On any given year, the world’s most influential voices in architecture converge at the Venice Architecture Biennale, a gathering that transforms the historic grounds of Venice into a living laboratory of ideas. Held every two years and alternating with its bi-annual art exhibition, the Biennale draws designers, scholars, and practitioners from around the globe. It is widely regarded as one of the most prestigious architecture exhibitions in the world.
In 2025, that reach expanded further. The 19th International Architecture Exhibition welcomed more than 300,000 visitors, the highest attendance in its history, with sixty-six countries participating. Curated by Carlo Ratti, the exhibition explored the theme “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” Within that global conversation, the U.S. Pavilion offered its own interpretation, “Porch: An Architecture of Generosity,” co-commissioned by Peter MacKeith and Susan Chin.
For Charlie Hailey, a professor in the University of Florida School of Architecture, the Biennale was not just an exhibition. It was a chance to extend years of research into a space where ideas meet the public in immediate and tangible ways. “I was fortunate to take part in the early stages of design and layout,” Hailey said, noting that his contributions were rooted in ideas from his book The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature. Hailey’s work helped inspire the physical and conceptual frameworks of the 2025 pavilion’s theme and also included the installation of his book. What began as a scholarly exploration evolved into something immersive.
Titled “Porch Unbound,” the installation translated written word into spatial form. It unfolded the book’s pages in an accordion that stretched the full 140 feet of the U.S. Pavilion’s interior wall, threading together rooms and exhibits into a cohesive experience. Running alongside a library curated by Places journal, the page-by-page unfolding of Hailey’s book aligned with tidal rhythms, rising and falling to echo the daily life of a porch and to mirror the ebb and flow of the Venetian lagoon outside. The result was both architectural and narrative, a structure that invited visitors to move, pause, and reflect.
The installation also carried a deeper environmental message. It recorded elevated storm surges and sunny-day flooding and projected sea level rise over the course of the Biennale’s seven-month run. In doing so, it connected the Homosassa River porch along the Gulf coast, where Hailey’s book is set, to Venice’s present realities and to broader global challenges.
For Hailey, the porch has long been a lens through which to understand those connections. His research traces the architectural and cultural significance of these in-between spaces, places that blur boundaries and invite exchange.
“Porches are wonder-filled places that bring the outside in, mix public with private, and connect people with nature,” he said. “And they are essential spaces to understand the climatic changes that are happening around us.”
That sense of connection sits at the heart of his work. Porches, in his view, show relationships that might otherwise go unnoticed. “Porches connect and reveal,” Hailey said. “They link far with near, tiny details with massive changes, micro with macro climates, making visible what might otherwise remain hidden.” In a time when climate concerns can feel abstract or overwhelming, the porch offers something immediate and human-scaled.
That philosophy resonated within the broader theme of the Biennale, where designers grappled with the intersection of natural systems, artificial intelligence, and collective action. The U.S. Pavilion’s focus on generosity and openness found a natural counterpart in the porch, a space defined by welcome, exchange, and shared experience.
For Hailey, having a central role in that conversation carried both professional and personal significance. “It was an honor to be able to reach an international audience through my investigations of the porch and to be a part of the team,” he said.
The project also reflected the collaborative spirit of the University of Florida community. Several UF alumni and students contributed to the pavilion in meaningful ways. Brooks Scarpa Huber Architects designed an installation titled Scarbusier Wunderkammer for one of the Porch Windows. Atelier Mey collaborated with MASS Haptic Pavilion, a project here on UF’s campus that involved UF graduate Haley Smith (BDES ’19). Ray Wincko (M.Arch ‘24) assisted Hailey with early design proposals, and current architecture majors Brady Schaffstein and John Mott supported the de-installation of “Porch Unbound,” ensuring the extension of the project’s lifecycle.
Together, those contributions underscore the reach of UF’s College of Design, Construction and Planning, where research and practice routinely intersect on a global stage. In Venice, that intersection took on a particularly vivid form, one that invited hundreds of thousands of visitors to step into a familiar architectural element and see it anew.
