A rainstorm made last night’s festivities a bit soggy, but thankfully the sun has largely been out all day in Venice. Here is a slice of the action. Rattifest In remarks given in Italian as a warm-up act for Carlo Ratti, La Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco said that he has a “special capacity that lies in being attentive to the murmurs of the world.” Ratti’s press conference took the tone of an academic lecture, which is no surprise coming from the MIT professor. Ratti kept his remarks brief and focused on the show, using slides to illustrate and list key points. He also stayed away from platitudes and heroic claims, but a handful of metaphors helped: The biennale is alternately a chain reaction, a superorganism, and a fractal. He shared ten themes for helping to organize the main exhibition’s contents and remarked it has rewarding qualities at whatever speed you encounter it, from 5 minutes to 5 days. His concluding slide was clear: Architecture is survival. Rem × Christopher × Mark × Florencia The first roundtable event on criticism to be held at the Johnston Marklee–designed Speakers’ Corner took place this afternoon. The guest of honor was Rem Koolhaas, who engaged with Christopher Hawthorne, Mark Lee, and Florencia Rodriguez. The conversation began from the familiar trope of “criticism in crisis”—as it always is, Hawthorne said. The packed crowd included Patrik Schumacher, Joshua Ramus, and Giovanna Borasi, among others. Koolhaas adeptly parried inquiries, largely from Hawthorne, about the state of criticism and the threatened predicament of critics. Despite the star power, the talk was boring and largely academic, without a direct reckoning with the structural reasons of money, media, and attention about why criticism feels so forgotten lately. (It still has a home here at AN.) I’m fond of borrowing Frank Zappa’s line about jazz in moments like this: Criticism isn’t dead. “It just smells funny.” Diller Times Dos Approaching the Giardini, a new pop-up bookstore designed by Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro is a long tensegrity beam with a taut, tentlike translucent skin. The James Stirling bookshop inside is now the site of The Perimeter of Architecture: Amid the Elements, curated by Sylvia Lavin as  “an environmental history of architecture animated by forgotten encounters between building and the elements” as seen through books. Models by AD-WO, Besler & Sons, all(zone), DESIGN EARTH, First Office, MOS, and Low Design Office line the display surface. Canal Café is serving coffee to festival-goers. (Marco Zorzanello) And out back of the Arsenale, Diller was present to greet well-wishers at the unveiling of Canal Café, a large contraption that pipes lagoon water up atop a steel structure, through natural and artificial filters, and down into a coffee bar to make espresso. Architects like Charles Renfro, Stephan Schütz, and Winka Dubbledam milled about in the sun. The queue for the caffeine was extensive, so I kept going. Other Countries With some exceptions, the national pavilions are lackluster this year. Many simply tell us about problems we are already aware of, like the climate crisis or how stressed out we are. Several pavilions play long videos on loop, which are disorienting for anyone not fortunate enough to walk in at the beginning. The predicament was true for Japan’s pavilion, curated by Jun Aoki and titled In-Between, in which a 17-minute, two-channel (!) film was unwatchable, though the premise about engaging with AI was interesting. A stronger example was Iceland’s Lavaforming offering, created by Arnhildur Pálmadóttir of s.ap architects. The main content was a simple, 7-minute video that told the story of a future civilization that dug trenches in the earth to harvest lava flows and use them as building materials to create cities. The results were some kind of spiky organic Brutalism. Japan’s pavilion stages the film In-Between, about engaging with AI. (Luca Capuano) Other pavilions overwhelmed attendees with information, like France, curated by Jakob+MacFarlane. The country’s main pavilion is closed, so the show was mounted on panels attached to lightweight frames as if a magazine was printed out and pinned up. Perhaps Ratti could run all this text through ChatGPT so we could make sense of it in a timely manner. Across the main show and national pavilions, it seems like scaffolding and ambient sound design are both having strong showings as the aesthetics of staging and performance continue to have a big role on what architecture exhibitions look—and sound—like. Film director and architect Liam Young, whose work is on display in the Arsenale as part of Intelligens, quipped “if you come to Venice to see the content, you are doing it wrong.” Some of the national pavilions seem to prove him right, unfortunately. We’ll see about the rest tomorrow. Now it’s time to get dudded up for the U.S. Pavilion event at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Ci vediamo domani!