The star system

VENICE, ITALY — While the Venice Architecture Biennale remains the most anticipated and ambitious design show in the world -- not to mention the only one featuring cocktail parties in canal-side palazzi -- every edition is marked by a curious split personality. There is a core exhibition, organized by a single curator and displaying work by the leading names of the profession, and along with it a scattered collection of national pavilions filled with designs by mostly anonymous younger architects. Because the pavilions vary so much in quality -- and theme -- they always knock the central exhibition at least a bit off message.

Rarely, though, has the gap in tone between the two sections been as wide as it is this year. The main show, organized by American-born Aaron Betsky, manages to be unsure of itself, divided against itself and pleased with itself at the same time. Its biggest gestures -- at the start of the exhibition, inside the cavernous old shipbuilding complex called the Arsenale -- come from a parade of celebrity architects, including Zaha Hadid, Elizabeth Diller + Ricardo Scofidio and Frank Gehry, nearly all of them playing down to the moment with overscaled, underwhelming work. A separate section on experimental architecture, which Betsky prepared with a young Italian curator, Emiliano Gandolfi, has the opposite problem. It is dense and unwieldy, a thicket of projects containing a handful of stirring moments but no clear theme.

In the way it embraces celebrity architecture and digital design without hesitation or irony, Betsky's Biennale seems nearly a decade out of date. It reflects the attitudes that dominated architecture before 9/11, the Iraq war or the current economic crisis -- and before rebuilding fiascoes at Lower Manhattan's ground zero and in New Orleans, which proved a kind of Waterloo for architecture's star system and exposed computer-modeling skills as ultimately meaningless in the absence of political ones.

In chasing glamour, and in trying to wring the last drops of relevance from tired and impenetrable theory, Betsky walls off the show itself from the real world and its growing list of ailments with a certain incoherent nonchalance.

Where the action is