The University of Miami School of Architecture has been selected by the U.S. Department of State to commission, organize and curate the exhibition of the United States Pavilion at the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale. Titled “Earth Craft,” the exhibition explores the relationship between American architecture, the land from which it emerges and the people who shape it. It traces earthen materials from the ground to the finished building and honors the communities of brickmakers, masons and earth builders who turned local soil into the foundations of public and private life. “Earth Craft” was conceived by Germane Barnesassociate professor and director of the Master of Architecture Graduate Program at the University of Miami School of Architecture and principal of Studio Barnes, who will serve as lead curator.
Few materials tell as expansive a story of American architecture as earth. Various iterations of earth—brick, rammed earth, adobe and concrete masonry—show architecture to be a continuous process of transforming geological matter into shelter. Earthen materials remain culturally and historically alive because they retain the conditions of their production, for example the soils and climates from which they emerge as well as the labor of workers who extracted, shaped and assembled them.
“Earth Craft” takes these material histories seriously, shifting attention from architectural aesthetics toward a material ethic in which architecture acquires form and meaning through its relationship to workers and landscapes – presenting earth as an active collaborator in design, and the central driver of what makes a design uniquely American. Every soil behaves differently – from the adobe communities of the Southwest and the earthen landscapes of Indigenous North America to Monticello, military brickworks on the frontier, plantation kilns and industrial brick towns such as Haverstraw, New York; St. Louis, Missouri; Tuskegee, Alabama; and Denison, Texas – so every earthen building carries a record of place, touch and inherited knowledge.
“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,” said Barnes.
Vyta Pivocurator and historian of “Earth Craft” and assistant professor at the School of Architecture, continued, “The exhibition will honor the brick masons, workers and tradespeople whose labor built this country and rarely gets credited for it. Their 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.”
Barnes is one of the U.S. Pavilion exhibition’s featured designers alongside Nader Tehrani of NADAAA; Carie Penabad and Adib Cúre of Cure + Penabad Architecture and Urban Design; Rodolphe el-Khoury, dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture and principal of RAD-Lab; multidisciplinary practitioner Leah Wulfman; and Merritt Chase, a landscape and urban design practice. Maxwell Jarosz will collaborate with University of Miami students to develop an exterior courtyard installation.
“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, but the unrecognized field leaders innovating in materiality and craft that enabled the building techniques that define America. Representing the United States in Venice is an incredible opportunity to bring this perspective on American architecture to an international audience, and we are grateful for this opportunity,” said el-Khoury.
During the Biennale, the U.S. Pavilion will host an earthen materials library and fabrication workshops. A published catalog will extend the exhibition beyond Venice.
Source: news.miami.edu
