Patrick Lynch enjoys fine wine, good company, and Palladio's San Francesco della Vigna in Venice

摘要

On my first night in Venice, just before the biennale opened, I bumped into some friends who were drinking with Bill Menking and Teddy Cruz, curator of and exhibitor in the American pavilion, in a bar in a scruffy bit of town. The rest of the week pretty much carried on from there. The Americans surprised even themselves, I think, by showing Cruz's projects for Mexican barrios and Rural Studio's work on community projects in Alabama, eschewing the formalist endgame of the Ivy League. It felt a long way from the baby-boomer psychodrama of Peter Eisenman, Jeff Kipnis, Mark Wigley et al, echoing Barack Obama's critique of the Clintons'generation in an exhibition based on hope instead of hype.