Venice Biennale to Spotlight Architects from Africa and the African Diaspora
2 min
The 18th edition of Venice Biennale di Architettura, dubbed The Laboratory of the Future, is set to kick off Saturday in the Italian city. This year, for the first time, the event will showcase sustainable designs from architects from Africa and the African diaspora.
Titled Guests of the Future, the exhibition’s theme is decolonization and decarbonization, and will highlight projects that have found architectural solutions for issues ranging from sustainable materials to housing issues to erased histories, according to the Ford Foundation, which, along with Bloomberg Philanthropies, is supporting the architects’ international travel to the event.
“As is the case with many elite gatherings and institutions, access to entry has been high, leaving a diverse pool of talent from displaying their expertise, and we’re hoping this will help open doors for other innovators in architecture and design from all backgrounds well into the future,” the Ford Foundation said in a statement.
This year’s Biennale, which runs through November, is curated by Ghanaian-Scottish architect, professor and novelist Lesley Lokko, who is also the founder of the African Futures Institute, established in Accra, Ghana.
“New technologies continuously appear and disappear giving us unfiltered glimpses of life in parts of the globe we will likely never visit, much less understand,” Lokko said in a statement on the event’s website. “In Europe we speak of minorities and diversity, but the truth is that the West’s minorities are the global majority; diversity is our norm. There is one place on this planet where all these questions of equity, race, hope and fear converge and coalesce. Africa.”
More than 20 projects were selected from across the continent, as well as locations from France to Fez, Morocco—the majority of which were developed by an individual or a team with five people or fewer, according to organizers.
That includes Nzinga Biegueng Mboup, a Senegalese-based architect who worked with Adjaye Associates for three years. She is now collaborating with Elementerre, a construction company specializing in local and 100% recyclable building materials, such raw earth and plants, that require less energy to create and are more suitable for hot climates.
Or the woman-owned, New York City-based Riff Studio. Its three-person team combines backgrounds outside of traditional design practice: building construction, historical research, and architectural pedagogy, respectively. “Our designs are riffs produced from dialogues between these distinct realms, as we contemplate the future of housing,” according to the firm’s website.
There’s also MOE + Art Architecture: a Nigerian firm “that is emerging as one of the leading design houses in Africa for their work to redefine African modernism,” and Cartografia Negra, “a collective based in Brazil that is working to reposition places in Sao Paolo that were used for the execution, sale, torture, and execution of enslaved people,” according to the Ford Foundation.
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In a series of social-media posts, the eldest child of David and Victoria Beckham threw stones at the image of a ‘perfect family’.
3 min
David Beckham was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday with Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan to promote their new partnership. But all anyone wanted to talk about was his son.
After the obligatory questions about business and the World Cup, a host on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” lobbed Beckham an out-of-left-field query about how young people can preserve their mental health in the age of social media.
“Children are allowed to make mistakes,” Beckham, 50, said. “That’s how they learn. So, that’s what I try to teach my kids, but you have to sometimes let them make those mistakes as well.”
Just a day earlier, his 26-year-old son Brooklyn Beckham had posted a series of accusations about his soccer-famous father and pop-star-turned-fashion-designer mother, Victoria Beckham.
He said that his parents had controlled him for years, lied about him to the press and sought to damage his relationship with his wife, Nicola Peltz Beckham. Their goal, he said, was to affect the image of a “perfect family.”
“My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else,” he wrote on Instagram. “Brand Beckham comes first.”
That brand has been burnished over decades of professional triumphs, tabloid scandals and slick dealmaking.
Recently, both David and Victoria Beckham put their legacies on-screen in docuseries that cast them as hardworking entrepreneurs and devoted parents. Their image appeared stronger than ever. Now their firstborn child is throwing stones.
Representatives for David Beckham, Victoria Beckham and Brooklyn Beckham did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for Nicola Peltz Beckham declined to comment.
In the U.K., the Beckhams are as close as you can get to royalty without sharing Windsor DNA. David is perhaps the most famous English player in soccer history, while Victoria parlayed her Spice Girls fame into a career as a respected fashion designer.
Their partnership was forged in the cauldron of 1990s celebrity gossip, with their every move—in their careers, their bumpy personal lives and their adventurous senses of personal style—subject to tabloid scrutiny.
“They were Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce before Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce,” said Elaine Lui, founder of the website Lainey Gossip.
Over time, the couple became savvy managers of their own brand, a sprawling modern empire including a professional soccer team, fashion and beauty lines, investment deals and commercial partnerships.
In recent years they each released a Netflix docuseries—“Beckham” in 2023, “Victoria Beckham” in 2025—featuring scenes from their private family life. (Brooklyn and Nicola appeared in David’s series, but not Victoria’s.)
“The way they’ve performed their celebrity has been togetherness,” Lui said: Appearing and engaging with the world as a happily married couple, in both relative calm and amid scandal. And as their family grew, their four children became smiling ambassadors for Brand Beckham, too.
Until Monday night. In a series of Instagram Story posts, Brooklyn accused his parents of “trying endlessly to ruin” his marriage to Nicola, an actress and model, and the daughter of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz . Brooklyn declared, “I do not want to reconcile with my family.”
Where Victoria and David seemed to see press scrutiny as part of the job, Brooklyn and Nicola are operating in a manner more typical of their own generation. Brooklyn’s posts call to mind the “no contact” boundaries some children have enforced with their parents in recent years to much pop-psych chatter.
Andrew Friedman, managing director of crisis communications at Orchestra, said he’d advised many clients through family drama. “Going public,” he said, should be a “last resort.”
He’s also warned clients that using social media to air grievances opens a can of worms. “Nuance is not welcome in social-media feeding frenzies,” Friedman said. “Sensational and unusual details will overshadow the central issue.”
Brooklyn, the eldest of the Beckhams’ four children, has built a following in his parents’ image, though without the benefit (or burden) of a steady career.
He’s worked as a model, photographer, cooking-show host and most recently founded a hot-sauce brand. Brooklyn and Nicola went public with their relationship in 2020 and married in a lavish 2022 ceremony at her family estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
Rumors of a family feud flared almost immediately after the wedding, including whispers about the fact that Nicola didn’t wear a dress made by her fashion-designer mother-in-law.
Brooklyn on Monday recounted further grievances related to a mother-son dance and the seating chart. In the months and years that followed, celebrity journalists and fans closely tracked both generations of the family, looking for cracks in the relationship.
But official dispatches from Beckham World suggested that things were just fine. In a scene from the final episode of David’s Netflix series, the Beckham family, including Brooklyn and Nicola, joke around on a visit to their country home. It’s a picture of familial bliss.
“We’ve tried to give our children the most normal upbringing as possible. But you’ve got a dad that was England captain and a mom that was Posh Spice,” David says in voice-over.
“And they could be little s—s. And they’re not. And that’s why I say I’m so proud of my children, and I’m so in awe of my children, the way they’ve turned out.”
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