Fragments and spolia have held the attention of archaeologists, antiquarians, historians, architects, curators, and the like for centuries. Part of the fascination with these artifacts is the authority granted by their very form. Weathered or beaten, a rougher grit or texture imbues the fragment with credibility, narrative, and historical significance. Debris shows its trauma rather than telling it, and the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale is littered with it. While one might no longer find a half-crumbled Corinthian capital on display, as Piranesi might have wanted, it’s not uncommon to come across crumbling concrete chunks pierced with rusting rebars or piles of broken and weathered brick in both the Giardini and Arsenale.
In the context of architectural exhibitions, objects are primarily called upon to justify the design proposal they serve and promote. Broken cement clusters dragged into the gallery or unearthed in a pavilion therefore act as shorthand for sites of intervention. Their quality of disrepair and distress are the aesthetic indication that architectural intervention is not only possible, but needed. Beyond this, they frame the contemporary and projected state of the architecture industry. Indeed, multiple national pavilions and installations sought to tap into the storied narratives offered by piles of rubble or crumbling fragments of deteriorated concrete. These display objects hint at a material inheritance, as well as a cultural one. They carry the haunting whisper of violence, destruction, and desire to rebuild—one that connects architecture with crisis.
The state of crisis is central in the harrowing but dreamy mobile of Re-forming Materials by Martina Dietrich, Robert M. Hazen, Matthias Massari, Jürgen Lehmeier, Sofia Pfister, and René Rissland, which highlights human-made minerals as a byproduct of invention. Surrounded by the sort of continued “innovation” it critiques in the “Out” section of the main exhibition, a cloudlike suspension hovers over a pile of geological remnants and components like an accumulation—a mournful inventory—of anthropocenic hubris. Accompanied by screens that flicker images of minerals and extraction sites to the sound of the droning voice which names them, “Reforming Materials” is more provocation than proposal, more scene-setting than suggestion.
This contrasts with Acapulco: Selective Memories, by a|911, Cadena Concepts, and Esrawe, located earlier in the “Collective” section of the main exhibition, which takes the form of a shelving structure that holds a collection of fragments wrought by the “devastation of recent climate events.” Grappling with material histories, artifacts such as a concrete fragment mounted by its rebars serve the narrative arc and a desire to display “Acapulco’s enduring capacity for transformation.”1 The fragment here not only serves as evidence of destruction, but also as a call to action for architects.
In the Giardini, the Danish Pavilion, “Build of Site,” by Søren Pihlmann, does not hint at rebuilding, but actively showcases it. Frozen yet styled mid-renovation, the building’s innards are turned inside-out and transformed into new material experiments. As a statement about “valuable waste,” Pihlman sought to display the rich material value already present in the walls and floors of the pavilion, which was scheduled for renovation. While stressing the importance of reworking materials and suggesting new futures for them, rather than just placing them on display, the most eye-catching components were the unutilized piles of debris descending from the wall opposing the northeastern entrance, and the dug-out gallery floor. Rubble here is caught between harsh realities and imagined futures, and eerie whispers of the suggestion that destruction begets opportunity.
Also in the Giardini, inside the US Pavilion, “PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity,” a crumbling piece of concrete is pierced by a central rebar and set in a rusting metal window frame, contrasted with a mirror and a folded apron reading “Neuhoff Packing Co.” in the background. This is all a part of Smith Gee Studio’s “Neuhoff: Reviving the Soul,” which promotes their adaptive reuse of the Neuhoff Packing Co., a former abattoir in Nashville, Tennessee. Presented as an extracted fragment, the object tells the story of the existing structure’s lack of viability while relaying its historical authority. Yet its texture and complexity becomes the starting point for growth: the “gritty” historical object to improve from.
While debris does not represent one singular theme, it almost always acts as a justification for intervention. Yet rubble does not only indicate the relentlessness of time, but also of violence. This speaks most clearly in Circularity on the Edge by Kateryna Lopatiuk, Herman Mitish, Yana Buchatska, Orest Yaremchuk, Oleksandr Sirous, and Roman Puchko, where artificial intelligence is utilized to detect rubble in satellite images of Russia-inflicted destruction in Ukraine. Fragments—stacked and suspended—break through the haze of excited experimentation and staging that many come to Venice searching for, offering a glimpse instead of what many seek to avoid. However, they are also conceptually suspended between destruction and potential, in need only of the right systems of oversight and organization to be reorganized into something new and useful.
Shivangi Mariam Raj’s theoretical work on rubble fills in many of the narrative gaps haunting the Biennale’s desire to rethink fragments, particularly its role in violent colonial narratives of ruination and decay. According to Raj, the image of ruins is often utilized to define “expendable” geographies as being in a state of decay in order to sustain legal order.2 Rubble in the gallery echoes the dire conditions faced by populations in Palestine, Ukraine, and Kashmir, yet reinforce narratives of ruin-and-rebuild and create cultural commodities or fetish objects. The use of fragments within the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, however, highlights a threshold from patination to ruination. Decontextualized and decayed to the point of rubble, debris stops representing the specific object to be rebuilt and instead signifies the process itself. This is particularly potent in an industry that is currently grappling with climate-oriented indications to halt production. Fragments and debris are used to signal the necessity of newness. The fragment is upheld both for its embedded history and authenticity. Yet questions of reinvention overshadow any desire to prevent its fragmentation in the first place.
From the project description in the Arsenale.
Shivangi Mariam Raj, “To Resist the Order of Rubble,” lecture, Learning from Struggles #1, Royal College of Arts, May 20, 2025.
