Deep in one corner of the Egyptian pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architec­tural Biennale, students from the Univer­sity of Pennsylvania displayed proposals for a dilapidated section of Cairo. Nearby, the Brooklyn-based filmmaker Gary Hustwit (Helvetica) debuted his documentary Workplace, about the New York offices of media giant R/GA. Off-site at the Palazzo Mora, Kevin Slavin, of the MIT Media Lab, was installing a beehive—part of a plan to create a microbiological map of Venice.

One criticism of this year’s Ven­ice Architecture Biennale­—that the American presence was too small—seems overblown. There were works by Americans throughout the Biennale, and works by non-Americans often reflected U.S. influences. The Biennale’s director, Alejandro Aravena, has taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design—just one of scores of foreign architects in Venice with ties to the U.S. And global teams often included Americans. For example, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm Ochsendorf, DeJong & Block helped the famed ETH Zurich create a thin-shell vault of interlocking tiles, one of many “low-tech”
buildings that characterized this Biennale.