Germane Barnes Will Curate the U.S. Pavilion at the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale

On Friday, the U.S. State Department announced that the University of Miami School of Architecture has been selected to commission the U.S. Pavilion at the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale. With highly awarded architect and designer Germane Barnes as lead curator, the exhibition will be titled “Earth Craft” and explore the relationship between American architecture, its makers, and materials (from brick to rammed earth, adobe, and concrete masonry).

Originally, Barnes intended to apply for the 2025 Architecture Biennale. “I have a university that has fully supported me from the beginning,” 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, tells Surface. “Whenever my brain comes up with something, they say, ‘we will figure out a way to support you.’” Due to preparation for a university accreditation visit, he tabled the idea which had begun to take shape as he worked on his 2024 Art Institute of Chicago exhibition.

When he saw the announcement (on Instagram) this summer that the State Department was taking applications for the 2027 U.S. Pavilion, he knew he needed to apply. He shared his thoughts with Rodolphe el-Khoury, Dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture, and then began to put together the proposal. “I firmly believe that architecture is a people-first profession, not a building-first profession,” he says. “That’s always been tied to the ideologies of Studio Barnes and the way that we approach architecture, ritual, and identity. It seemed to tie in serendipitously with the theme, ‘Do Architecture.’”

Rather than address one material and its relationship to the landscape (which has happened in pavilions past), Barnes wanted to communicate stories of the land from across the country. “I thought earthen materials would be an incredible way to talk about the Southwest U.S., the Northeast U.S., the Central Plains, and the West Coast,” he says, “and then I can bring in all these issues of identity, of politics, of people, through the physical manifestation of space—through the way that every soil behaves differently across these communities.”

People are the path into materiality. “I think we focus too much on who the architect was, but we don’t know where the material came from or who built something,” Barnes says. “So much of this will be about the craft of humanity across the country, because the way that they built adobe structures in the Southwest U.S. is not the same way that people in Chicago, where I’m from, made red brick, and it’s not like the limestone that was quarried from Indianapolis. We’re doing this all.”

This parallels Barnes’ previous participation, in the 2023 biennale’s The Laboratory of the Future, where he presented Griot, which positioned that architecture is the keeper of stories. “A lot of these ideas have been tangential trajectories of my practice—of understanding not only how architecture keeps stories, but how it presents them, and what the artifacts are,” he says. “If we treat people as the most important component, and we treat the final output as the artifact, then how do we deal with issues of excavation, of labor, of ideation, speculation, fabrication, and memory?” He observes that all of this becomes one singular narrative.

Barnes will work alongside curator, historian, and Assistant Professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture, Vyta Pivo. The pavilion will feature work by Merritt Chase, Cure + Penabad, Rodolphe el-Khoury (RAD-Lab), Nader Tehrani (NADAAA), and Leah Wulfman, as well as Studio Barnes. Additionally, Maxwell Jarosz will work with University of Miami students on a courtyard installation. “The curatorial approach is one where it’s one story—one story throughout the entire structure, and we’ll have a bunch of actors that play a role and tell you this very important story,” he says.

“I think Vyta’s approach to the historical aspect and my approach to the more cultural anthropological portion of it, coupled together, create the narrative that we’re pushing forward,” Barnes says, “for understanding that people are the craft, and the artifacts are the buildings.” In the pavilion, Barnes foresees all of the participants engaged in a timeline, and in dialogue from room to room. He adds, “my curatorial approach is not one that speaks to all the positives of earth materials in the U.S., but it gives an accurate representation of what happened to landscapes that were excavated and then what remained.”

“I’m a firm believer that when you get the opportunity to represent your country on a very global scale, that this is not necessarily about exceptionalism,” he adds. “It could also be an opportunity to self-critique. I want people to understand that we can critique ourselves, and we should critique ourselves, because no nation is perfect. But I also want them to be able to celebrate the people and the hands that have really built this nation. To be able to tell that story on a global platform is incredibly important because it gives other countries the opportunity to understand the true fabric of the United States, and how it got to where it is. It becomes a learning tool. Ultimately, I think all exhibitions should be an opportunity for learning.”

Barnes notes that the U.S. Pavilion is itself composed of brick. “I’ve had some amazing opportunities to present architecture to a lot of people,” he concludes. “I have a particular narrative in what I like to present, and sometimes that blurs the line between visual art, architecture, and archaeology. I think what better way to blend those in than in the U.S. Pavilion, which itself is already an earthen construction. So, we get to tie that history in, as well.”