Germane Barnes to Curate US Pavilion at 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale

The US Department of State has named the University of Miami School of Architecture (U-SoA) as the organizer of the US Pavilion at the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale, with architect Germane Barnes and historian Vyta Pivo at the helm.

Their exhibition, titled 'Earth Craft', will examine the raw materials of American building — brick, adobe, rammed earth and more — along with the people who shape them. Barnes laid out the premise plainly in a statement.

'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.

Who is curating, and who else is involved?

This is Barnes' second appearance in Venice. In 2023, his practice Studio Barnes presented Griot, an Arsenale installation exploring the architecture and hidden histories of the African diaspora. His CV also includes the Chicago Architecture Biennale, Exhibit Columbus, and MoMA's 2021 exhibition 'Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.'

Pivo brings a different expertise: construction labour and materials. She is currently writing a book on the history of the US concrete industry.

The preliminary participant list reads like a cross-section of American practice:

• Nader Tehrani of Boston-based NADAAA
• Carie Penabad and Adib Cúre, who work between Miami and Guatemala
• Rodolphe el-Khoury, dean of U-SoA and principal of RAD-Lab
• Leah Wulfman, Merritt Chase, and Barnes himself

U-SoA students, working with assistant professor Maxwell Jarosz, will build an installation in the pavilion's courtyard.

What will the exhibition actually argue?

The pavilion itself is a 1930 Palladian-style building in Venice's Giardini. Design details haven't been released, but expect raw, earthen materials in quantity. The announcement references fabrication workshops and research sources spanning indigenous American landscapes, industrial brickworks and plantation kilns.

The curators also want to defuse the anxiety that technology will replace the trades. Pivo put it directly: '[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, because the new tools work best when they learn from the hands that came first.'

What does it cost to mount a US Pavilion show?

Plenty. The State Department supplies a $375,000 seed grant — roughly a third of what past organizers say the real bill runs to, with total costs that can exceed $1 million. Curatorial teams must raise the balance themselves.

That funding gap makes the theme's collaborative logic more than rhetorical. U-SoA dean Rodolphe el-Khoury framed the school's role in the same terms as the exhibition's thesis: '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.'

With design details still under wraps, the first test of that collective approach will be visible when the Biennale opens in 2027.