The Architecture Lobby at La Biennale di Venezia 2025
08 May – 23 Nov 2025
The Architecture Lobby (TAL) conducted interviews with fellow activist architecture worker organizations around the globe, asking them about their work, their formation, and their vision. These conversations comprise TAL’s “Organizing in the Lobby,” an interactive video project exhibited in the Arsenale Corderie at La Biennale di Venezia 2025. Twenty-six interviews were conducted and they form the media content of The Architecture Lobby’s installation in the Arsenale, a space dedicated to this global cross-section of ongoing political and labor organizing in architecture. These interviews will soon be hosted online as an archive of global labor organizing in architecture in 2025.
This year’s Biennale is titled, ‘Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective.’ and TAL asserts the primacy of the labor necessary to make any of this intelligence happen. It is through withholding that labor and engaging in mass politics that architectural workers can wield political power. The worker is mobile, and their physical condition is directly related to the consolidations of power in our world. That gives a sense of the precarity of architectural work in 2025, but also the precarity of hierarchy, power and its dependence on the lowliest worker to run its machine. TAL is not the only group saying this; diminishing working conditions and agency of architects is a problem that spans borders. The global roster of groups engaged with labor issues in architecture attests to this.
In addition to the 16+ hours of video (YouTube playlist) on architectural labor power, The Architecture Lobby presents four main conclusions that suggest a response of organized architectural labor to Biennale curator Carlo Ratti’s thematic prompt of multiple intelligences:
• Organizing in the workplace is the necessary first step for the profession of architecture to be taken seriously. Politically unifying the voices of architects—even at smaller scales—amplifies our power beyond the scope of the project, the program, and the client.
• Intelligence—of any kind—is social. Therefore, intelligence is impossible without labor. Architectural workers know that the value of architecture is not created by genius alone but by collaborative creative labor power.
• Climate justice is a political problem and will not be solved by technological means. It is through withholding our labor and engaging in mass politics that architectural workers can wield political power, not via the intelligence of our ideas being whispered into the right ears.
• Architectural workers must unite in their resistance to profit-driven motives that shape the built and natural environments. Organizing in the workplace can scale the collective power of architectural labor to impact the life-or-death issues facing the human race.
MORE INFORMATION
Associated Past Events:
Solidarity-Building Workshop for Biennale Workers
May 6 @ 6 pm
Location: Campo d’la Arsenale, Venezia
‘Organizing in the Lobby’ Opening Party
May 8 @ 3pm (co-hosted with ULLARC)
Location: Ponte dei Giardini, Venezia
Solidarity-Building Workshop for Allied Organizations
July 14 @ 4 pm
Location: COMBO, Campo dei Gesuiti, 4878, 30121 Venezia
Team:
Gabriel Cira
Kristen Day
Peggy Deamer
Valérie Lechêne
Natalie Leonard
John Ludlam
Daham Marapane
Devon Miller
Kaede Polkinghorne
Ekam Singh
Cath Wang
Anonymous Contributors
Authorial Collaborators:
- The Left Movement of Working Architects (ΑΚΕΑ)
- Alternative Building Industry (ABI) Collective
- Architects! Climate Action Network (ACAN)
- ArchiteXX
- Architecture Beyond Capitalism (ABC) 2024: Hacking the Institution Turkey
- Architectural Workers United (AWU)
- Belgian Architects United/Wanorde van Architecten
- Dark Matter University
- Design As Protest
- Feminist Spatial Practices
- Future Architects Front
- Just Transition Lobby
- Kate Wagner
- Loudreaders
- Netherlands Angry Architects \ Nederlandse Anonieme Architecten / NAA!
- (non-) Swiss Architects
- Parlour
- pre:fab
- Section of Architectural Workers (SAW)
- SHEEEP
- Sindicato dos Trabalhadores em Arquitectura (SINTARQ)
- RIOT
- TAL – Academic Working Group
- TAL – Green New Deal Working Group
- TAL – Michigan Chapter
- Unione lavoratrici e lavoratori in architettura (ULLARC)
- Zawód na A
Technical Collaborators:
Niels Hoyle-Dodson
Eloise Sherrid
Ramon Solis
Thanks:
With gratitude to all past members of The Architecture Lobby whose foundational work made this possible, and to future members who will carry this mission forward.
ADDITIONAL PRESS
The Guardian: Can robots make the perfect Aperol spritz?
e-flux: Arsenalegeddon
