Icons and biennales.

Mother of them all, the Venice Biennale starts 7 September and closes 7 November. This year's architecture theme, curated by Kurt W. Forster, is Metaporph which is to say, 'the transformation of urban landscapes, city outskirts and niches as a result of architectural intervention'. That very likely means the usual architectural suspects showing their latest project slides again. You can get the full monty at www.labiennale.org where there is a nice little, erm, slide show of participants' recent work. I wish sites would arrange for such slide shows to be downloadable and run as either wallpaper or screen savers; it would save us all a lot of conference fees and might encourage the older staff to design more interestingly. Still, this is definitely not the kind of thing for British architect Graham Morrison who recently denounced 'iconic' architecture at a Royal Academy dinner and started a great row among the London architectural nomenklatura. His rather elegant, well mannered site is at www.alliesandmorrison.co.uk. Not an icon to be seen.