Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 review – a pick’n’mix of conceptual posturing

Refugee camps, ad-hoc mosques and Wetherspoon’s carpets are among the muddle of answers to the well-intentioned curatorial question: ‘How will we live together?’A robotic arm twitches above a lumpy landscape of compacted earth, pock-marked with little hollows from which pink tufts of fungus emerge. This is an “ecosystem of empathy and coexistence”, a caption tells us, the fungal flora and mechanical limb living together in perfect harmony. Nearby, bubbling tanks of