La Libreria

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.