Wang Shu Tells Venice 2027: "Architecture Must Return to Its Essence"

"Architecture must return to its essence." With those six words, Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu have set the agenda for the 20th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, which runs May 8 to November 21, 2027.

That's a curatorial thesis, not a slogan. The exhibition, titled "Do Architecture – For the Possibility of Coexistence Facing a Real Reality," will spread across the Giardini, the Arsenale, and venues throughout Venice. The title alone tells you the drift: verb first, manifesto second, condition third.

What do the curators want architects to stop doing?

According to Wang and Lu, the discipline has drifted too far from lived reality — a drift they attribute to excessive abstraction, commercialization, and digitalization. Their answer is not a speculation about what architecture might become. It's a return to the physical act of making, through materials, construction, local knowledge, and direct experience.

The position is consistent. Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu founded Amateur Architecture Studio in 1997, and the practice has spent nearly three decades on traditional building techniques, material reuse, and the bond between a building and its place. The Biennale brief reads like the studio's back catalogue scaled up to a citywide exhibition. That's not a criticism. Convictions travel well.

Why "coexistence"?

The exhibition puts coexistence at its center. Specifically, it asks how architecture can hold together conditions that usually pull apart: technology and craftsmanship, urban and rural ways of building. The curators insist this synthesis stay grounded in the specific realities of each place — a hedge, presumably, against the kind of generic global solution that flattens exactly the differences it claims to bridge.

It's a deliberately unfashionable posture. Where recent Biennales have leaned into data, AI, and planetary-scale systems, Wang and Lu are pointing back toward the hand, the site, and the material at hand. Whether national pavilions follow that lead or politely ignore it is the customary subplot of every edition.

Who are the curators?

Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu run Amateur Architecture Studio, founded in 1997 in Hangzhou. Their built work and their teaching have long argued that demolition-driven development discards both materials and memory — hence the studio's signature practice of reclaiming brick, tile, and timber from demolished buildings. The 2027 exhibition extends that argument from individual commissions to the discipline's self-understanding.

The framing has a certain dry logic. A discipline accused of abstraction gets assigned homework: do architecture. The opening is eight months past the drawing board now, and the proof will be in the Arsenale's sheds, not in the press release.

For the 20th edition of the Architecture Biennale, the stakes are straightforward. If "Do Architecture" delivers on its promise of making, material, and place, it offers the profession a counter-manual to the screen. If it doesn't, the title becomes the review.