What does it mean to draw the edges of architecture—where walls give way to air, where materials encounter weather, where the built world is held in tension with its surroundings? “The Perimeter of Architecture: Amid the Elements” takes up these questions in the Padiglione del Libro [Book Pavilion], the structure designed by James Stirling and Michael Wilford and reimagined this year as a site of “paper architecture.” The installation unfolds as both a meditation on architecture’s thresholds and a proposal for how books, drawings, and speculative projects might extend the discipline beyond its physical enclosures. Co-authored by a transdisciplinary group of architects, designers, and scholars brought together and led by Sylvia Lavin, the installation rejects the spectacle-driven aesthetics of the architectural mega-show. Instead, it reclaims the modest, fragmentary, and durational medium of the book and paper—not as supplementary artifacts, but as the very conditions of architectural exhibitions.
“The Perimeter of Architecture” positions printed matter as an elemental technology in the ongoing circulation of architectural thought, asking how this knowledge is recorded, preserved, and disseminated through modes of publication and representation. Drawing on Venice’s own entangled history with paper manufacturing, printing, and intellectual circulation, and in response to an era marked by rising anti-intellectualism, the installation asserts the book and paper as a counter-infrastructure for pedagogy, collectivity, and dissent, one that bypasses other monitored and surveilled sites of intelligence. Organized around the thematic perimeters of air, water, and ground, the installation foregrounds architecture’s negotiation with elemental forces, situating these engagements within a disciplinary history that reveals how its most radical expressions have frequently been articulated on paper.
Viewers are greeted by speculative architectural designs that engage with architecture’s simultaneous relation to building materials and conditions of knowledge, such as the unfurling of the literal form of the book in Hilary Sample and Michael Meridith’s Everything Is in the Process of Becoming Something Else, which runs down the center of the pavilion. On its periphery are reimaginings of “naturalized” sites such as Rock Paper Rock, an architectural illustration of Stonehenge by Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood of First Office. Other projects present a more didactic relationship between architecture and the elements such as Plants as Collaborators by Besler & Sons/Erin Besler, which features an architectural model of an amphitheater adorned with plant life. As a material and conceptual constant, each project utilizes paper in its many forms and stages of processing from its most raw, such as branches, to cardboard and dyed specialty papers.
The installation’s thesis centers on the provocation that architecture and its elements of production do not only reside in built form, but also in the distributed surfaces of its mediation—in drawings, manuscripts, zines, facsimiles, and critical bibliographies. This material approach resonates with longstanding traditions of paper architecture, a term that historically refers to speculative or unbuilt projects rendered primarily through drawings or texts. But the installation revitalizes this term beyond its Cold War connotations.1 Paper here is not simply a surface of projection, but a technological material with distinct affordances and limits: it wrinkles, it fades, it degrades. It offers a temporality distinct from screen-based media—a slow, tactile, and embodied form of engagement. As a technology, paper is also porous, indexical, and materially responsive to time, climate, and handling. It is precisely because of these traits that paper becomes a strategic medium in an exhibition widely responding to climate precarity and digital acceleration.
What emerges is a deliberate refusal of the polished image-object economy that dominates contemporary architecture publishing and neighboring national pavilions in the Giardini. At its heart is also an ethic of critical citation that enacts accountability and historicity. Rather than presenting its references as footnotes or academic flaunt, “The Perimeter of Architecture” embeds them into its material logic through presenting books alongside the design speculations that reference them. What sits on the surface of these open historical manuscripts are scanned copies of spreads and pages from the books themselves, highlighting imagery and text that served as inspiration for the design projects around them. As palimpsests requiring peeling and unfolding to access embedded material histories, the books impel interaction—creasing, rotating, annotating—but are left untouched due to the politics and formalities of exhibition etiquette. This renders the act of reading as an architectural performance in itself, and foregrounds how architectural thought is built not through originality but reference, repetition, and re-reading.
In this way, “The Perimeter of Architecture” becomes a living bibliography, a network of citations that makes visible the intellectual and political stakes of architectural memory. It is also a refusal of erasure, following Sara Ahmed’s idea that citations can be used as bricks to build and protect communities of knowledge.2 Paper—a material that can expire and degrade—brings forth the urgency of the installation’s propositions, which are made by architectural practices that generally rely on representational methods and models (both literally and as a conceptual mode of study). At a time when architecture is increasingly instrumentalized—rendered as icon, product, or content—“The Perimeter of Architecture: Amid the Elements” calls attention to the infrastructures of architectural knowledge: citation, printing, reading, annotating, referencing. Paper, in this framework, is a charged, time-sensitive, site-aware medium: a technology of slow and fleeting attention and site for speculative disciplinary survival.
Andrei Gozak and Yuri Avvakumov, Paper Architecture: New Projects from the Soviet Union (London: Architectural Foundation, 1989).
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).