UA’s Fay Jones School, Crystal Bridges Museum, and DesignConnects to Represent U.S. at Venice Architecture Biennale

UA’s Fay Jones School, Crystal Bridges Museum, and DesignConnects to Represent U.S. at Venice Architecture Biennale

The University of Arkansas’s Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, along with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and independent consultancy DesignConnects, has been selected to represent the United States at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. This partnership marks a significant milestone for American architecture and design.

Headed by a team of co-commissioners – Peter MacKeith, dean of the Fay Jones School; Susan Chin, principal of DesignConnects; and Rod Bigelow, executive director of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art – the exhibition titled “PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity” will focus on the porch, a quintessential constructed place in American architecture that encompasses both social and environmental dimensions.

The exhibition aims to showcase the diverse facets of the porch typology, exploring its role as a space that is both tectonic and performative, hospitable and intimate, generous and democratic. This comprehensive display will emphasize a variety of voices and perspectives while highlighting crucial global and national issues addressed through architecture and design, with an emphasis on public engagement and civic building for the greater good.

Key members of the curatorial design team include Marlon Blackwell, the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture at the University of Arkansas; industrial designer Stephen Burks; landscape architects Julie Bargmann and Maura Rockcastle. Together, they will create a temporary, large-scale porch structure – the nucleus for diverse programming throughout the biennale – accompanied by an exhibition of around 50 projects that demonstrate the importance of the porch typology in American civic life.

This prestigious representation of the United States at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale not only celebrates American architecture but also highlights the cultural and artistic intersections between the natural and constructed environments.