Like global design fairs, architecture’s biennials and triennials are, fundamentally, opportunities to showcase the most pressing ideas in the field; curators provide an expert glimpse into the professional and academic practices that envision what the future might hold. The Venice Biennale—the most prestigious of such fairs—has provided the world with many prospects: In 2023, curator Leslie Lokko’s The Laboratory of the Future invited architects, academics, and artists to imagine a decolonized and decarbonized African continent; in 2021, curator Hashim Sarkis’s How We Live Together exhibition explored how we might cohabitate generously during times of political and social divisions. These underlying themes ask participants to think through how the built environment can shape or play a role in shaping future possibilities. In some ways, many of the most recent editions have been intrinsically optimistic.

The forthcoming edition, which opens in the spring of 2027, will instead ask participants to instead address the here-and-now. Hangzhou-based architects Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, cofounders of the firm Amateur Architecture Studio, were selected in 2025 to curate. Their work, which bridges contemporary buildings with material reuse and historic knowledge, announced their biennale theme this week: Do Architecture - For the Possibility of Coexistence Facing a Real Reality. To be honest, I laughed when I first read the ArchDaily headline; the curators of the world’s most prestigious biennale are asking architects to do the thing that they are trained to do. The duo seems to be tapping into whatever hope and optimism that could exist within that invitation—to simply do—in the context of our warming planet, degrading infrastructure, and artificial intelligence sucking up our natural resources and cognitive capabilities. These curators are turning away from the speculative, asking instead how architects might take action.

The invitation to do feels strangely spot-on, and comes with a critique of the common role of speculative design during our current range of daily catastrophes. Reality, as a term, plays an important role: They call it “real reality” outright, making a distinction between the imagined conditions in which many architectural concepts would be welcome (and likely funded)—these might look like sci-fi-esque futures where the problems of humanity like war, famine, and disease, have been eradicated; or, wherein funding for extravagant design propositions is plentiful. Unfortunately for us, none of that is real, and architects instead are often working upstream of the existing political, financial, and climate-related constraints. There’s always a space for imagination, but according to the curators, focusing solely on these fantastical states (and designing solely for them) has larger implications.

“Conceptual experiments driven to extremes are often divorced from reality and overcommercialization tends to be merely popular and short-lived,” the curators wrote in their statement. “It will lead to the death of architecture.”

One can’t help but feel that this thematic choice is a direct rebuke of the Venice Biennale’s most recent 2025 edition. Under the curatorial leadership of Carlo Ratti, a professor at MIT, architecture’s future was shown through his selected theme of Intelligens—artificial, natural, and collective—that hoped to show “how we can adapt to the world of tomorrow with confidence and optimism,” per the curatorial statement. The resulting exhibition was described as “daunting and dense”: 300 unique installations explored the theme through myriad technological whizzgigs. Visitors encountered robotics in architectural craft, humanoids, algae, espresso brewed with purified canal water, blobs, drones, and much more. It was called a noisy, “tech bro fever dream” by ArtReview; the Guardian characterized the show as unfocused, “like trying to complete the internet.” The edition boiled our current affairs down to problems that can be solved with an array of technocratic one-liners. “Don’t fear the climate crisis,” the Guardian continues, sardonically, “a harmonious union of technology and nature will save us.”

Instead, 2027 cocurators Shu and Wenyu are asking architects to acknowledge the role that their profession plays in such ecological collapse. Speaking at the thematic announcement in Venice this week, they said that “architecture must recognize the depth of the crisis in which it finds itself,’” Designboom reports. But it’s not just the climate crisis that the curatorial vision will touch upon; the thematic announcement also includes issues related to land, material, and craft—the essential elements that speak to a building’s relationship with its specific place and time. It’s unsurprising, considering Amateur Architecture Studio’s portfolio, which has frequently combined recycled building materials and adaptive reuse strategies that speak to traditional building practices, particularly in China where rapid urbanization and demolition has resulted in the large-scale vernacular loss.

Shu and Wenyu seem to have their finger on the culture’s pulse. Among compounding crises related to tech, environment, and social fray, many are dreaming of another way to live, perhaps one that is more rooted in addressing our everyday frictions, both large and small. It’s perhaps less compelling at this moment to watch robots making cocktails (as they did in Ratti’s exhibition) when food prices are soaring; experimenting with AI installations feels tone deaf as jobs for people get snatched away by the technology. The only way to move toward that other way of living is to act, not just respond with empty platitudes or sky-high what-ifs. Do Architecture is a refreshing proposition for the biennale’s showcase—buildings might be tall, but among our present-day woes, architects could, like the rest of us, keep their feet on the ground.

Top image of Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu by Andrea Avezzù.

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