For the last 20 years, everybody and his dog has been trying to stage an art biennale in the hope of acquiring reflected glamour from the high-profile openings, parties and feuds that go with such events. But Venice, which invented the idea of a once-every-two-years art beano in the first place, has managed to keep architecture all to itself. The city came up with the idea of an international architectural event at the start of the 1980s in an attempt to fill up its municipal gardens, which were full of crumbling national pavilions in the off years between art biennales. The architecture biennale hit its stride when Charles Jencks (in 1980) and Paolo Portoghesi (in 1982) used it as the launch platform for postmodernism. Suddenly broken pediments and nursery colours were everywhere.
Italy being Italy, there has been some difficulty finding the money for architecture every two years, and in any case, even in the febrile world of design, it is not always easy coming up with a convincing new movement to order with such regularity. Some biennales have declined into incomprehensible walls of drawings or installations masquerading as art.
The September opening of the ninth Venice architecture biennale promises to be reflective rather than predictive. The director is the Swiss Kurt W Forster, late of the Getty Centre, offering scholarship rather than showmanship. The last director, to declare an interest, was me. Before that, it was the overexcitable Italian architect, Massimiliano Fuksas, who came up with the barely pronounceable theme of "less aesthetics, more ethics" and filled the magnificent Venice Arsenale with video screens 280 metres long showing flickering images of rubbish tips in São Paolo that rendered every other exhibit invisible. Now, Forster's show is dedicated to the somewhat nebulous theme of "metamorph," an indigestible mix of archive and reportage. There are projects from the late James Stirling and Aldo Rossi, along with more recent projects that supposedly reflect the same themes that the work of these two pioneers pointed to. But whatever the exhibits on show, the opening weekend will see Harry's Bar and the terrace at the Gritti Palace crowded with architects from around the world dressed from head to foot in black, and looking anxiously over each other's shoulders in the search for a potential client.
As the rhetoric accompanying the biennale gets increasingly overheated, so its fringes keep swelling. Even as architects delight in demonstrating their contempt for buildability, it has become the place where reputations are made and projects are unveiled. It is the place the big players take their clients to, where the developers and the megalomaniacs, busy trying to turn a fantasy into a real project, hold seminars. Last time, there was one Mexican multimillionaire who tried to introduce his plans for a new city outside Guadalajara by flying in his own DJ from LA in his private 747 for a party in the old Venetian grain stores. Now it's a place where the slick machinery of the cultural public relations industry attempts to blur business with pleasure, shipping in movers and shakers for Bellinis and learned dialogue about the end of the "Bilbao effect."
The British pavilion, orchestrated by Peter Cook, is a meander around the architectural landscape, from the austerity of John Pawson's new monastery in the Czech Republic to Future Systems and their speculative design for a skyscraper in Berlin. Scotland is unveiling its own pavilion for the first time this year, co-ordinated by the Lighthouse centre in Glasgow.
Perhaps inspired by all the surrounding hoopla, the idea of the architecture biennale is suddenly springing up everywhere. London staged its first at the beginning of the summer. It was originally going to limit itself to Clerkenwell, ground zero for the capital's architectural classes. But it quickly burst its banks, attracting thousands to its programme of exhibitions, street parties, and even a cattle drive through Smithfield.
Beijing, currently the world's biggest building site, is launching its first architecture biennale in September, while Rotterdam will be staging its biennale for the second time next year. Buenos Aires has one too. It's all evidence that architecture is emerging from the shadows of the art world to become a mainstream interest.
The ninth Venice architecture biennale runs from 12th September to 7th November
