditions of modern life.” Ironically, in this era of global instability catalysed in large part by the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the States, Garofolo’s project – which offers concrete solutions to a major social problem - is equally timely and relevant. Installations exhilarate , while Housing Italy sobers and gives hope.

In the aftermath of our odyssey through the Arsenale, the oppositions seem extreme and it is difficult to see how on one hand ground level problem-solving and experimental formalism can be integrated. Yet I believe the future of contemporary architectural practice can move forward in a positive direction when these opposable forces- substance and style – are brought together through dialogue and interaction to lead to an integrated synthesis and previously unimagined solutions. This is critical, especially if, in Betsky’s words, “the role of architecture is to make us feel at home in this challenging world.”

*Photographic Credit: Taken from Flickr account members, tom$ and dysturb