Internalities
Spanish Pavilion
19th Venice Biennale, IT
2025
Internalities is conceived as a counterpoint to the notion of Externalities—a term coined by economist Arthur Pigou in 1920 to define the indirect costs of production that affect people and territories not involved in the process. Architecture is one such process. It encompasses myriad repercussions, waste, degradation, and pollution that often remain unrecognized and unquantified. These include the materials we extract, the energy we consume, the labor we displace, the byproducts we produce, and the emissions we release. Internalities challenges those taken-for-granted models of doing architecture. It epitomizes the efforts of an emerging generation of designers committed to decarbonizing a construction industry that currently accounts for 37 percent of carbon emissions. It questions how architects can (and must) articulate robust territorial ecosystems of production—ones that do not necessarily rely on global, carbon-intensive flows of resources but are capable of balancing ecologies with economies. The project is structured around five key axes: Materials, Energy, Labor, Byproducts, and Emissions.
*More info coming soon...
Curators:
Manuel Bouzas
Roi Salgueiro
In collaboration with:
MIVAU Government of Spain, AC/E, AECID, Arquia Foundation