S-O-S! Intelligence overload in Venice! After curator Lesley Lokko’s decolonial tour-de-force in 2023 and expected big-firm complaints about the lack of actual buildings in the so-called Architecture Biennale, this year’s edition, titled “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.,” is a messy, multidisciplinary smorgasbord, heavy on the science. While the three sub-genres of intelligence identified by head curator Carlo Ratti inspired cogent, poetic responses among the national pavilions, the mashing together of everything from wood-working robots (artificial) and infrasonic elephant drones (natural) to housing rights activism (collective) in the Arsenale is jarring and, despite the clever title, ultimately half-baked.
“In the face of the climate crisis, imagination alone isn’t enough,” Ratti, director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, explains in his lead curatorial text. “Artists and architects need science to provide frameworks and validate possible outcomes. That is why this Biennale is extremely interdisciplinary.” It’s both valiant and true, but his inclusive approach does no favors in making sense of the chaos we’re living through and the intelligence our survival demands. Despite a spatially smaller footprint – the Padiglione Centrale in the Giardini is under construction – the main exhibition somehow crams 750 participants into the long reaches of the Arsenale’s Corderie. Ratti and team abdicated a “top-down” project selection in favor of an open call, from which three hundred projects were chosen. For the weary visitor, it leads to delightful and geeky discoveries of new architectural materials and applications, plus a fair amount of textual gobbledygook and unlikely adjacencies. More on those later.
Outside the Corderie slog, ther are instances of greater clarity and levity. Take, for example, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s witty realization of their 2008 proposal to make espresso from lagoon water. For €1.60, you can sip a bio-filtrated, pretty-regular-tasting cup of joe. Despite its gimmicky, déjà vu quality, it won this year’s Golden Lion for best participation. Playful critique also animates three standout national pavilions. Poland pivots on the paraphernalia that make us feel “safe” in buildings, interspersing CCTV cameras and burglar alarms with superstitious items like wiecha, or wreaths that customarily protect new buildings from malevolent spirits. Plus, a crowd hit: a mosaiced shrine to the fire extinguisher. Serbia suspends a cloud-like cascade of knitted fabric hooked up to a wall of rotating spools. Over the next six months, the structure should slowly unravel to nothing – a “demolition performance” teasing architects to design ephemeral structures. Lastly, Estonia takes to the street, marring the façade of a palazzetto along a main Venetian promenade with the same ugly insulation panels used to clad the country’s Soviet-era housing blocks. “Look, how ugly!” it shouts in response to an EU-led energy efficiency drive that would make many Italians, fierce preservationists, hurl.
View of “Lares and Penates: On Building a Sense of Security in Architecture,” Pavilion of POLAND, Venice, 2025. Photo: Luca Capuano
View of “Unravelling New spaces,” Pavilion of SERBIA, Venice, 2025. Photo: Luca Capuano
As always, the best pavilions are those that point to a problem and demonstrate a solution to it aesthetically (it is a Biennale, after all, and not a trade fair). Canada stands out with four HR Giger-esque bio-sculptures made of marine cyanobacteria, or picoplankton. This 2.4-billion-year-old life form was “responsible for decreasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and creating the oxygen-rich environment of today.” Thrusting out of a black pool, the alien-like forms are mesmerizing while packing a scientific punch. On the human side of things, Bahrain builds a 1:1 suspended shade canopy. Through passive architectural design, a tubular central column circulates cool air onto an inviting circle of bean-bag seating. Its immediate practical application, in a deadly-hot country where migrant laborers have few rights, earned it the Golden Lion for best national participation.
View of “Picoplanktonies,” Pavilion of CANADA, Venice, 2025. Photo: Luca Capuano
View of “Heatwave,” Pavilion of BAHRAIN, Venice, 2025. Photo: Andrea Avezzù
In the Giardini, many country pavilions were closed on account of war (Russia and Israel) or renovation (France and Czechia). Set against the cacophony of the Arsenale, it’s a blessing. Several European countries indulge in the navel-gazey cliché of obsessing over the lore and materiality of their own pavilions (Switzerland, Finland, Denmark). More compelling as critical engagements were those like Belgium – where leafy, airport-style planters turn the Art Nouveau pavilion into a greenhouse harnessing the “natural intelligence of plants … to produce an indoor climate” – and the Netherlands – whose “queer sports bar” imagines how the collective redesign of sport can minimize conflict.
