Germane Barnes will curate the United States Pavilion at the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale. The U.S. Department of State announced today that it has selected the University of Miami School of Architecture to commission, organize, and curate the exhibition, titled Earth Craft, with Germane as lead curator and the historian Vyta Pivo as curator.
Earth Craft follows brick, rammed earth, adobe, and concrete masonry from the ground to the finished building, and it credits the brickmakers, masons, and earth builders who turned local soil into the country’s houses, schools, and public buildings. Its range runs from the adobe communities of the Southwest and the earthen landscapes of Indigenous North America to Monticello, frontier military brickworks, plantation kilns, and industrial brick towns like Haverstraw, New York, and Tuskegee, Alabama. The exhibition argues that America’s lasting contribution to architecture is the people who made it, not the icons they built.
“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,” says Germane. “Earth Craft represents the United States through its makers and not through its icons.”
Germane grew up in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood and is now an associate professor at the University of Miami, where he directs the Master of Architecture program, and the founding principal of Studio Barnes. Sixtysix interviewed him in Issue 13 about Columnar Disorder, his solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago, and about a field he said has never been kind to people of color, one he plans to change from the classroom. His installation Griot was shown in the Arsenale at the 2023 Biennale curated by Lesley Lokko.
Vyta, an assistant professor of architectural history and theory at the school, studies construction labor and the life cycles of building materials. “The exhibition will honor the brick masons, workers, and tradespeople whose labor built this country and rarely gets credited for it,” she says. “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.”
The featured designers are Germane, Nader Tehrani of NADAAA, Carie Penabad and Adib Cúre of Cure + Penabad, Rodolphe el-Khoury, the school’s dean and principal of RAD-Lab, Leah Wulfman, and the landscape and urban design practice Merritt Chase. Maxwell Jarosz will work with University of Miami students on an installation in the pavilion’s courtyard. During the Biennale, which runs May 8 to November 21, 2027 under curators Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, the pavilion will hold an earthen materials library and fabrication workshops.
