British Pavilion

A Clockwork Jerusalem

Viddy well, dear readers, how England's green and pleasant land has become a carbuncle of brutalist buildings, squat tower blocks and emptied 'pavements in the sky'. If the 2014 British Pavilion by Crimson Architectural Historians and FAT Architecture is a complex, muted celebration and something of an apologia for the misfiring modernism of our sceptered isle (mainly in the Sixties and Seventies), then it is also an exhilarating explanation of where this impetus for architectural optimism and social betterment came from and why we came to love these utopian cock-ups anyway.

Three large models of the housing scheme's Hulme, Thamesmead and Cumbernauld. Photo Credit: Paul Raftery

The central room features a sorry-looking hillock made of earth, one of the show's recurring motifs, which references not only prehistoric burial mounds, but the rubble left after the slum clearance around Shoreditch's Arnold Circus of 1903, as well as a conical landscaping feature of a social housing scheme designed by the Smithsons in 1963. This tiny promontory could, in the context of the Biennale, be a tongue-in-cheek metaphor for our relative international standing in architecture and, as part of a wider context, our status in most other things for that matter. But it is also defiantly funny and self-deprecating, in a 'Carry On' kind of a way.

The hillock made of earth is a reoccurring theme throughout the British Pavilion. Photo Credit: Cristiano Corte/British Council

This light-hearted spirit continues in delightfully irreverent leaps of influence from Sir John Soane's Bank of England, pre-imagined as a ruin, to the Barbican's hope-filled redevelopment, as immortalised in a film for Unit Four Plus Two's song Concrete & Clay, in which the band cavorts on the building site in their proto-music video of 1965. Another great passage, deftly orchestrated by curators Wouter Vanstiphout of Crimson and Sam Jacob of FAT (whose practice is now, ironically, defunct) shows how the monument of Stonehenge begat the semi-circular Royal Crescent in Bath (1767), which begat the short-lived tenements of the four Hulme Crescents in Manchester (1964) that were pulled down just three decades later.

While Kubrick's use of Thamesmead in A Clockwork Orange and an image from the Tottenham riots of 2011 bring some ultra-violence to proceedings, it's still a noticeably British trait to foreground our failures so spectacularly and publicly. Whether it is modesty or the inherent navel-gazing of a national pavilion that forces the hands of subsequent Biennale commissioners to face our inner demons in this manner, A Clockwork Jerusalem is timely in so far as it resembles last year's art offering in the same spaces by Jeremy Deller (entitled English Magic and now touring this country), which shared the sensibility that can bring William Morris, the welfare state and rave music to the same party (as well as very similar visual display design and graphics).

Glass vitrines are filled with books, leaflets and displays of pop music videos. Photo Credit: Cristiano Corte/British Council

This impetus to delve into Britishness -- which no one has succeeded in distilling since Nikolaus Pevsner's slightly faltering but laudable effort to discover The Englishness of English Art -- is surely a healthy exercise, or perhaps it's an exorcism. Because, on the basis of much of this show, what British modernity seemed to lack in true visionaries, our glorious past and its plethora of driven architects can always be counted on to provide more than enough compensation. It's also a feature of Biennales past to not know quite how to handle some of the spaces in this little marble neoclassical folly -- especially the narrow gallery at the back, used here for a simple model of one of Hulme's sci-fi crescents and by Deller as a pit-stop serving mugs of Yorkshire tea. Maybe then it's all the fault of the pompous pavilion, itself sat ridiculously on a hillock atop of the Biennale's winding Giardini.