Venice Biennale 2025
Installation under construction at Palazzo Mora in Venice. Image Courtesy of the European Cultural Centre
GOAT (aka the Global Office of Architecture & Taste), an architecture and design practice based in New Orleans, has been invited to participate in the 2025 Venice Biennale in the European Cultural Centre’s ‘Time Space Existence’ exhibition. We have taken this opportunity to develop an installation that shares the spirit of New Orleans with the world and deepens our ongoing research into GOAT’s ultimate raison d'être: helping to craft a thriving long-term future for our city.
Our exhibition in Venice is the first phase of the multi-generational, multi-disciplinary project of envisioning and executing a thriving near and distant future for the communities that compose the greater New Orleans area. This installation will present the results of the first step of every architectural project: pre-design research. We will share the results of our engagement with the project’s stakeholders, our research into the geological history and future of the region, and a first glimpse of proposals that will be explored well into the future.
The immersive installation will include commentary about resilience, optimism, and the city’s long-term future collected from residents in the form of interactive chalkboard panels, a video collage of brief interviews with residents responding to similar questions, and wall graphics documenting the region’s past, current, and projected conditions.
“Despite the evidence to the contrary, we believe that the continued existence of our home is non-negotiable. Rather than wallowing in our predicament, we believe our role, as architects, is to help create a positive vision that we can all aspire to and to then draft the roadmap for achieving it,” shares Colin VanWingen, GOAT’s co-founding principal. The exhibition will be held from May 10 to November 23, 2025 throughout multiple venues in Venice and GOAT will be featured in the Palazzo Mora. To learn more about the Venice Biennale, visit labiennale.org/en/architecture/2025.
We have taken the radically optimistic position that the continued existence of New Orleans is non-negotiable. That statement may seem like naivete or hubris, especially to those unfamiliar with New Orleans and the resilience of its people; however, we believe that optimism is what this moment in history requires of our profession and what the people of our community are demanding of us. Pessimism is certainly understandable given the sheer magnitude of the challenges so many communities are faced with today. The threats posed by manmade climate change are truly existential for many; the inequality of access to necessities, opportunities, and justice across communities continues to fester unacceptably, nearly everywhere; the political and social divisions between communities frequently feel unbridgeable; unpredictable and seemingly unchecked ‘advances’ in technology have not delivered on their promises and have made the immediate future more obscure than ever; the list goes on and on. These challenges certainly require a sober, stoic reckoning and it is understandable that, if sweeping societal changes are not made, the futures we imagine have tipped toward the dystopian
We believe, however, that pessimism is corrosive and to succumb to it is a subversion of the social responsibility placed on the architectural profession. While we should certainly advocate for measures and interventions that may avert the worst outcomes, the truth remains that these outcomes are largely beyond our control and may well become the parameters for our future work. Our role as the visionary designers of civilization and its manifestations is to use the parameters as they are presented to us and to craft a positive vision of the best possible future for life within them, drafting the roadmap to achieve it. We believe there is generative power in the creation of this vision.
The regional map to the right assumes a future where sea levels rise unabated, but New Orleans harnesses the advantages of its geographic position to fortify its existence, evolves within and without its boundaries to adapt to its new reality, and endures as the cultural beacon it has been nearly since its founding in 1718. Many of the ideas presented here are not new; many of them have existed in the imaginations of New Orleanians for generations and were more or less proposed by the stakeholders that weighed in on the city’s future. Others have already been proposed in some form or other by the many other visionary architects, artists, and creatives working in the city. Some are even already in motion. We begin to collect them here with the intent to positively re-frame the local, regional, and national conversations about our collective future and to create a framework for further investigation.
Site Documentation: NOLA’s Past, Present, Future
NOLA Stakeholders: Video Collage
The chief reason optimism is required of the architects imagining the long term future of New Orleans is that our clients, the city’s stakeholders demand it of us. The stakeholders of this project have made it clear that they do not intend to be uprooted: not in 2005 after Katrina, not now, and certainly not three generations from now when so many outsiders predict New Orleans will be ceded to the sea. Our job as designers is to rise to their challenge and to ultimately create the blueprint to make such an buoyant vision possible.
The central component of our planned exhibition installation is a video collage of brief interviews with the *foreverNOLA project’s stakeholders: New Orleanians and people from the surrounding communities. We have compiled the filmed responses into a single video, approximately 35 minutes in length. The final product is a moving representation of the diverse range of voices and perspectives that make up this vibrant community.
The video will make its debut in Venice at the Palazzo Mora May 9th, 2025 and will be made available here shortly after. Plans are also being finalized to publicly show the video and the rest of the installation in New Orleans following the completion of the Biennale in early 2026.
Thank you to all those that participated. If you did not get the chance and would like to share your thoughts on the long-term future of this place, please reach out to us. We would love to continue expanding the project indefinitely, reflecting our ambitions for this beautiful community.
The core of the first phase of every project we undertake, what we call 'Pre-Design Research', is engaging with the project's stakeholders to better understand their respective needs. We are approaching our vision for the city's long term future like any other project and the central component of our installation in Venice will be our engagement with this project's stakeholders: i.e. New Orleanians. One way we tried to engage as many residents as possible was by staging an interactive installation along the Lafitte Greenway and other public corridors in the city, allowing passersby to weigh-in and inform the project's process.
We staged (3) versions of the installation at the Lafitte Greenway Partnership’s Supernova event in December 2024 and then at the locations along the Lafitte Greenway for (60) days in early 2025. The disassembled components of the installation and the collected commentary have been re-purposed for the exhibition at the Venice Biennale.
