Intelligence, keyword at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025
Publication date: 20.05.2025
This article by Nora Santonastaso was translated by Jan Hoffman
The excitement of visiting the event lies above all in understanding that the new path of architecture thrives on a broad, multifaceted and multi-sector contribution that draws on artificial intelligence in a conscious and innovative way.
The Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 investigates the extra-sectoral relationships of design and construction. The Great Britain pavilion, for example, becomes a place to experiment with the link between architecture and geology.
On 10 May, the doors of the Venice Architecture Biennale, now in its 19th edition, opened on the exhibition project curated by Carlo Ratti. This project strongly focused on technology and its relationship, in its most current and advanced forms, with the environment, the built space and the person, understood as an individual but also as belonging to a collective reality in continuous and multifaceted evolution.
As always, the exhibition can be visited in the two main venues of the Giardini and the Arsenale, as well as in a series of locations scattered throughout the streets and squares of the lagoon city, which retains its charm and, as always, proves capable of inducing reflection and elaboration of what is savoured with the eyes, fingertips and even the nose.
Many installations incorporate deeply communicative and enveloping olfactory supports. These include the sensory exploration Lulebora nuk çel më. Emerging Assemblages curated by the Republic of Kosovo at the Arsenale and the experience offered inside the Qatar temporary pavilion in the Giardini - the latter with the task of hinting, right next to Stirling and Wilford's Electa, at the future permanent structure designed by architect Lina Ghotmeh. It involves a tasting of coffee and dates that anticipates the reflections on the theme of hospitality in architecture developed at the Palazzo Franchetti with the exhibition Beyti Beytak. My home is your home. La mia casa è la tua casa.
Pulling back the heavy black curtain that gives access to the Corderie dell'Arsenale is always an emotional experience. This year perhaps even more so. The exhibition itinerary, in fact, unsettles and amazes from the very first steps: the experience of darkness, heat, artificial lighting and the hum of a myriad of air conditioners suspended to create a dense forest of unhealthy artificiality, then gives way to possibilities and solutions. The exhibition is divided into three sections: Natural Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence and Collective Intelligence.
The exhibition hosted in the Arsenale facilities is structured around scenic installations and project narratives. Once the heavy black curtain giving access to the Corderie is drawn aside, a captivating and disorienting panorama unfolds that denounces the damage caused by global warming.
The keyword is intelligence, expressed in a multitude of proposals. In a broad and distributed selection process, this involves architects and engineers, mathematicians and climate scientists, philosophers and artists, chefs and programmers, writers and carvers, farmers, stylists and many others in the new Biennale.
We are therefore faced with a choral project that, moreover, involves something that is new, but perhaps expected: It is all about artificial intelligence and the presence of anthropomorphic robots, open to dialogue and available to become tools for experimentation and research.
Between the Arsenale and the Giardini, the presence of representatives from the various countries involved, distributed worldwide, remains very strong and deeply personalised. In relation to the age and different architectural articulation - especially in terms of materials and technology - of the permanent structures scattered along the long avenues of the Giardini, on either side of the canal that crosses the exhibition area, the design and history of many pavilions becomes a path of research, an opportunity for redevelopment, exhibition and reinterpretation.
This is the case for Finland, which tells the story of Alvar Aalto, between design and the collective restoration of the old, dilapidated wooden structure. There is also Denmark which, like France, is transforming the construction site into a hybrid space, a symbol of transformation and experimentation with new solutions.
Among the most recurring macro-themes, one that undoubtedly emerges is that of doing and undoing while minimising the impact and waste of resources. It does this both material and human, while at the same time enhancing the design and concrete realisation, including through the support of technological systems.
On the left, a segment of the Gateway to Venice's Waterway, a new entrance to the city through water, designed by the Norman Foster Foundation Team and Porsche. On the right, the project Unraveling: New Spaces, on display at the Serbian Pavilion at the Giardini, which exemplifies the concept of doing and undoing while minimizing impact without compromising the project or the quality of its execution.
For me, the emblem of this research path is encapsulated in the space curated by Serbia, which, with the project Unravelling: New Spaces, constructs a light and dynamic structure through the creative skill of the hand, the enhancement of weaving techniques and the integration of artificial-bionic supports. The sail-like tent, now visible in its entirety inside the pavilion, is being unravelled day by day. On 23 November, at the close of the Biennale, all that will remain will be a series of spools of wool thread, easily transportable and reusable.
One last note: the Italian Pavilion is curated by Guendalina Salimei. The theme TERRÆ AQUÆ. Italy and the intelligence of the sea recounts, through a wide collection of projects selected through an open call, the projects and achievements for the redevelopment and enhancement of over 8,000 km of Italian coastline.
All images © Nora Santonastaso | design outfit