La Biennale come sismografo / The Biennale as Sismograph

The 6th International Architecture Biennale of 1996, directed for the first time by an international figure – the Austrian architect Hans Hollein – produced neither manifestos nor ruptures, and it did not inaugurate or close any particular season. Its historical resonance is instead implicitly condensed in the title of the main exhibition: Sensors of the Future. The Architect as Seismograph. Hollein used this intuition to celebrate the very figure of the architect, effectively inaugurating the season of the “archistar,” a move that attracted criticism for privileging the personalization of the discipline.
At the time, the exhibition seemed to register an irreparable fracture and a growing distance from an earlier season of shared intentions, collective “truths,” and common programs. Yet the metaphor of the seismograph articulated with precision the epistemological vocation of the Biennale: to record, at periodic intervals, the unstable rhythms of architecture—its tremors and aftershocks, its subterranean vibrations and sudden eruptions. Far from the rhetoric of forecasting the future, as many propose, the Biennale functions as an instrument for registering the present in its discontinuities and contradictions.
It is precisely in this capacity to register fragments, visions, and contradictions that the Biennale derives its historiographical force. Over the past decades it has become a privileged laboratory for tracing the evolution of architecture, testing the limits of the discipline, and interrogating its shifting media, while contributing to the redefinition of the objects, languages, and themes that constitute its “expanded field.”