What would an Architecture Biennale be without French people without clothes? We don’t know because it has never happened before. French architect Philippe Rahm wanted to turn air into structure and the original plan was to create a strong convection flow deploying a cold plane. A really cool idea, all agreed, but it wasn’t working on Day One leaving a bunch of comely dudes, some in minimalist Egyptian togs to inhabit the cool space, the others demonstrating the warm space in the buff. To our surprise, the ones exposing themselves were not architects but a performance troupe.

It’s the night before the opening and all doors are locked, while interns and curators go bezerk trying to finish thier installations in time before press day at the 11th Architecture Biennale. I managed to sneak into the main space of the Arsenale, past David Rockwell’s whizzy interactive scrim (more later, once I figure it out) and into the vast emptiness now fairly crowded with a swooping green formation that–even without the help of a single label–is clearly a work of Zaha-ness