The US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is a Palladian-style building, designed in 1930 by renowned architects, William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich.
The US Pavilion enjoys a prominent position in the Castello Gardens, which house many of the national pavilions of the Venice Biennale. In 1986, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, purchased the US Pavilion from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with funds provided by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Advisory Board. Since 1986, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection has worked with the United States Information Agency (USIA), the Fund for Artists at International Festivals and Exhibitions, and currently with the Bureau for Education and Cultural Affairs of the US Department of State in the organization of the visual arts and architecture exhibitions at the US Pavilion. Prior to 2002 the architecture exhibitions were organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
18th International Architecture Exhibition
Venice, 20.05–26.11.2023
Everlasting Plastics
Organized by Spaces, Cleveland, directed by Tizziana Baldenebro, who co-curated the exhibition with Lauren Leving, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, the show examines the urgency to reframe our approach to the overabundance of plastic detritus thanks to five artists/designers—Xavi Aguirre (Assistant Professor of Architecture, MIT), Simon Anton (Detroit-based designer), Ang Li (Assistant Professor, Northeastern University School of Architecture), Norman Teague (Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Chicago, School of Design), and Lauren Yeager (Cleveland-based sculptor)—who have specifically engaged with the re-use of the material. The exhibition considers the ways plastic shapes and erodes contemporary ecologies, economies, and the built environment, highlighting our unseen dependency, demonstrating how plasticity has created expectations for the behaviors of other materials, and pointing to the material long-term and indelible impact on our futures.