Text by Thomas RouechéPhotos by Elliott Gunn

It was hard not to feel a sense of anxiety at this year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture. The industry is profoundly complicit in many of the ills of the present: climate change, housing instability, the privatisation of public spaces, and riven with workplace abuses – but the discipline remains wedded to the idea that it can solve the problems that it itself creates. Walking through Carlo Ratti’s vast show drove home a sense of futility, one underlined by the many country pavilions that presented, time and again, new forms of material, new forms of brick that might improve sustainability, make building better, and make the work of construction less interwoven in the destruction of the planet and rising global inequity.

This biennale, though only housed in the Arsenale while the Giardini building is refurbished, contains more contributions than any previous, which were gathered through an open call. Even at such a scale, the resulting impression is of a series of gimmicks. Nowhere was this more evident than in the AI summary below each caption, a gesture that felt like a troll, and had the effect of undermining the wall text and increasing a sense of detached incoherence. An installation by Zaha Hadid Architects explores how video game design can impact urban planning. Another, by Kengo Kuma, uses 3D-printed elements to hold up fallen tree branches. An installation by the Architecture Lobby, an activist group, has put up a whiteboard for complaints about the industry. A chilling note demands that practices constructing detention centres should lose their licences.

Emerging blinking into the light at the end of the Arsenale, the visitor is confronted by Norman Foster’s collaboration with Porsche on a snakelike pavilion that leads to a docking station for his water bikes. Nearby, a team led by New York practice Diller Scofidio + Renfro had constructed a filtration system that takes Venice water and purifies it enough to make espresso. Such installations feel cynical: glib solutions to existential planetary challenges.

In the country pavilions materiality recurred again and again, but stranger exhibitions felt more exciting. The Nordic Pavilion sought to interrogate the language of modernism  through an installation and intensely physical performance that asked questions of gendered space. Opposite, at the Japanese Pavilion, a language model generated a play from characters created from the different parts of the building. A beautiful, if slightly twee, installation in the Polish Pavilion highlighted the elements of buildings that protect us, like fire hydrants, exit signs and dowsing rods, here presented as household gods.

The Golden Lion-winning Bahrain Pavilion sought to deal with a specific problem – heat – through a specific solution: sandbags. Other highlights were the Irish Pavilion’s cerebral celebration of people’s assemblies and the Uzbekistan Pavilion’s incredible exploration of the country’s Soviet-era solar furnace. The British Pavilion tackled a broad and conceptual landscape through the framework of the Rift Valley, allowing the Nairobi and UK-based team to tie together decolonial projects from Africa to Gaza.

At the heart of the Gardini was a temporary pavilion marking the place where Lina Ghotmeh’s new Qatar Pavilion will stand (the country’s main exhibition, celebrating ideas of community and care, remains at Palazzo Franchetti). This fragile temporary space, a “community centre” by Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari, offered shelter amidst scattered Venetian showers. This is more than can be said for the nearby US Pavilion’s Porch Project, which clad the neoclassical building in a porch structure, designed to provide an “architecture of generosity”. It is, as the Pavilion describes it, at once “social, environmental, tectonic, performative, hospitable, generous, democratic” –  but, sadly, it offers no protection from the rain. .