Michael Kimmelman on 'Spontaneous Interventions' at the Venice Biennale

Biennale Focuses on Architects, but Projects Without Them Steal the Show

"Every city is a fixer-upper, as one architect puts it in a video running at the pavilion: that’s the American message. “Spontaneous Interventions” is the title of the presentation, which highlights 124 small-scale, often anonymous, mostly collaborative projects to improve cities. They range from pop-up book-shares in disused phone booths to plug-in street furniture for food cart patrons; from portable playgrounds and guerrilla gardens that hijack newspaper-vending boxes for ready-made planters, to flea markets on abandoned lots.

Organized by Cathy Lang Ho, Ned Cramer and David van der Leer for the Institute for Urban Design, along with Michael Sorkin, the institute’s chairman, and Anne Guiney, the show may not be the first but it is the latest and one of the most panoramic surveys of this sort of insurgent, unplanned, provisional, do-it-yourself micro-cultural citizen activism.

That many of the projects here skirt authority and don’t involve architects suggests not that architects aren’t important or that cities don’t depend on top-down plans. It suggests that cities and architects still have a ways to go to catch up with an increasingly restless public’s appetite for better design and better living.

And that the public isn’t waiting"