UVA Faculty Emerita and Alums co-lead and curate the U.S. Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale

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The University of Virginia's former faculty and alumni will co-lead and co-curate the exhibition of the United States Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale, titled PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity. 

In an article for The Architect's Newspaper, Daniel Jonas Roche, elaborates on the 2025 theme describing, "In all its literary, political, and cultural dimensions, the porch will take center stage at the U.S. Pavilion in the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale... The show which opens May 24, 2025, will focus on 'the porch as a central element in American architecture, highlighting its social, environmental, and democratic significance.'  From August Wilson’s Pittsburgh, Harper Lee’s Alabama, Spike Lee’s New York, to John Steinbeck’s California; artists lean on porches as literary devices for telling complex stories about civic life, and as liminal spaces that divide our public and private worlds…”

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The 2025 U.S. Pavilion will be commissioned and curated by three acclaimed leaders in architecture and design, including a UVA alumnus: Peter MacKeith (UVA COL ’81), dean of the Fay Jones School at University of Arkansas; Susan Chin, founder of DesignConnects; and Rod Bigelow, executive director of Crystal Bridges Museum. The interdisciplinary trio was selected by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs.

The UVA School of Architecture will also be represented by professor emerita Julie Bargmann’s D.I.R.T. studio and Ten x Ten Landscape Architecture and Urbanism, co-founded by alumnus Ross Altheimer (MArch + MLA ’04).

Both design practices join the curatorial team, alongside Marlon Blackwell Architects and Stephen Burks Man Made.  Timothy Hursley will photograph the exhibition and its accompanying activities.

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UVA faculty and alumni selected to co-lead and co-curate PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity. In addition to Peter MacKeith (COL '81), professor emerita Julie Bargmann (above, photo © Barrett Doherty for The Cultural Landscape Foundation) and TEN x TEN Landscape Architecture and Urbanism (above, photos courtesy TEN x TEN), co-founded by alumnus Ross Altheimer (MArch + MLA ’04) and Maura Rockcastle), are part of the curatorial design team.

PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity aims to spotlight the character, value, and contemporary purpose of the place of the porch through the exhibition of projects and practices across the nation. The curatorial design team will create a new, temporary porch, amenities, and surrounding landscape for the U.S. Pavilion, becoming site of programmed events and activities throughout the run of the Biennale. These include a wide range of programs from musical performances, readings, farm-to-table meals, children’s education, social exchanges, craft demonstrations, and educational dialogues.

Inside the pavilion, an exhibition will feature some 50 curated projects and practices drawn from across the United States, selected from an open call for projects, all highlighting the ongoing importance of the porch typology in American civic life.

“This exhibition has a very personal dimension for me, but the choice to center porches was arrived at by consensus,” Peter MacKeith told AN. “Myself, Susan Chin, Marlon Blackwell, Rod Bigelow, Julie Bargmann, Maura Rockcastle, Stephen Burks, and Tim Hursley have had lengthy discussions over a long period of time about this theme, and its potential for conveying a broad story about American architecture, and culture.”

The theme follows chief curator Carlo Ratti’s overall vision for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition. Last May, Ratti named the biennale Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. describing its focus on the city of Venice as a testbed for combating climate change. For the main international exhibition among the national pavilions, he encouraged participating countries to address the common prompt of "One place, one solution”, to showcase how "local ingenuity… can only be tackled in a cooperative manner, reflecting a multiplicity of approaches". In part, the larger theme addresses collective intelligence, an idea that the U.S. curatorial team seeks to draw out through the commission.

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Porches for us are ways of connecting all these dots, 
in musical terms, photographic terms, artistic terms, 
craft traditions like quilts and basket-making, in cuisine, 
and more generally in architectural terms.

MacKeith elaborated. “I think the central ambition has ultimately been how to best represent not just American architecture, but this sense that American architecture is a social, environmental, and educational construct that incorporates people from many walks of life, and of course, from all over the world.”

Further details about spatial interventions inside and outside the U.S Pavilion will be unveiled throughout this fall.

The 19th International Architecture Exhibition will be held in Venice from May 24 to November 23, 2025.