Curators Chosen for American Pavilion at Architecture Biennale

The State Department has selected three curators who will turn the United States pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale into an experiment in reimagining the last 100 years of American building abroad. They are Ashley Schafer, editor of the Boston-based architecture journal Praxis, Eva Franch Gilabert, executive director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in Manhattan and Ana Miljački, an architecture professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs chose the trio with advice from a committee of curators and design experts, said Susan Pittman, a spokeswoman for the department.

Rem Koolhaas, the Rotterdam architect who will direct the 2014 Biennale, had said he wanted participating countries to focus “on architecture, not architects,” explained Ms. Franch, who with her co-curators will select 1,000 projects designed by U.S. firms for sites outside the U.S. â€" architecture that, in her words, “spread the project of modernity worldwide.”

Ms. Milaki said the hope is to “reactivate” projects by firms like the Architects’ Collaborative of Cambridge, Mass., which designed a campus for the University of Baghdad in the 1950s, and Albert Kahn, the Detroit architect whose Moscow office helped to industrialize the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

The pavilion will be a working architecture office as much as an exhibition space. The curators will select five design “fellows” to reinvent many of the past projects in front of visitors. “They will need to be extroverts, because they will be designing in public from June through November,” said Ms. Schafer. She said the fellows will be paid a small stipend. The pavilion interiors will be designed by the New York firm Leong Leong.

The design fellows will be joined by design experts and even visitors to the pavilion â€" “anyone can work in the office for a day,” Ms. Franch said, calling the plan an experiment in rethinking the conventions of American architectural practice. The State Department is providing $100,000 to the pavilion organizers, who expect to raise several times as much from donors, including architecture firms.