- The theme of the seventh annual Venice Biennale of Architecture is “cities: less aesthetics, more ethics.” Not a bad goal, but “it’s a particularly tall order in Venice: the city has been in decline since the 18th century, and hasn’t been a real, workaday place since the great flood of November 1966, which marked the beginning of a major international effort to conserve [the city]. From then on Venice was pickled in aspic, becoming a tourist ghetto and a place known equally for its aesthetics and its lack of ethics when it came to dealing with the millions of visitors who flood into St Mark’s Square every year.” – The Guardian
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