La Serenissima is the female personification of Venice’s power, stability, and sheer cunning that enabled her unlikely emergence as a cultural and commercial empire. La Libreria, the bookstore of the Biennale Architettura 2025, is a metaphor for “Venice as a Woman” and a reflection of the trading port’s legacy as a beacon of knowledge. A contemporary caravanserai, it is designed as a nomadic cultural repository for the Biennale that embodies Venice’s democratic and intellectual outreach. La Libreria evolves a long tradition of lightweight tensile structures, particularly Robert le Ricolais’s sculptural tensegrity experiments from the mid-twentieth century that aspired to “zero weight and infinite span.” Adapting this research, an elongated tensegrity beam spanning the long axis of the space supports the tent’s fiber-reinforced transparent skin. La Libreria is unanchored to the ground and ballasted by the weight of books, enabling this mobile bookstore to travel and engage the world.
Participants
DILLER SCOFIDIO + RENFRO (NEW YORK, USA)
Elizabeth Diller, Łódź, Poland, 1954. Lives and works in New York, USA.
Ricardo Scofidio, New York, USA, 1935–2025. Lived and worked in New York, USA.
DIANE VON FÜRSTENBERG, Brussels, Belgium, 1946. Lives in Connecticut, works in New York, USA.
SCHLAICH BERGERMANN PARTNER (NEW YORK, USA)
Michael Stein, Stuttgart, Germany, 1968. Lives and works in New York, USA.
TRANSSOLAR (STUTTGART, GERMANY)
Matthias Schuler, Stuttgart, Germany, 1958. Lives and works in Stuttgart, Germany.
Authorial Collaborators
Konstantin Kakanias (Artist), Tillotson Design Associates (Lighting Design)
Team
Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, David Allin, Matt Ostrow, Bryce Suite, Alfred Wei; Schlaich Bergermann Partner: Michael Stein, Robert Hellyer, Christoph Paech; Transsolar: Matthias Schuler, Moritz Mütschele, Nadir Abdessemed; Tillotson Design Associates: Suzane Tillotson, Dagmara Nowak
Supporters
LUMA Foundation; Maestro Technologies; Davide Groppi
