The 2025 US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale asks visitors to gather round

What comes to mind when you think of a typical American porch? White columns? Haint blue ceilings? Perhaps a pair of rocking chairs and chilled glasses of sweet tea?

But what about a public park? Or a Native American roundhouse? Or even a New York City dining shed?

These are some of the ways architects and designers are rethinking these familiar structures for the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025.

The exhibition, ‘PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity’, opens to the public on Saturday 10 May and was organised by an Arkansas-based team comprising the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas alongside DesignConnects and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Porches, according to the pavilion’s co-comissioners, provided the perfect physical and metaphorical structures to not only address the biennale’s main theme, 'Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective’, but also to create a gathering place for engagement, edification, relaxation and play. It’s a place, per co-commissioner Peter MacKeith of the Fay Jones School of Architecture, ‘where we invite each other to come and sit with us for a while’.

‘It's not architecture as an object,’ he adds. ‘It's architecture as experience and as activity.’

And there’s plenty to experience at ‘PORCH’, beginning with the historic US pavilion itself. A design team consisting of Fayetteville, Arkansas-based Marlon Blackwell Architects, industrial designer Stephen Burks, and landscape firms D.I.R.T. Studio and Ten x Ten, have wrapped the 1930 Palladian-style brick building with a gigantic mass timber veranda, complete with a deck, a conversation pit, outdoor furniture and even a zig-zagging ceiling painted in an electric blue, a riff on traditional Southern verandas.

This welcoming structure will be hosting a variety of performances and events in partnership with the Crystal Bridges Museum. ‘Our team is very enthusiastic and invigorated about how you create individual moments on a porch – a moment of solitude or communal moments,’ says the museum’s executive director, Rod Bigelow.

It will also be a moment of fun and celebration within the hustle and bustle of the larger biennale, the organisers say. ‘We’re bringing Ozarks hospitality to the world stage,’ says DesignConnects’ Susan Chin.

‘This is a really timely concept, and I think that is what has been truly appreciated,’ she adds. ‘And also being focused on Arkansas, I think that there's a sensitivity to lots of different perspectives.’

Inside, visitors encounter projects from 54 different participants. The co-comissioners wanted to steer clear of esoteric jargon, speculative projects and screens, so asked that participants create ‘porch windows’ based on real-life work.

‘It’s been very clear to me for more than a decade that the primary and ultimate audience of people coming to the architecture biennale are not you and I – they're school children,’ insists MacKeith. Therefore, they asked the participants, narrowed down from nearly 400 submissions, to keep their contributions as tangible as possible.

Studio James Carpenter in collaboration with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, for example, contributed a translucent blue model of the entryway they’ve designed for the Gateway Arch museum in St Louis, Missouri. New York firm WXY, in collaboration with the city’s department of transportation, submitted a kit of parts to transform the city’s deteriorating Covid-era dining sheds into sturdy, more accessible structures. Other ‘windows’ are like shadowboxes and are filled with photographs, models or, in one case, a forest of tiny evergreen trees.

‘It's like a box of chocolates and people will encounter 54 flavours,’ says MacKeith.

The pavilion, which relies, in part, on funding from the US Department of State, arrives at a moment of political division and uncertainty. But the co-comissioners see the timing as an opportune one.

‘I think this project works very well within the context of bringing people together,’ says Bigelow. ‘And I think more than anything, that's what we need to do now, is to get proximate to each other, listen, and discuss. I think the porch is the perfect concept to do that.’

‘PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity' is on view at Giardini della Biennale in Venice, Italy through 23 November 2025. Visit porchusavenice2025.org for visitor information and more.