Finalists Announced for the U.S. Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia Following Open Call

Feb 3, 2025

Selected Projects from Across America Reflect the U.S. Pavilion’s Theme, PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity, and Complement the Biennale Architettura 2025’s Theme, Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective.

Interview requests can be coordinated through jessica@novitapr.org.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Today, the Organizers of the U.S. Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia announce the selection of 52 projects to feature in PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity. Chosen through a nationwide Open Call for Participation, the finalists were evaluated by a distinguished jury, including Austen Barron Bailly, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary; Julie Bargmann, D.I.R.T. studio; Marlon Blackwell, Marlon Blackwell Architects; Stephen Burks, Stephen Burks Man Made; Josephine Minutillo, Architectural Record; Justin Garrett Moore, Mellon Foundation; and Jack Murphy, The Architect’s Newspaper.

The selected finalists reflect diverse contributions from architects, landscape architects, designers, artists, nonprofits, and individuals from across the U.S. and its territories. Each project showcases built work from the 21st century that demonstrates architectural and design merits while expressing the U.S. Pavilion’s PORCH theme, as well as that of the Biennale Architettura 2025, Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective. The participants will receive a stipend to further develop their proposals into exhibition-ready formats.

The 52 winning finalists are:

Architecture for Public Benefit
Atelier Mey
atelierjones
Auburn University’s Rural Studio
brg3s architects
Brightmoor Maker Space
Brooks + Scarpa
Chibbernoonie
CLB Architects
Coles House Project
CU Denver
Cunningham | Quill Architects
Danielle Hatch
David Baker Architects
de Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop
Detroit Collaborative Design Center, University of Detroit Mercy
DUST
El Dorado
Eskew+Dumez+Ripple
EYRC Architects
Figure
Fred Carl Jr. Small Town Center at Mississippi State University
Friends Of Residential Treasures: Los Angeles
Gulf Coast Community Design Studio
Jerome Haferd Studio
Johnson Fain
Jones Studio
Katherine Hogan Architects
Lake|Flato
Letter J
Mark Cavagnero Associates
Marpillero Pollak Architects
Matthew Mazzotta
modus studio
Office of: Office
Olson Kundig
Pei Cobb Freed/Moody Nolan/Hood Design Studio
Peoples Architecture Office and Plugin House
RDG Planning & Design
Richard Kennedy Architects
Ross Barney Architects
Smith Gee Studio
SO – IL
Somewhere Studio
Studio Cadena
Studio Gang
Studio James Carpenter / JCDA Inc.
The Miller Hull Partnership
VJAA
Weiss/Manfredi
WXY Studio
Young + Wales Architects

“The collaborative jury process affirmed the power of the American porch as a design concept that resonates with all types of communities and fosters positive connections,” said Austen Barron Bailly, Chief Curator, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary. “The selected porches’ aesthetic allure and civic vision reveal the spirit of invitation essential for the people who activate these spaces, and they promise to create a lively and transporting exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion.”

“The 2025 U.S. Pavilion will showcase the power of architecture to shape and reflect our American communities, ecologies, cultures, and stories,” said Justin Garrett Moore, Program Director, Humanities in Place, Mellon Foundation. “The selected participants offer creative and generous solutions to the challenges for how we make and share space, engage in civic life, and build and maintain more equitable and beautiful places for all.”

“I was most impressed by the range and diversity of the different interpretations of PORCH and its role as a public place of gathering, community, and civic purpose,” said Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, Founding Partner and Design Director, Marlon Blackwell Architects, and E. Fay Jones Distinguished Professor at the University of Arkansas. “The submissions ranged in scale from two people to 200 people and everything in between. As a jury, we sought to reflect this range in the quality and different scales of work through the selections we made from around the country.”

Organized by the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, in partnership with DesignConnects and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity focuses on the representation of the U.S. through the contemporary manifestation of the porch in American architecture. As a quintessentially constructed place, the PORCH is at once social and environmental, tectonic and performative, hospitable and intimate, generous and democratic. The U.S. Pavilion’s theme highlights an enduring American architectural typology that persists across scales, geographies, communities, construction methods, and histories.

To complement the 52 finalists announced today, the Organizers will also showcase a “Beyond the PORCH” collection featuring ideas, concepts, and expressions of the porch that have influenced cultural and societal norms, shaped philosophical thinking, or sparked architectural movements. This includes iconic examples such as Arcosanti, entry ports, and urban archetypes like stoops, highlighting the porch’s enduring role as both a physical and symbolic space in the built environment.

In partnership with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, a call for unbuilt and speculative work emerging from U.S. schools of architecture will be issued in mid-March, for eventual submissions and presentations in November, as a closing finale for the U.S. Pavilion’s reflections on the PORCH.

PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity will debut publicly on May 10, 2025, at the opening of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition.

ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS

The Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, University of Arkansas advances design excellence through a multi-disciplinary, place-responsive design education, in service to Arkansas, the nation and the world. Within the curricular context of an excellent professional design education, the school provides a vital design culture and educational environment grounded in critical design thinking, multidisciplinary collaborations and civic engagement. Founded in 1946 with degree programs in architecture, and named in honor of the Arkansas-born Fay Jones, the 1990 AIA Gold Medalist, today the school is constituted by nationally recognized degree programs in architecture, interior architecture and landscape architecture, as well as the award-winning University of Arkansas Community Design Center, the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation and Garvan Woodland Gardens, a botanical garden in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Across the school, students focus on issues of community with a global awareness, designing for the lives of real people and towards a better environment, through a responsible emphasis on the materiality and experience of design, preparing students to work productively across geographies, societies and cultures.

As Arkansas’s flagship institution, the University of Arkansas provides an internationally competitive education in more than 200 academic programs. Founded in 1871, the U of A contributes more than $3 billion to Arkansas’s economy through the teaching of new knowledge and skills, entrepreneurship and job development, discovery through research and creative activity while also providing training for professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the U of A among the few U.S. colleges and universities with the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the U of A among the top public universities in the nation. See how the U of A works to build a better world at Arkansas Research and Economic Development News.

DesignConnects’s mission is to create and nurture places and organizations using art and design, collaboration and civic leadership. DesignConnects provides services in design, nonprofit management, community engagement, advocacy, policy making, government operations and public/private partnerships, associated with culture, architecture, preservation, landscape and urban design and planning. Recent projects include: Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden; NY Chinese Scholar’s Garden renovation; and Portland, Oregon’s Back to Square One: Rethinking O’Bryant Square.

The mission of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is to welcome all to celebrate the American spirit in a setting that unites the power of art with the beauty of nature. Since opening in 2011, the museum has welcomed more than 13 million visitors across its spaces, with no cost for admission. Crystal Bridges was founded in 2005 as a non-profit charitable organization by arts patron and philanthropist, Alice Walton. The collection spans five centuries of American masterworks from early American to current day and is enhanced by temporary exhibitions. The museum is nestled on 120 acres of Ozark landscape and was designed by world-renowned architect Safdie Architects. A rare Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house was preserved and relocated to the museum grounds in 2015. Home of the prestigious Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art and Tyson Scholars of American Art Program, Crystal Bridges offers public programs including lectures, performances, classes, and teacher development opportunities. Some 478,375 school children have participated in the Willard and Pat Walker School Visit program, which provides educational experiences for school groups at no cost to the schools. Additional museum amenities include a restaurant, gift store, library, and five miles of art and walking trails. In February 2020, the museum opened the Momentary in Downtown Bentonville (507 SE E Street), conceived as a platform for the art, food, and music of our time. In 2026, Crystal Bridges will complete a 114,000 square foot expansion that will allow the museum to expand access for all. For more information, visit CrystalBridges.org. The museum is located at 600 Museum Way, Bentonville, Arkansas 72712.

ABOUT THE JURY

Austen Barron Bailly

Chief Curator, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary

Austen Barron Bailly is Chief Curator for Crystal Bridges and the Momentary, leading the Curatorial and Art Management Division. Since 2019, Bailly has provided strategic vision and executive leadership for all art functions of the museum including collection development and care, exhibitions and installations, programs, publications, and partnerships. Bailly’s curatorial career spans more than 25 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Peabody Essex Museum. She has curated and authored many American art exhibitions and publications including the award-winning American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood and Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle.

Julie Bargmann

Founder and Principal, D.I.R.T. studio

Julie Bargmann is internationally recognized as an innovator in the design and building of regenerative landscapes. She founded D.I.R.T. studio in 1992 to research, design, and build projects with passion and rigor. Born and raised in New Jersey, Julie is forthright and unafraid to provoke debate in order to tease out what matters most about places, especially post-industrial landscapes that are often erased. Her background in sculpture influences an intuitive to carefully unearth site histories, imagining renewed sites of cultural and ecological production. Teaching at the University of Virginia for 30 years, Julie has educated a generation of future heroes of derelict and fallow places. Earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Carnegie-Mellon University, and a Master in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, she has received the American Academy Rome Prize fellowship, the National Design Award by Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Center of Cultural Landscapes’ Oberlander International Prize in Landscape Architecture and an honor award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Julie has served on national and international design juries galore.

Marlon Blackwell

Founding Partner and Design Director, Marlon Blackwell Architects

Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, is an internationally recognized architect who has created iconic and award-winning designs across typologies, scales, and budgets for over 30 years. Honored with the 2020 Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects for his enduring impact on the theory and practice of architecture, he is widely regarded as one of the most significant and original voices in design. He’s a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2023 inductee of the American Academy of Arts and Science. Equally respected as an educator, he has taught and lectured at universities nationwide throughout his career and is the E. Fay Jones Distinguished Professor at the University of Arkansas. Work produced in his professional office, Marlon Blackwell Architects, has received recognition with significant publication and more than 180 design awards including the 2016 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture.

