CORAL GABLES, FLA.- The University of Miami School of Architecture (U-SoA) 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 Barnes, Associate 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 Germane Barnes.
Vyta Pivo, Curator & Historian of Earth Craft and Assistant Professor at the University of Miami 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."
Germane Barnes is one of the U.S. Pavilion exhibition's featured designers alongside Nader Tehrani of NADAAA; Carie Penabad and Adib Cre 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 the 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 Rodolphe el-Khoury, Dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture.
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.
Germane Barnes is a licensed architect, designer, and founding principal of Studio Barnes, a research and design practice that investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining architecture's social and political agency through historical research and design speculation. His work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, in MoMA's Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, and at the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial. His project Griot, presented at the 2023 Biennale Architettura, The Laboratory of the Future, was widely published. He is a past winner of the Architectural League, United States Artists, Harvard Wheelwright, J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller, and American Academy in Rome Prizes, and was selected for the inaugural cohort of the Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, created by Theaster Gates and sponsored by Prada. His work is held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, LACMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and has been featured in The New York Times.
Vyta Pivo is a scholar of the intersecting histories of material lifecycles, construction labor, ordinary landscapes, and climate change. Her forthcoming book, Cast in Concrete: How the US Built Its Empire, traces the history of the U.S. cement and concrete industries and their global and transplanetary expansion. Pivo's research has been published in various academic and public-facing outlets, including Architectural Theory Review, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Architectural Education, PLATFORM, Psyche/Aeon, and others. Her research has received support from the National Science Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, Michigan Society of Fellows, and the MacDowell Fellowship, among others. Pivo works as an Assistant Professor of architectural history and theory at the University of Miami School of Architecture.
