19th Venice Architecture Biennale

The Venice Architecture Biennale, a prestigious international art event, is set to return in 2025 for its 19th edition.  More than just a showcase of innovative building designs, sustainable technologies, and urban planning strategies, the Biennale consistently engages with broader cultural contexts.  The 2025 edition promises to be no different, offering a compelling dialogue with art history, exploring the reciprocal influences between architecture and the art movements that have shaped our understanding of space, form, and function.  This engagement will be manifested through thoughtful installations, comprehensive art exhibitions woven into the architectural displays, and critical analyses of how famous artists have inspired and been inspired by architectural thought throughout the centuries.

The 19th Venice Architecture Biennale traditionally kicked off with the awarding of prizes. The main “Golden Lion” went to the national pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain, which proposed an original way to combat global warming – by creating a lounge area with a cooling ceiling. The “Golden Lion” for “Heatwave” speaks not only to the artistic merits of the project, whose architect was German Andrea Faraguna, engineer Italian Mario Monotti, and thermomechanic a native of the Soviet Union, now living in Switzerland, Alexander Puzrin. It is clear what global problem the curator of the 19th Architecture Biennale, Carlo Ratti, considers key, having defined the theme of the Venetian exhibition as “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” Humankind is not the king of nature; it is time to reckon with the material world and the virtual world on equal footing. Collective intelligence is there to help. We are all part of a single ecosystem and are responsible for it. “The time has come to adapt architecture to a changing world,” Carlo Ratti urged in his manifesto. The “Heatwave” project is the answer that the curator was obviously waiting for.

The “Heatwave”

“Heatwave” is a lounge with sand on the floor, large bags filled with the same material arranged as a sofa around the perimeter, and a cooling ceiling overhead. In the center of the secluded spot in the Arsenale is a column of pipes. It holds a square metal canopy and creates coolness using a passive cooling system based on traditional building practices. Heat from the heated ground is transferred to heat pipes, which dissipate it, thereby cooling the air. A similar system is found in almost every laptop. Here, it is transferred to a different scale and cools not computer intelligence, but human intelligence. A subtle reference to the main theme of the Biennale.

“Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective”

The best project within the main art exhibition “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective” was “Canal Café.” The American studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (which, incidentally, owns the concept of Zaryadye Park) installed a water purification system on the banks of the Grand Canal, which is immediately used to prepare coffee. The entire process is on display to the public: murky, swamp-colored water is transformed into crystal clear water, and then they brew fresh coffee for you from it. A relevant experiment for a city on the water. The Biennale jury noted it precisely for its “contribution to the public space of Venice.”

“Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500–2025”

The “Silver Lion” for “promising participation” in the main art project was awarded to the study “Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500–2025” by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler. Their 24-meter-long diagram is about how power uses technical and scientific achievements for its own purposes – from signal fires and carrier pigeons to artificial intelligence.

The national pavilions of the Vatican and Great Britain deserve special mention. Under the curatorship of Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, the Holy See presented the project “Open Work” (Opera aperta). Visitors find themselves in the midst of restoration work in a conservatory and can observe engineers and builders, as well as play musical instruments and even discuss pressing issues at a round table. The message is clear: the world order needs restoration, and only a “collective mind” can bring it to completion.

“GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair”

The British Pavilion is also about repair, which is understood as a reboot of the world order. “GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair” is the result of a year and a half of collaboration between curatorial teams from the UK and Kenya and is presented by the authors as “a practice of understanding architecture as a vital tool for planetary restoration.” The preamble of the art project is a “beaded embroidery” made from agricultural waste on the facade. The pavilion is as if sprinkled with beads of manure. Inside are six halls that expose the painful colonial problem, along with the environmental one, offering to look at the Earth as a single organism and formulate alternative ways of world-building together. A vivid illustration of the idea is the first hall with the immersive and multi-sensory installation “The Earth Compass”, where the celestial maps of the night sky of London and Nairobi are connected. The images of the sky were taken on December 12, 1963 – the day of Kenya’s liberation from British control. The map shows the aggregate of carbon emissions into the environment, clearly proving that atmospheric pollution knows no national borders.

“Golden Lions”

The names of the recipients of the two “Golden Lions” for lifetime achievement in architecture were known in advance. First and foremost, it was the American Donna Haraway, one of the founders of cyberfeminism, “new materialism,” a central figure in contemporary epistemology and posthumanism. The other “Golden Lion” for overall achievements was awarded posthumously to Italo Rota. The Italian architect and designer, known for the reconstruction of the interiors of the Musée d’Orsay and the creation of the lighting for Notre Dame Cathedral and the banks of the Seine, passed away last year. There is a “blind spot” in this choice. And it’s unlikely that it’s only because Rota studied the latest technologies, experimented with artificial intelligence, and taught students to think non-linearly. “Everything revolves around passion: you must be happy with what you do, because without this feeling, you won’t achieve much,” the Milanese architect used to say.

In Carlo Ratti’s main art project, there is a lot of technology, yet it is created with a very human emotion. His visual statement begins with a stuffy room with non-working air conditioners (the project of climatologists Sonya Seneviratne and David Bresha) and ends with a city capsule deep in the bowels of Mars. In this projection of the future, humanity loses its planet due to global warming, but does not despair, instead colonizing the neighboring one. As the classic writer put it, “Life has defeated death in a way unknown to me.”

The biennale will continue its work until November 23. 66 countries, as well as 750 specialists in the main art exhibition, including not only architects and engineers, but also mathematicians, climatologists, philosophers, artists, programmers, and even farmers and chefs are participating in the art event.