Nnamed curators of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2027, it was not simply a nod to their prestige or the poetic rigor of their architectural language—it was a tacit acknowledgment that the cultural center of gravity has already shifted, that the old European rituals of display now depend on the intellectual oxygen of the very margins they once exoticized, and in this case, those margins speak Mandarin; the selection of these architects, whose practice refuses both the spectacle of high-concept digital fantasies and the sterility of commercial trend-hopping, signals a deeper tectonic shift: the biennale is no longer a European mirror—it’s a Chinese lens, and through it we see the ruins of modernism, the exhaustion of starchitect egos, the brittle confidence of parametric optimism; instead, Wang and Lu offer a way back—not backwards—towards a place-bound, memory-infused architectural thinking that honors debris, time, craftsmanship, and social meaning, as in their Ningbo History Museum where salvaged bricks breathe new narratives into the bones of demolished villages, transforming loss into syntax; their critique of “over-conceptualised” and “hyper-commercialised” architecture is not simply aesthetic—it is existential, a lament for a discipline that has forgotten the weight of real ground and the intimacy of use, and their proposal to return to “simple and true concepts” is radical precisely because it resists the neoliberal demand for innovation at any cost; in choosing them, the biennale itself becomes the exhibit, a site where Europe’s curatorial power is re-inscribed through an Asian voice that neither asks for permission nor mimics the center, because it has become the center, calmly, confidently, irrevocably.
