68
Bursting Bubbles
November 2025
Architecture and design have a long legacy of operating from inside their respective bubbles: reinforcing their own aesthetics, logic, networks and vocabulary with the effect of becoming self-referential and exclusive.
These bubbles shape who architects collaborate with, how projects take form, and ultimately, who benefits from spatial production. Marking the occasion of VOLUME’s contribution to the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Carlo Ratti we go beyond our bubbles and connect with fields outside our own in search for inspiration and proximity.
From VOLUME’s initial declaration to “go beyond, or not to be” bursting bubbles has been fundamental to its ideological agenda, and this guide might be as far beyond as it ever went. In times of societal polarization VOLUME 68 hosts 13 conversations in which architects and designers meet inspiring figures outside of their bubble to find points of engagement and exchange notes on professional practices.
Where else do you find a place where thirteen reputable architects and designers from all kinds of backgrounds have a conversation – not just a soundbite or tribute of greatness – with some of the most inspiring figures around – from the culinary arts, boxing, football, healthcare, trans sex work to sociology, politics, public policy, and down the various avenues of theatre and the tech world? We go from OMA to Noma, to the Harvard Kennedy School for public policy and Ligue 1 soccer club of Lille OSC, as well as alternative tech-media platform Mastodon and the experiential theatre of Rimini Protokoll. This is all within the honest pursuit of wanting to learn and exchange notes, while implicitly and sometimes explicitly trying to answer the question: where do we need each other?
Contributors
With Andrea González (Zuloark), Andy Piper, Céline Zimmer, David Zilber, Ethel Baraona Pohl, Evgeny Morozov, Félix “Tito” Trinidad, Gabriel Fontana, Hanno Pijl, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Juana Salcedo, Julia Minson, Ludwig Engel, Michelle Mildenberg Lara, Negar Sanaan Bensi, NAA! Netherlands Angry Architects, Olivier Létang, Paul Cournet, Paulette Lenert, Pelin Tan, Peter van Assche, Red Comunitaria Trans, Rem Koolhaas, Rimini Protokoll, Roger Bernat, Silvia Dal Dosso, Sjeng Scheijen, WAI Think Tank
Details
Editor in Chief: Stephan Petermann
Managing Editor: Maria Mazzanti
Materialized by Irma Boom Office
192 pages, 22.5 x 16.7 cm
Soft cover
ISSN 1574-9401
ISBN 9789077966860
