Germane Barnes will curate the US Pavilion at the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale
The architect and professor, in tandem with the University of Miami and historian Vyta Pivo, will organise an exhibition called 'Earth Craft' – an exploration of brick, rammed earth, adobe and the hands that craft them
A Blue Wave may have just crashed into Washington, DC, but today, the United States Department of State had a topic other than politics on its agenda: architecture.
The federal agency announced that the University of Miami School of Architecture (U-SoA) will be representing the US at the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale. Organising the pavilion will be award-winning architect and educator Germane Barnes, alongside historian Vyta Pivo.
Germane Barnes and Vyta Pivo
The 2027 theme, according to a release from U-SoA and the State Department, will be ‘Earth Craft,’ a topic that will look at the materials that comprise America’s architecture – brick, adobe, rammed earth and more – and the hands that make them.
‘Most of the buildings we celebrate were made from ground somebody dug, shaped, and fired, and we rarely ask who did that or what they knew. "Earth Craft" represents the United States through its makers and not through its icons,’ Barnes said in a statement.
'Joyriding,' an installation by Studio Barnes created at Exhibit Columbus last year that celebrated Black car culture
This won’t be Barnes’ first time in Venice. In 2023, along with his practice Studio Barnes, he presented Griot, an installation in the Arsenale that explored the architecture and hidden histories of the African diaspora. He’s also exhibited at the Chicago Architecture Biennale, Exhibit Columbus and was part of MoMA’s 2021 exhibition ‘Reconstructions Architecture and Blackness in America.’
Pivo, meanwhile, is an expert in construction labour and materials; she’s currently writing a book on the history of the US concrete industry. Other preliminary participants in ‘Earth Craft’ will include Nader Tehrani of the Boston-based practice NADAAA; Miami and Guatemala-based architects Carie Penabad and Adib Cúre; Rodolphe el-Khoury, dean of U-SoA and principal of RAD-Lab; Leah Wulfman, Merritt Chase and Barnes himself. U-SoA students will work with assistant professor Maxwell Jarosz on an installation in the US Pavilion’s courtyard.
A view of the US Pavilion at this year's art bienniale.
While design details on the installation, to be set in a 1930 Palladian-style building in Venice’s Giardini, have yet to be released, it’s bound to include plenty of raw, earthen materials. The announcement also alluded to fabrication workshops, and cited visual and research references ranging from America’s indigenous landscapes to industrial brickworks to plantation kilns – all in service of telling a story about materials and labour.
It will also assert that technology isn’t here to take over the architectural profession: ‘[The worker's] knowledge of soil, water and heat is not a relic, and we are putting it in the same building as robotic fabrication and computational design,’ Pivo, the co-curator, said, ‘because the new tools work best when they learn from the hands that came first.’
The 2025 US Pavilion was curated by the University of Arkansas’s architecture school, DesignConnects and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Mounting an architecture exhibition at the US Pavilion is a costly and logistically challenging endeavor. While the State Department awards a $375,000 seed grant, the expectation is that curatorial teams raise the rest of the needed funds themselves – costs that can soar upwards of $1 million, according to past organisers.
But, just like its theme implies, ‘Earth Craft’ will inevitably be a group effort. As U-SoA dean Rodolphe el-Khoury, said, ‘As an American school of architecture, we study the full range of what this country has built, and that includes the work of the people who built it – not just the designers whose names are bolded in textbooks.'
