Earth Compass
29 April – 12 July 2026
Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland is hosting installations and works from the award‑winning British Pavilion exhibition of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025.
Presented under the title Earth Compass elements from the Venice exhibition are situated in dialogue with house’s cavernous burnt-out interior and the coal that lay beneath the ground on which it stands.
Seaton Delaval Hall was designed by Sir John Vanbrugh in 1718 and is an acknowledged masterpiece of the English Baroque. The house’s history is tight interwoven with mining. The Delaval family made significant investments to improve the nearby seaport at Seaton Sluice where coal was shipped to London where it became fuel that powered the British Empire.
Colonisation exported the processes of geological extraction pioneered in the North East of England to the world. These processes have led directly to the present climate emergency unfolding globally – in which the built environment is deeply implicated as a major emitter of carbon.
The installations from the British Pavilion bring this history to the fore, while proposing new possibilities for imagining ‘other architectures’ that rebuild our connections to the Earth.