A delegation from Arkansas will be traveling to Italy to represent the United States in its official pavilion at next year’s Venice Architecture Biennale.
The announcement was made Wednesday by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The group includes presenters from The University of Arkansas's Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design in Fayetteville, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, and the independent consultancy DesignConnects, which is based in New York City.
Guided by co-commissioners Peter MacKeith, Susan Chin, and Rod Bigelow, the U.S. Pavilion will showcase their presentation, PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity, which focuses on porches' role as a social and environmental space in the American context.
A "dynamic showcase" of projects and practices from around the country, the exhibition proposes a "positive, productive" presentation of American architecture that emphasizes both empathy and education.
"The exhibition format emphasizes a diversity of voices and perspectives, but also a set of common causes for productive action through architecture and design," Peter MacKeith, Dean and Professor of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, shared. "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."
Joining the contingent is a well-known group of curatorial design collaborators. AIA Gold Medallist Marlon Blackwell, fresh from the announcement of his new Global War on Terror Memorial on the National Mall, will join designer Stephen Burks and the noted landscape architects Julie Bargmann and Maura Rockcastle. Together, they will design a temporary porch structure to be put in place outside of the pavilion that organizes musical performances, farm-to-table meals, craft demonstrations, a Juneteenth celebration, and other educational activities.
Accordingly, the interior of the U.S. Pavilion will feature 50 curated projects highlighting the continued importance of the porch typology in civic life beyond their traditional association with the American South. The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale is being curated by Carlo Ratti. Events kick off on May 10th, 2025, and will run through November 23rd.
2 Comments
Hey Porch People - don't forget the role of the brownstone entry steps as a "porch" in New York City that promoted resident interaction, surveillance of children playing in the street and overall neighborliness.
I live in a changing historic neighborhood. Originally built by German immigrants, during the era of white flight it became a Black neighborhood. In the recent decade, many Hispanic and Latino families have bought houses and moved in.
The older Black culture here is a social culture of the front porch. The front porch is where people sit and talk and wave to their neighbors and have drinks and grill food and play and socialize.
The newer Latino and Hispanic culture is one of courtyards. They tend to build solid fences at the property line and often enclose the front porch as an additional room, then the socializing happens in outdoor spaces but behind walls. It’s joyous and boisterous and celebratory but it’s somewhat private.
There are a few new-build houses, expensive, the beginnings of gentrification. These white-owned houses have small porches that have picture-perfect chairs with throw cushions and signs that say HOME in cursive script, but no one ever sits there.
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