The curators of the 20th architecture biennale in Venice will be Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu

As soon as the gates of this year's Venice Biennale (which attracted nearly 300,000 visitors) closed, the president of the Venice Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, introduced the main curators of the upcoming jubilee 20th edition, who are the architects Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu from the Chinese Amateur Architecture Studio. This married couple, in addition to their private practice established in Hangzhou in 1997, is also significantly engaged in academia. In 2003, they founded the Department of Architecture at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and in 2007, they established the School of Architecture at the same institution, where Wang Shu became the first dean, and the university campus is gradually being supplemented by their buildings. Lu Wenyu is also the director of the Center for Sustainable Construction. In 2011, Wang Shu was a visiting professor at Harvard University, and a year later, he received the Pritzker Prize.
Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu participated in the Venice Biennale as early as 2006, where they were part of the Chinese national pavilion with their project “Paved Garden”. In 2010, at the invitation of chief curator Kazuyo Sejima, they presented the project “Collapse of the Dome”, for which they received special mention, and they also participated in the 15th Architecture Biennale in 2016 under the direction of Alejandro Aravena. The work of Amateur Architecture Studio was most comprehensively presented to a European audience in 2017 at an exhibition at the Danish museum Louisiana.
The Biennale's leadership justified their selection of curators by stating that the studio “focuses on indigenous materials, the everyday lives of ordinary people, the potential of commonly used structures, and the work of craftsmen on construction sites.”
Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, who will be the first Chinese curators in the history of the Venice Biennale, expressed their thoughts on the invitation with the following sentences: “In today's world, where rapid changes are taking place, architecture is more a matter of exterior appearance, the result of complicated concepts and strong commercialization. Conceptual experiments pushed to extremes are often detached from reality, and excessive commercialization tends to be only temporarily popular. Trends change quickly. For architecture to survive, it must break the tight connection with a specific place, which leads to the death of architecture and misleading results. We address the crisis of this world by insisting on a simple and truthful concept that has unique value for us. These values we will continue to explore and present in a sincere expectation of a better present and future.”
The main motto of the 20th Architecture Biennale will be announced in the first half of 2026 and will take place at well-known Venice locations from May 8 to November 21, 2027.

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