The 2025 United States Pavilion 19th Venice Architecture Biennale
This week marks the opening of PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity, the U.S. Pavilion exhibition at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. As part of the exhibition, Duvall Decker’s project, the Bennie G. Thompson Academic and Civil Rights Research Center, will be featured within the U.S. Pavilion, contributing to the broader dialogue on the role of architecture in fostering generosity, connection, and cultural exchange.
A small, southern historically black college was founded in 1869 on the grounds of the failed Boddie Plantation. During the 1950s and 1960s, this college was instrumental in organizing and providing the philosophical inspiration for the American Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. The campus courageously provided sanctuary for civil rights leaders and protesters as they shared ideas, devised strategies, and fought for an end to segregation.
The Bennie G. Thompson Academic and Civil Rights Research Center is sited to the south of the original slave-built plantation mansion. The new building design contrasts sharply with the singular authority promised by the original plantation mansion. The design is founded with multiple porch-like conditions; thresholds, margins, and pauses. These spaces are first political, then environmental, and social. The entry to the building is suppressed and discovered along a generous porch that fronts the historic lawn. The new porch is a place of plurality, shifting authority to the students, faculty, and visitors as they gather in the sanctuary of the shady pause.
The building is organized with an indirect planning strategy, creating pause-and-move sequences. There is no single center. Margins are created between the structure and outer enclosure where students and faculty can claim space to meet and talk.
The wings of the building are connected by compressed thresholds clad with larger-than-life images of civil rights history. These memory theaters press in, embodying a palpable sense of movement from oppression to freedom, promoting pause and reflection in the daily habitation of the building.
This installation invites visitors into the margin, encouraging moments of discovery through the materials that knit together this significant story – one that continues forward with hope and radical openness.
The Porch exhibition will remain open to the public until November 23, 2025.
Duvall Decker was featured in The New York Times’s story on PORCH. Click the link to read the exclusive article in The New York Times.
In addition, Duvall Decker’s participation in the Venice Biennale was featured in the Financial Times. Click the link to read the exclusive article.
