Lares et Penates: On Building a Sense of Security in Architecture
Interview with the architect Maciej Siuda and artist Katarzyna Przezwańska
Inside the Polish Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Lares et Penates explores how architecture can restore a sense of safety — not only through structure and regulation, but through rituals, symbols and everyday gestures of protection.
In this interview, recorded inside the Polish Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the curatorial team of Lares et Penates: On Building a Sense of Security in Architecture explains how the exhibition looks at architectural safety starting from practices, rituals and “building superstitions”. How can architecture restore a feeling of protection?
From 10 May to 23 November 2025, the Polish Pavilion presents an exhibition conceived by an interdisciplinary group made of curator and art historian Aleksandra Kędziorek, architect Maciej Siuda, and artists Katarzyna Przezwańska and Krzysztof Maniak, selected through the national competition organised by Zachęta – National Gallery of Art to represent Poland in Venice. The title recalls the Roman household deities, the lares and penates, to suggest that security in architecture is never only technical: it is also made of gestures, symbols and small devices people keep around themselves to feel safe.
As the authors point out, the pavilion brings together elements already present in the building and new, carefully crafted additions. Working with what is there becomes a statement: before inventing spectacular scenarios, architecture can begin from existing resources and from the forms of pre-modern, collective wisdom that people have used for centuries to protect their homes. In this sense, the exhibition proposes to look at architecture anthropologically, as a practice that shelters bodies but also habits, fears and hopes, and to recognize that different cultures of protection can coexist in the same space.
Lares et Penates therefore invites visitors to rethink safety as a layered condition, regulatory and technical but also cultural and affective. By making these layers visible, the pavilion suggests that architects today can learn as much from everyday practices as from advanced technologies, and that designing protection also means giving people back a sense of agency.
Lares and Penates: On Building a Sense of Security in Architecture
Commissioner: Agnieszka Pindera
Curator: Aleksandra Kędziorek
Exhibitors: Krzysztof Maniak, Katarzyna Przezwańska, Maciej SiudaMore information about the Pavilion at this link.
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