The Venice Biennale, which opened in June and runs until late November, is probably in terms of floor-area coverage, and probably also in dollars expended, the largest architecture show on Earth. Indeed, maybe the greatest too. Every other year, this exhibition takes over most of this legendary city’s Arsenale, a historic complex of shipyards and armories, and the adjacent Napoleonic-era public gardens known as the Giardini—an area about one-fifth the size of Monaco. Legions of curators representing their countries stage exhibits in the national pavilions, some little haiku-buildings themselves, built over the years by well-known architects including Gerrit Rietveld (the Dutch pavilion), Sverre Fehn (Norway, a Pritzker Prize winner), and Josef Hoffmann (Austria, one of the leaders of Secessionism). Other pavilions are temporary: art-and-architecture-addled squatters in tents or vast, crumbling rooms.

This year sixty-five countries are participating. In addition to the usual suspects there are battalions of others, or “Others”—Armenia, Bahrain, Ivory Coast, Kuwait, Montenegro, Paraguay. And there’s more: in recent years the Biennale’s tentacles slithered ever farther into the city in “collateral exhibitions” in splendid palazzi from Cannaregio to Giudecca. The result: Venice is a riot of architectural models, installations, photographs, mock-ups of architectural elements and details, digital fly-throughs of buildings, films, and—everywhere— graphically scintillating text.

This year’s Biennale promised to be especially interesting, and likely provocative, because its curator is the laconically charismatic Rem Koolhaas. He is surely the most influential architect of his generation. Since he has taught for decades at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, he is able to marshal the energies and orchestrate the efforts of past and present students from around the globe who are his more-or-less fawning acolytes.

When he accepted the position as curator of this year’s show, Koolhaas announced that he was determined to deliver a Now-for-Something-Completely-Different moment. In a venue structured to celebrate the best of the newest in architecture and architects, Koolhaas delivers a text-heavy message impaled on the tip of a poisoned arrow: contemporary architects are impotent. Far from heroic, the “starchitects” as well as the merely mortal practitioners are but cogs in a machine that they do not and cannot control. Architecture is thoroughly mediated—by history, by governments, by industries, by the flow of capital. The capacity of architecture and architects to advance, or even to influence significantly, the transformation of society is next to nil. In his curatorial brief, Koolhaas writes: “Architects’ reputations and expectations are largely based on their supposed uniqueness, but we actually assemble elements that have largely been defined by others, mass produced in series, offered in catalogues on the internet, and put together by increasingly indifferent labor. ... We may posture as geniuses, but we play our assigned role in the uberscript of modernization.”

This is analogous to maintaining that no author can be original, or influential, because all the words she uses have been used before. It’s just silly. If the formulation of Koolhaas’s project seems lifted from the back covers of pastel-colored books in the Cultural Studies sections of what used to be known as bookstores, that’s because, effectively, it was. During the panel discussions, invited salons, and private parties of the Biennale’s days-long opening, names of cultural theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Guy Debord, Jean-François Lyotard, Slavoj Žižek, and Manfredo Tafuri (the Frankfurt School’s architectural amanuensis) wafted through the hotter-by-the-day Venetian air.