Germane Barnes. Photo by Benedetto Rebecca.
Vyta Pivo. Photo by Benedetto Rebecca.
On Friday, November 6, the US Department of State announced that they had selected the University of Miami School of Architecture (U-SoA) 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. He will curate the pavilion alongside curator and historian Vyta Pivo.
Germane Barnes is one of the US Pavilion exhibition’s featured designers alongside Nader Tehrani of NADAAA; Carie Penabad and Adib Cúre 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—also a MAS Context contributor—will collaborate with the University of Miami students to develop an exterior courtyard installation.
In 2019, Germane Barnes and Shawhin Roudbari guest edited the Vigilantism issue. A year later, the guest editors lectured about the Architectures of Vigilantism. As part of the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial, MAS Context and Shawhin collaborated with Germane to present the installation Block Party. The same year, Germane and Shawhin lectured as part of our event Architecture’s Social, Ecological, and Political Agency. In 2022, Iker Gil invited Germane to participate in the Concéntrico Festival in Logroño, where he presented his installation Intersect supported by MAS Context. The following year, Iker Gil interviewed him about Griot, his contribution to the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. And earlier this year, Germane Barnes lectured about his work at the MAS Context Reading Room.
Our congratulations to Germane and we look forward to seeing the work presented in Venice.
ABOUT GERMANE BARNES
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.
ABOUT VYTA PIVO
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 US 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.