Project Statement

The US State Department describes the U.S. Pavilion in Venice as the nation’s official representation at the world’s most important architecture exhibition, requesting design proposals for the Architecture Biennale that “showcase the excellence, vitality, and diversity of the arts in the United States” and strengthen cultural diplomacy. In response, PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity created a contemporary porch that embodied hospitality, openness, plurality, and civic generosity while supporting an exhibition of contributions from across the country. The installation needed to function as both architectural intervention and cultural platform, inviting gathering, reflection, and exchange.

This theme first signals itself to the Biennale and the visiting public through the design, construction, and animation of a new ‘front porch’ for the existing historic Pavilion, one that announces the centering concept and then threads throughout the interior of the Pavilion as well. This construction is simultaneously a beacon, a shade structure, a social platform, a weather and climate response, and an open hand to the larger world. The scale and character of the new porch is intended to pull visitors to the Pavilion, engaging them in small and large ways and draw them further into the exhibition galleries of the Pavilion itself.

Planning constraints were significant as the U.S. Pavilion is a historically protected structure, and nothing could anchor to or alter the existing building, requiring all construction to be freestanding and fully removable. Every component had to be fabricated off-site, transported by rail and boat, and installed with minimal on-site modification. This approach to fabrication and construction emphasized lightness, reversibility, and low environmental impact.

The exterior canopy was prefabricated from mass timber in Italy and assembled on site with numbered components. The deck used a prefabricated, modular steel stage system topped with wood on site to create an accessible, elevated surface and incorporated rammed earth blocks made from local soils, providing thermal mass and grounding. Interior exhibition elements were fabricated in Rome and installed without anchoring, relying on a new floating wood floor for stability. Together, these methods created a fully independent architectural system—rooted in craft, designed for disassembly, and responsive to the constraints of a historic site.

Quietly affirming and continuing the design of the exterior, the deck itself continues uninterrupted inside the Pavilion. Using a series of abstracted architectural elements found on porches – columns, windows, shutters, tables – a distinct and memorable exhibition is created that extends and heightens the experience of the porch that begins outside.

An array of ‘Porch Windows’ – interpretations of important porches that address critical, imperative issues of society, culture, and the environment – presents the vitality of contemporary architecture and design across the United States. The transformative potential of the porch is further revealed through ‘Objects of Belonging,’ a collection of handcrafted objects and furniture. Through contemporary expressions of vernacular home furnishings including brooms, swings, quilts, and even a rocking chair, Objects of Belonging amplifies the PORCH as a site of creativity, diversity and liberation.

Also on display are a curated history of the porch, a bookshelf featuring a ‘citizen’s library’ of relevant texts, an installation dedicated to a single book on the porch, and a site-specific piece titled ‘American Canopy’ that abstracts the role of American forests in the construction of porches in the rotunda.

The porch of the U.S. Pavilion illustrates in exhibition and in animated character more than an exercise in nostalgia, or a demonstration of contemporary inventive and ambitious architecture: this American Porch is a collaborative porch, a projective porch, a speculative porch, a place of future-thinking, a place of optimism.