View of “Building Biospheres,” Pavilion of BELGIUM, Venice, 2025. Photo: Luca Capuano
View of “A Space to Rethink Togetherness,” Pavilion of The NETHERLANDS, Venice, 2025. Photo: Marco Zorzanello
The German pavilion is troubling, and intentionally so. The curators sought to turn urban climate change into a “physical and psychological experience” by creating contrasting “stress” and “de-stress” rooms. In the main room, images of generic-landscapes and housing projects blink across a vast screen, soundtracked by opera, before a ball of fire emerges to destroy the new urbanist idyll. In one side room, a cluster of trees in burlap bags suggests the radical idea that planting trees in cities is a good thing. Across the way, heating mats hang in rows from the ceiling, blasting visitors like café terrace lamps to simulate a future of extreme warming. The whole thing feels like badly executed disaster porn.
View of “STRESSTEST,” Pavilion of GERMANY, Venice, 2025. Photo: Marco Zorzanello
View of “Let me warm you,” Pavilion of ESTONIA, Venice, 2025. Photo: Andrea Avezzù
If Germany’s pavilion is a downer, it highlights in counterpoint one triumph of Ratti’s curatorial framework. Despite its overwhelming nature, the Biennale brims with a rare quality for 2025: optimism. Inspired by the collaborative model of authorship found in academic papers, the main exhibition is intended to create a “networked super-organism.” And, thanks to the clubby installation design by Berlin studio sub, the too-many-headed show achieves a uniform aesthetic in the mood of a sci-fi film.
Aurelia Institute, Heatherwick studio & Brent Sherwood, Space Garden, 2025. Installation view, “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.,” La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2025. Photo: Marco Zorzanello
Where Ratti allows the mood to spin out too far, however, the Biennale loses focus. After intellectually bushwhacking your way past “algorithmically designed 3D printed oyster reefs” and an “elephant dung chapel” in the “Natural Intelligence” section, you land in the edgier world of “Artificial Intelligence.” At first, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Silver Lion-winning mega-diagram lays out what’s at stake. Three meters tall and twenty-four-meters wide, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500 (2023) “follows the relationship of technology and power across five centuries of empire in order to give a deeper historical understanding of the current tech oligarchy.” But this political clarity about where we are now and where we risk going with AI quickly recedes in an onslaught of drum-beating, spritz-making, and even nightmare-dreaming anthropomorphic robots. While Ratti told Dezeen before the May opening that “this certainly won’t be the tech bro biennale,” the presence of things like speculative moonsuits and designer Thomas Heatherwick’s proposal for a salad-growing satellite belie the curator’s confidence.
Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler, Calculating Empires: A Geneology of Technology and Power Since 1500, 2023. Installation view, “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.,” La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2025. Photo: Luca Capuano
The Biennale’s cry for “Collective Intelligence” is less flashy but most actionable; in fact, many of the tools it requires are already among us. The Austrian pavilion, far from futuristic, is nonetheless one of the most radical. Split in two, it juxtaposes bottom-up squatting movements in Rome with top-down government planning in “Red Vienna” – two sides of the same left-wing aspiration to provide working-class people with affordable housing. There are macro-economic analyses, as well as a rap video from a Roman suburb. At another moment, a searing quote from early 20th-century Viennese philosopher Moritz Schlick flashes across a screen: “Humanity is undeniably in possession of all means necessary to eliminate existential hardship from the face of the earth. Why doesn’t it put them to use? We all know the answer: Because it does not want to.”
View of “Agency For Better Living,” Pavilion of AUSTRIA, Venice, 2025. Photo: Luca Capuano
Despite the bevy of well-known designers given center stage, some more fringe voices did percolate through the “bottom-up” open call. One unlikely, but fruitful adjacency comes from The Architecture Lobby, a labor action group in New York. Right next to the discourse pit where starchitects and academic bigwigs will host roundtables through November, it hung a sign declaring “THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNPAID LABOR.” Only later, when I got home, did I read the back of the postcard I picked up from their installation: “Climate Justice is a political problem and will not be solved by technological means.” Yes, right. Technology will surely help us, but we’ve known we’re destroying the environment for decades, and we keep doing it. Knowledge is power but politics is a choice.
The Architecture Lobby, Organizing in the Lobby, 2025. Installation view, “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.,” La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2025. Photo: Andrea Avezzù
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19th International Architecture Exhibition
“Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.”
Arsenale, the National Pavilions of the Giardini, and Forte Marghera, Venice
10 May – 23 Nov 2025