The United States Department of State has selected a team from the University of Illinois at Chicago to curate the United States Pavilion at the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale.
The team, led by architects Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner, will create an installation in the pavilion titled American Framing that investigates "the conditions and consequences of American wood-framed construction," according to a press release.
As construction types that can be found all over the world, from the ranch houses of suburban enclaves to more recent aluminum-framed commercial architectures that evolve the approach, balloon and Type-V wood framing construction methodologies—known as "Chicago Construction" during the 19th Century—are among the leading construction innovations that American building culture has propagated over the centuries. Not only that, but especially in the suburban context, the construction type, as an easily-replicated construction methodology and generator of architectural form, maintains many connections to social and environmental phenomena, including issues relating to redlining, the gendered use of space, environmental politics, and others. The exhibition is set to go on display May 23, 2020 and will run through November 29, 2020.
A bit about the curators: Aside from directing the firm Independent Architecture, Andersen is the Clinical Associate Professor of Architecture at the UIC, while Preissner is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the UIC and also the figure behind his eponymous practice, Paul Preissner Architects.
The 2020 edition of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia is curated by Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning Dean Hashim Sarkis. Earlier this year, Sarkis and Paolo Baratta, president of La Biennale di Venezia, announced that the exhibition will fall under the heading of "How will we live together?"
Describing the approach, Sarkis and Baratta write that architecture should bring people “together as human beings who, despite our increasing individuality, yearn to connect with one another and with other species across digital and real space; together as new households looking for more diverse and dignified spaces for inhabitation; together as emerging communities that demand equity, inclusion and spatial identity; together across political borders to imagine new geographies of association; and together as a planet facing crises that require global action for us to continue living at all."
6 Comments
It wouldn't be a US biennale without some banal research faux realism -- which the euro curators love to reinforce their anti-americanism. Frank Lloyd Wrong
I'd call this Dank Lloyd Wright- why bend to European chauvinism? the Pauls do good work, looking forward to it being shared.
Congratulations! Great choice by the curators. Looking forward to seeing it.
The American Paulvilion.
Congrats Paul&Paul! Looking forward to seeing it.
add one more Paul and you're good (like archinect Paul, bruh)
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