Luis Hernan on the tech-boys, utopian futures, and the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2025 - Biennale Architettura – 19th International Architecture Exhibition 2025 curated by Carlo Ratti Giardini, Arsenale and other sites throughout Venice 10 May to 23 November 2025 - Volume 29 Issue 2-4

The Knoxville International Energy Exposition, held in 1982, was the first world’s fair in which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) participated. Shortly after the rapprochement between the PRC and the United States, the erection of the Chinese Pavilion in Knoxville overlapped a ‘honeymoon’ period of the two nations, marked by growing political and architectural exchange after decades of isolation. This article argues that the Chinese Pavilion at the Knoxville fair materialises China’s enthusiastic yet discreet interaction with the US during moments of diplomatic sensitivity, economic uncertainty, and shifting ideological positions in the 1970s and 1980s. Constructed at the height of the Cold War, the pavilion symbolised the PRC’s diplomatic success in rebuilding its relations with the Western Bloc, while the realisation of the pavilion was challenged by sensitive political issues, China’s limited budget, and a lack of exhibits. Under China’s new Reform and Opening-Up policy, the building also marked a turning point in pavilion design for the country in international events, with a significant shift of focus from overt ideological promotion to a self-orientalised cultural display through the pavilion’s design process. It illuminates a key moment in the architectural history of modern China when the nation’s growing self-awareness of its global image prompted its officials, exhibition planners, and architects to reconsider the relationship between pavilion design and the architectural profession.

This article proposes alternatives for the conceptual scaffolding needed to ecologise architecture production studies. It engages Sérgio Ferro’s seminal work O canteiro e o desenho and expands Ferro’s critique of design’s inherent role in the exploitation the building site by introducing the concept of negative accumulation, the recognition of combined human and nonhuman labour grounding value extraction, and the entropic potential of building technologies. Drawing from Denise Ferreira da Silva’s theory of labour in connection to the transduction of energy, the article reintroduces forms of labour that fall outside the juridical definition of wage work into the calculus of value, and amends Ferro’s original claim for the liberation of construction work with the notions of reparation and restitution. Additionally, it presents the rupture of ecological relations as the grounding action in turning humans and nonhumans into propertied property, as explored by Ferreira da Silva and Kathryn Yusoff. By recognising the combined human and nonhuman labour resulting from mutually exacerbating movements of extraction, the article presents the possibility that design also reassembles previously disaggregated nonhuman labour towards the production of architecture. Finally, it draws on Bernard Stiegler’s work to focus on the entropic tendencies of technics as expressed in the building site and on how the configuration of these sites impacts workers’ style of energy expenditure and individuation. It proposes that the economy of resources in construction should also be understood as an economy of gestures and an economy of energy, and that this perspective can be extended to other sites of production.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.Arriving there is what you're destined for.But don't hurry the journey at all.Better if it lasts for years, so you're old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you've gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.Without her you wouldn't have set out.

This paper is a case study that reflects on the intricate process of crafting a specialised private training pool, located in Highgate, London. The client is KP, a woman in her 50s who developed Multiple Sclerosis (MS) more than a decade ago. In her everyday life, KP uses a wheelchair and relies on continuous support. She can navigate semi-independently without the wheelchair by using her arms and upper body to push and pull herself through space with sufficient support such as from (door) frames, furniture, handlebars, etc. She has one side that is more dependent with one foot less responsive. When overcoming thresholds, for example, she therefore often requires additional help lifting. Generally, independent movement through space is slow, and her navigation and speed are inherently determined by the availability of surrounding support. This paper explores the multifaceted journey of delivering a training pool that embraces a holistic approach and encompasses the physical, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions of the client’s needs. To reflect on these important issues, it draws on an interview between the client and author, who is also the architect.

Architects, architectural regulation, and architectural scholarship are increasingly acknowledging the differing spatialities of different bodies, and the effects of different bodies on the making and inhabitation of the built environment.Disability scholars like Eli Clare, Margaret Price, and Sami Schalk use the term 'bodymind' to emphasise the interdependence of embodiment, on one hand, and ways of thinking and knowing, on the other.Diverse bodily knowledges of the world help us to imagine it differently.For architects, imagining with Deafness, Disability and Neurodiversity in mind not only has potential to make the world more accessible, but can open up fresh creative opportunities for design.This special issue of arq is curated by Stylianos Giamarelos and Nina Vollenbrker.In their opening 'perspective ' (pp.224-233), Giamarelos and Vollenbrker introduce Lennard Davis's argument that disability 'is not a minor issue that relates to a relatively small number of unfortunate people' but rather 'is part of a historically constructed discourse, an ideology of thinking about the body under certain historical circumstances' .As a result, Davis shows, architects should not only consider 'the person using the wheelchair or the Deaf person but the set of social, historical, economic, and cultural processes that regulate and control the way we think about and think through the body' .As Giamarelos and Vollenbrker write, the papers gathered in this arq understand that architectural processes can also be seen as central producers of disability.'In other words, disability is a social, historical, economic and cultural construction, and also very much a spatial construction.' The authors whose work is collected below grapple with the built environment's long-standing entwinement with ableism.Addressing the partialities of architectural cultures and histories, they examine how we might, in the words of Jos Boys in Doing Disability Differently, 'design -and think -from disability, rather than for it' .

Since the American Deaf community’s formation in the early nineteenth century, ‘Deaf utopias’ have emerged across a wide range of tangible and fictional manifestations. These utopias have presented, on the one hand, as a fully accessible world in which deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals are integrated into the mainstream and, on the other, as a Deaf-centric world in which all or most inhabitants are Deaf and deafness constitutes the norm. These varied integrationist and separatist orientations have become spatially manifest, most notably, in the cultural narratives of ‘Eyeth’, John Jacobus Flournoy’s 1850s ‘Scheme for a Deaf Commonwealth’, Douglas Bullard’s 1986 novel Islay , and the signing community in Chilmark, Massachusetts, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. This article investigates the ‘up-island’ town of Chilmark as a site of cultural fantasy within the American Deaf community, positing its history as spatially expressive of enduring political ambivalences within American Deaf culture - namely, internal debates about the community’s desired cultural position relative to the mainstream. Chilmark’s most definitive spatial artefacts, including buildings in its town center, its transportation infrastructure, rural character, and isolated geography, are here analysed and subsequently compared with parallel Deaf utopias, aiming to situate Chilmark within a broader Deaf-utopian legacy. Building on existing accounts of Chilmark’s signing community (Nora Ellen Groce, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language , 1985) and literary analyses of ‘Deaf utopia’ (Kristen Harmon, ‘Beyond Islay: A Brief Literary History of Deaf Utopia and Dystopia’, 2023), as well as the architectural scholarship of Jeffrey Mansfield (‘The Architecture of Deafness’, 2017) and Hansel Bauman (‘DEAFSPACE: An Architecture Towards a More Livable and Sustainable World’, 2014), this article further elaborates on the politically ambiguous meaning of ‘Deaf space’ and ‘Deaf utopia’ by critically examining some of the Deaf community’s most prominent spatial artefacts.