Stephen Burks

Founder and Principal, Stephen Burks Man Made

Chicago native Stephen Burks is an industrial designer and artist whose innovative approach to making synthesizes craft, community, and industry. He has collaborated with artisans and craftspeople in over 10 countries on six continents. His socially engaged practice seeks to broaden the limits of design consciousness by challenging who benefits from and participates in contemporary making. He has had solo exhibitions and led curatorial projects at the Studio Museum in Harlem (Stephen Burks Man Made, 2011), the Museum of Art & Design (Stephen Burks, Are You a Hybrid, 2011), and the High Museum of Art (Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place, 2022). In the fall of 2023, Stephen Burks: Spirit Houses opened at Volume Gallery in Chicago and Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place (Nov. 18–Apr. 14, 2024) traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art where Stephen, already the first and only African American to win the National Design Award in product design, became the first African American to receive the Collab Design Excellence Award.

Josephine Minutillo

Editor in Chief, Architectural Record

Josephine Minutillo is editor in chief of Architectural Record. Minutillo has a long history with Record, first contributing to the magazine in 2001, the same year she began practicing architecture in New York City. Her efforts in architecture during the early 2000s were focused on affordable housing and, later, preservation. Simultaneously, she wrote for numerous international architecture, art, and design publications, and was a contributing editor to Architectural Digest. Over the last two decades, and in a variety of roles, Minutillo has covered the gamut of topics for Record, from exhibition reviews and building technology articles to feature project stories – traveling the world to report on new buildings. She has been a member of the organizing committee of the Monterey Design Conference since 2016, and is a trustee of the National Building Museum. She has served as a guest critic at architecture schools across the country, including Washington University in St. Louis, from which she received her Master of Architecture degree. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University.

Justin Garrett Moore

Program Director for Humanities in Place, Mellon Foundation

Justin Garrett Moore is the program director for the Humanities in Place program at the Mellon Foundation. His transdisciplinary work focuses on advancing equity, inclusion, and social justice through place-based initiatives and programs, built environments, cultural heritage projects, and commemorative spaces and landscapes. He has extensive experience in architecture, planning, and design – from urban systems, policies, and building projects to grassroots and community-focused planning, design, preservation, public realm, and arts initiatives. In 2021, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture and was named to the United States Commission of Fine Arts by President Biden.

Jack Murphy

Executive Editor, The Architect’s Newspaper

Jack Murphy is executive editor of The Architect’s Newspaper and AN Interior. Before joining AN, he was editor of Cite and an adjunct professor at the University of Houston. Murphy was Co-Editor-in-Chief of PLAT 8.0 Simplicity and the assistant editor for Totalization, edited by Troy Schaum and published by Park Books in 2019. He received an Honorable Mention for the Pierre Vago Journalism Award 2020 from the International Committee of Architecture Critics. He earned degrees in architecture from MIT and Rice University. Prior to his work as an editor, Murphy contributed to award-winning architecture practices in Boston, Austin, Houston, and New York.

ABOUT LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

Established in 1895, La Biennale di Venezia is considered the most prestigious institution, with its International Art and Architecture Exhibitions. Introducing hundreds of thousands of visitors to exciting new architecture every two years, the 19th International Biennale Architettura of La Biennale di Venezia (May 10 – November 23, 2025) will be curated by architect and engineer Carlo Ratti. Information about the Biennale Architettura 2025 is available at: labiennale.org/en/architecture/2025.

The United States Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale, a building in the neoclassical style, opened on May 4, 1930. Since 1986, The U.S. Pavilion has been owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and managed by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, which works closely with the U.S. Department of State and exhibition curators to install and maintain all official U.S. exhibitions presented in the Pavilion. Every two years, museum curators from across the U.S. detail their visions for the U.S. Pavilion in proposals that are reviewed by the National Endowment of the Arts Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, a group comprising curators, museum directors and artists who then submit their recommendations to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Past exhibitions can be viewed on the Peggy Guggenheim Collection website at: https://www.guggenheim-venice.it/en/art/us-pavilion/.

The United States Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs supports and manages official U.S. participation at the International Art and Architecture Exhibitions of La Biennale di Venezia. The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) builds relationships between the people of the United States and the people of other countries through academic, cultural, sports, professional and private exchanges, as well as public-private partnerships and mentoring programs.

These exchange programs improve foreign relations and strengthen the national security of the United States, support U.S. international leadership and provide a broad range of domestic benefits by helping break down barriers that often divide us. ECA programs build connections that engage and empower people and motivate them to become leaders and thinkers, to develop new skills and to find connections that will create positive change in their communities. For more information, please visit: eca.state.gov.

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