Venice’s famed Giardini della Biennale is set to get a heaping taste of the Natural State beginning next May.
As announced by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs, the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, joined in partnership with independent consultancy DesignConnects and Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, have been selected to commission, organize, and curate the U.S. Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Curated by Carlo Ratti, whose Intelligens theme was announced this May, the 19th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale will open to the public on May 10 and run through November 23, 2025.
Leading the team in the roles of co-commissioners are Fay Jones School dean and professor Peter MacKeith, DesignConnects principal Susan Chin, and Rod Bigelow, executive director of the Moshe Safdie–designed Crystal Bridges, which, like the University of Arkansas, is situated in Northwest Arkansas (Bentonville and Fayetteville, respectively.) The name of the exhibition to be staged at the U.S. Pavilion is PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity. As detailed in an announcement, it will “focus on the representation of the United States through the contemporary manifestation of the porch in American architecture—a quintessential constructed place that is at once social and environmental, tectonic and performative, hospitable and intimate, generous and democratic.”
“The exhibition format emphasizes a diversity of voices and perspectives, but also a set of common causes for productive action through architecture and design,” elaborated MacKeith, who will also act as coordinating curator for the exhibition alongside Jonathan Boelkins, exhibition designer and special projects coordinator at the Fay Jones School.
“The emphasis will be on imperative issues, national and global, addressed through architecture and design, and on public engagement and civic building for the greater good, founded on a generous architectural diplomacy of creative expression, representing the best of the nation’s past, present, and future,” MacKeith added in his statement.
In addition to the co-commissioners, a four-person curatorial design team for PORCH has also been announced: Marlon Blackwell, the AIA Gold Medal-winning founder of Fayetteville-based Marlon Blackwell Architects and E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture at the University of Arkansas; industrial designer Stephen Burks of New York–based Stephen Burks Man Made; Oberlander Prize–winning landscape architect Julie Bargmann of Charlottesville, Virginia–based D.I.R.T. studio; and Maura Rockcastle, co-founder and principal of Minneapolis landscape architecture and urbanism practice Ten x Ten. Rockcastle, along with partner Ross Altheimer, was named a 2024 Emerging Voice by The Architectural League of New York.
A temporary, large-scale structure—a porch, of course, with a surrounding landscape—will be designed by Blackwell, Burks, Bargmann, and Rockcastle and realized directly outside of the historic, Palladian-style pavilion. The porch will serve as nucleus for diverse programming—talks, group meals, musical performances, children’s educational sessions, and more—throughout the run of the biennale. Inside the 1930 building, roughly 50 curated projects will be showcased, all of them focused on the “importance of the porch typology in American civic life.”
A call for entries seeking porch-centric project submissions will launch this fall.
