Although the 2025 structure extravaganza at La Biennale di Venezia closed just some days in the past, the group already has information about its subsequent model: Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, of Beginner Structure Studio, will curate the Biennale Architettura 2027. It is going to be the twentieth staging of the structure exhibition, which formally started in 1980.
This marks the primary time Chinese language curators have directed the exhibition, and solely the second time a duo has led the best way: Pritzker Prize–winners Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects curated the occasion in 2018 with the theme FREESPACE. Their model included the work of Beginner Structure Studio, as did the showings in 2016 (curated by Alejandro Aravena), and 2010 (curated by Kazuyo Sejima).
Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu based their structure follow, Beginner Structure Studio, in Hangzhou, China, in 1997. When the work was awarded the Pritzker Structure Prize in 2012, it solely went to Wang Shu.
The couple’s buildings have been realized in China, the place they elevate their voice to counteract the lightning-fast pace of improvement. As a substitute, they concentrate on “current supplies, the traces of extraordinary folks’s day by day lives, the vitality of the unnamed, widespread constructions, and the method and craftsmanship of artisans on the development web site,” they usually “advocate for a radical experimentation that’s rooted within the native context and vernacular custom,” in accordance with an outline from La Biennale di Venezia. It continues: “The studio merges reminiscence with innovation by combining recycled outdated constructing supplies with fashionable engineering methods, providing a strong response to the social actuality of city improvement that entails large-scale demolition and building. They’ve persistently upheld a broad world perspective, expressing by way of their works an modern imaginative and prescient that transcends the cultural battle between metropolis and countryside, and the dichotomy of the factitious and the pure.”
In a press release in regards to the curatorship, the couple mentioned: “We’re very honored to be the Creative Administrators of the Structure Division and Curators of the twentieth Worldwide Structure Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2027 by the invitation from President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. And due to the Board of Administrators of La Biennale di Venezia for the belief in us. We are going to attempt our greatest to fulfill this huge problem. Within the present world, the fast and a number of modifications in structure are extra a phenomenon of look, the results of extreme conceptualization or marked commercialization. Conceptual experiments pushed to extremes are sometimes divorced from actuality and over-commercialization tends to be merely in style and short-lived. This phenomenon modifications quickly as a way to survive, breaking away from the reference to the true place. It should result in the loss of life of structure. Subsequently, structure turns into a sort of delusional expression in regards to the future.”
Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu conclude: “Because of this, within the face of the true disaster of this world, insisting on a easy and true idea and methodology of structure has a particular worth. We are going to attempt to current this worth and exploration with the best sincerity for a greater actuality and future.”
Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu’s official theme and positioning assertion haven’t but been launched.
Like nationwide elections that ping pong between opposing events, the sentiment on this preliminary quote reads as a departure from Carlo Ratti’s curatorship of the Biennale Architettura 2027, which, beneath the theme of Intelligens, gathered quite a few techno-optimist efforts in a jam-packed setting.
The Biennale Architettura 2027 will run from Saturday, Could 8, although Sunday, November 21, 2027, with its pre-opening vernissage on Could 6 and seven. See you there?
