The U.S. Pavilion at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale has launched a new website and issued a call for projects to be considered for inclusion. Organized by the Institute of Urban Design, the exhibition is devoted to the theme Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good, and will explore a burgeoning movement of architectural projects that are changing our urban environment through unorthodox, open-sourced, and often improvisational means. With the launch of its website (www.spontaneousinterventions.org) the U.S. Pavilion seeks to further grow its roster of featured projects, which already includes guerrilla bikes lanes, urban farms, pop-up markets, acts of chairbombing (building chairs out of found materials, then placing them in public spaces in need of seating), temporary architecture, communication campaigns, and digital projects that reshape the way we navigate cities. Over the next nine months, the website will grow to include a news feed, a curators’ blog, links to articles and resources, and a list of participants and projects. When the Biennale begins in September, the site will add a participants’ blog, a searchable project database, and a guide to Biennale programs in the U.S. and Venice.
Through Feb. 6, the U.S. Pavilion is soliciting submissions from architects, artists, planners, and designers who have completed an intervention-style project in a U.S. city. Submissions will be reviewed during the next curators’ meeting. U.S. Pavilion commissioner and curator Cathy Lang Ho is a New York–based writer, editor, and a board member of the Institute of Urban Design. Co-curator Ned Cramer is the editor-in-chief of ARCHITECT magazine, an official media partner of the U.S. Pavilion. David van der Leer, also a co-curator, is the assistant curator of architecture and design at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
