Venice Biennale: Can Architecture Rescue the Future?

A sign about two-thirds of the way around the Arsenale reads: ‘We are fucked! You can change it!’ The statement by HouseEurope! responds to curator Carlo Ratti’s emphatic call to engage with urgent environmental issues in his exhibition for the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, ‘Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.’ His show features more than 750 participants, from farmers to fashion designers, and over 280 projects spread throughout the Arsenale and across the city. In the Giardini, the national pavilions – which don’t fall under Ratti’s curatorial purview – mostly house collaborations between architects, researchers, artists and others. Ratti’s central questions in curating the exhibition are: What will the climate be like in the future and how can architecture adapt to meet it?

The Arsenale segment of the show sees projects from across the globe coalesce to address everything from what to do with the excess heat expelled by underground city infrastructure to how banana fibre might be an inventive new building material. There’s a slow-moving mechanical arm that 3D-prints miniature landscapes (Geological Microbial Formations, all works 2025), wrinkly triangular tiles designed to encourage the growth of underwater algae (Blue Garden), a giant canopy knitted from ‘DNA-encoded yarn’ (Necto) and every conceivable type of brick.

The most successful presentations show rather than tell, especially when the membrane between their conception and realization is thin. The written language of architecture is exhausting in its banality and lack of specificity, with questions like ‘Is it possible to make what seems impossible possible?’ printed on oversized boards. As a viewing experience, the Biennale can feel like reading a repetitive textbook in need of a tighter edit.

The first room is hot – literally – and contains suspended air-conditioning units and a pool of what looks to be oil. It’s a promising opening devised by climate scholars Sonia Seneviratne and David Bresch in collaboration with Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte, Transsolar and environmental historian Daniel A. Barber (The Third Paradise Perspective / Terms and Conditions). Heat and visuals combine to offer a vision of a future in which the temperature has soared. Perhaps this unity of concept and execution is a model for engaging the wider public in complex architectural theory.

Given the academic rigour and lengthy preamble that accompanies the majority of the projects, the lingering question is: How can these ideas effectively leave the page? I find myself drawn to works that somehow fold the research into the delivery, such as Ireland’s presentation, Assembly, in which Cotter & Naessens Architects, architect and poet Michelle Delea, curator Luke Naessens, woodworker Alan Meredith and sound artist David Stalling have created a wooden structure that facilitates ‘non-hierarchical communication between strangers’, activating one of Ratti’s central tenets: the collective.

This sense of communality and collaboration is a beautiful dimension of the Architecture Biennale – one that challenges the notion of a singular master. It’s humbling to learn about projects like Margherissima, for which Nigel Coates Studio has worked with students from the Architectural Association School of Architecture to conceptualize a new neighbourhood for the lagoon. 

With the International pavilion in the Giardini closed for refurbishment, Ratti has elected to frame the city itself as a ‘lab’ for projects that might typically have been housed there. Broadly, these endeavours address the technological futureproofing of Venice against the consequences of climate change: the Norman Foster Foundation has teamed up with Aerotrope, BAU + Empty and Porsche to reimagine the aquatic transport networks (Gateway to Venice’s Waterway); Diller Scofidio + Renfro worked with Aaron Betsky, Natural Systems Utilities, chef Davide Oldani and SODAI to transform the languid water of the canals into ‘the best espresso in Italy’ (Canal Café); and fashion icon Diane von Fürstenberg has unexpectedly stepped up to ‘turn Venice’s femininity into resilience’ (La Libreria). I find solace in the idea that the end of the world could be accompanied by Von Fürstenberg and canal macchiato.

Over at the Giardini, my standout offerings are, again, those that stage their theories. The Plano Coletivo group, in the brutalist Brazilian pavilion, presents its research on a wobbling, self-supporting table that embodies the precarity of conditions in the Amazon, as explored in their project RE(INVENTION). Meanwhile, at the Nordic pavilion, artist Teo Ala-Ruona performs with three others – naked or partially clothed trans and non-binary people – inviting audience members to draw on their bodies in pen, mapping notions of gender onto space (Industry Muscle). Finally, in a presentation almost devoid of text, the Living Room Collective’s Picoplanktonics at the Canadian pavilion features 3D-printed structures containing live cyanobacteria, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, hardening as they do so.

As one architect tells me: ‘We’re haunted by the idea that construction and architecture contribute to 40 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.’ With this in mind, the Biennale might feel like a stab at industry absolution. However, water purification systems to make nice coffee and tiles designed to harbour rare algae represent the kinds of technologies essential for addressing the consequences of those emissions. So, since we clearly are fucked, can we change it? Ratti seems to have forgone blue-sky idealism in favour of technological pragmatism in the face of inevitable climate change. I leave with the hope that some of the propositions – from the sublime to the ridiculous – might come to fruition.

^{Main image: The Living Room Collective, Picoplanktonics, Canada Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2025, installation detail. Courtesy: the Canada Council for the Arts and the Living Room Collective; photograph: Girts Apskalns}