Wael Al Awar
Wael Al Awar is the founding principal of waiwai, an architectural, landscape, urban, interior and graphic design practice with studios in Dubai and Tokyo. He was the chief curator of the UAE Pavilion for the 17th Architecture Biennale di Venezia in 2021, which received the Golden Lion award, the Biennale’s highest prize for national participations.

Stephen Burks & Malika Leiper
Stephen Burks and Malika Leiper are partners at Stephen Burks Man Made. The socially engaged design studio is part of the design team for the US Pavilion for the 19th Architecture Biennale di Venezia in 2025, PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity, which reframes the quintessential element of American architecture as a meaningful site of social negotiation and cultural exchange. Stephen Burks Man Made’s curatorial contribution to the Biennale, Objects of Belonging, ampliﬁes the porch as a site of creativity, diversity, and resistance through a collection of handmade objects and furniture, featuring 10 unique quilts made in collaboration with the Gee’s Bend quilters of Alabama.

Aric Chen
Aric Chen is the general and artistic director of the Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands’ national museum and institute for architecture, design, and digital culture in Rotterdam. As commissioner of the Dutch Pavilion for the 19th Architecture Biennale di Venezia in 2025, the Nieuwe Instituut presents SIDELINED: A Space to Rethink Togetherness, an installation that reinvents the sports bar to question how architecture inﬂuences social dynamics.

Eva Franch i Gilabert
Eva Franch i Gilabert is an architect, curator, researcher, and professor at UMPRUM in Prague. Franch is a co-curator of Water Parliaments: Projective Ecosocial Architectures, the Catalonia in Venice collateral program for the 19th Architecture Biennale di Venezia in 2025. With a focus on the Catalan, Valencian and Balearic contexts, the exhibition reframes architecture as a multispecies, collaborative practice that reﬂects the interdependence of humans, non-humans, and water systems.

Béatrice Grenier
Béatrice Grenier is a Paris-based curator, writer, and editor. She is currently the director of strategic projects and international programs at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, where she is curating The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain by Jean Nouvel, an exhibition on the architectural vision of the acclaimed French architect, as part of the collateral program of the 19th Architecture Biennale di Venezia in 2025. Grenier has also been appointed co-curator of the inaugural exhibition at the Fondation Cartier’s new home, opening in autumn 2025.

Ana María Gutiérrez
Ana María Gutiérrez is the founder of Fundación Organizmo, a community organization that leads processes of knowledge exchange and experimentation toward social, cultural, and ecological regeneration in rural areas around Colombia. Through participatory construction projects, the team aims to recover vernacular building practices and enable a closer, more respectful relationship with the natural environment. Fundación Organizmo’s We are all Woven exhibition, developed with Alice Grandoit-Šutka and Natalia Guarnizo, is on view in the Carlo Ratti–curated Arsenale for the 19th Architecture Biennale di Venezia in 2025.

Kieran Long
Kieran Long is the director of the Amos Rex Museum in Helsinki, Finland. He was formerly the director of ArkDes, Sweden’s national center for architecture and design. Previously, Long was the keeper of the design, architecture, and digital department at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and led the curatorial team for the 13th Architecture Biennale di Venezia in 2012. Long has edited several eminent architecture and design publications, including The Architectural Review and The Architects' Journal, and has had an extensive career as a teacher, broadcaster, writer, and commentator.

Tosin Oshinowo
Tosin Oshinowo is a Lagos-based Nigerian architect and the founding principal of Oshinowo Studio. Oshinowo’s research project, An Alternative Urbanism: Self-organizing Markets of Lagos, is on view in the Carlo Ratti–curated Arsenale for the 19th Architecture Biennale di Venezia in 2025. Sharing the specialist markets’ spatial and organizational structures, agencies and politics, the installation reframes Lagos’s marketplaces as a conceptual testbed for envisioning the African city yet to come.

Bas Smets
Bas Smets is a landscape architect whose distinct approach to urban design is informed by a multidisciplinary background. Since founding his Brussels-based Bureau Bas Smets in 2007, his team has completed more than 50 international projects. In 2022, the oﬃce won the prestigious international competition to redesign the public green space surrounding Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Smets is the curator of the Belgian pavilion for the 19th Architecture Biennale di Venezia in 2025, Building Biospheres. Developed with botanist Stefano Mancuso, the exhibition investigates how the natural intelligence of plants can be integrated into the design of the built environment, oﬀering a prototype for this research.

Moderator:
Beatrice Galilee
Beatrice Galilee is the founder and executive director of The World Around. Galilee is an architecture historian, curator and writer, internationally recognized for her expertise in global contemporary architecture and design. From 2014 to 2019, she served as the first curator of contemporary architecture and design at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has also been a curator at numerous international architecture and design exhibitions. Galilee is the author of Radical Architecture of the Future (Phaidon, 2020).

Upcoming event

8 November — 8 November

QUANTUM ENTANGLED CONVERSATIONS

Exhibition on view

5 September — 23 November

THE QUANTUM EFFECT

Past events

9 May — 13 July

For all that breathes on earth: Jung Youngsun and collaborators

9 May — 20 July

Migrating Modernism. The architecture of Harry Seidler

8 May

The World Around on Site: Venice

Receive SMAC news and be the first to hear about events and exhibitions on site.