A rebuke to Modernism: the Venice Architecture Biennale imagines new ways of building to cope with climate change

A scene of tumbling rocks from Architecton, a film showing various civilisations and buildings rising and collapsing throughout the millennia, is the first exhibit to confront visitors at the entrance to this year’s 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.

The journey continues behind a black curtain where a curving pathway leads through a dark cavernous space filled with raised reflective pools of water by the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s foundation, creating the illusion that with one wrong step you could fall into the abyss. Titled The Third Paradise Perspective, the intertwined circular pools of water are in the shape of the symbol Pistoletto designed years ago to represent his call for a reconciliation between humanity and nature, and in this particular instance, are also intended as a meditation on the projected sea level rise in Venice by the year 2100.

Meanwhile, air conditioners suspended by wires at different heights throughout the space seem to blast visitors with the din of their motors and the heat of their exhaust. (The air conditioners are actually not functional and the heat is coming from hidden compressors above). This installation by the German engineering firm Transsolar KlimaEngineering, one of the many in this year’s Biennale that could easily inhabit an art gallery, invites us to consider the contribution of contemporary technologies to global warming and environmental degradation.

These foreboding exhibits at the Biennale’s entryway, in one of the Corderie—the Renaissance-era buildings formerly used to manufacture ropes for ships—are intended to jar us out of complacency. Noting that 2024 was Earth’s hottest year on record, and that climate change is linked to recent devastating floods, fires and droughts proliferating throughout the world, this year’s curator of the Biennale, Carlo Ratti, is calling for a major break with contemporary architectural practices.

Rebuking the Modern

Indeed, in many ways this year’s Biennale serves as a rebuke to the buildings that have defined the Modern era—constructed from environmentally degrading materials such as steel and concrete, and with indoor environments controlled by carbon-emitting heating, ventilation and cooling systems. Instead, we should be designing in ways outlined in Bernard Rudofsky’s seminal book, Architecture without Architects and incorporating both scientific innovation and indigenous knowledge. “Nature doesn’t have perfect solutions,” Ratti says, “but it tries—and so should we.”

Ratti, a professor at MIT, where he runs a tech-oriented thinktank called the Senseable City Laboratory, gave this year’s Biennale the title Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective to call attention to the different types of knowledge that he says will be necessary to adapt our existing built environment to climate change.

To change the conversation, Ratti decided not to follow the usual practice of inviting a select group of the world’s top and up-and-coming architects, Instead, he issued what he says is the Biennale’s first open call for participants. He ended up choosing more than 300 submissions, a record for the Architecture Biennale, from multidisciplinary teams that include engineers, mathematicians, climate scientists, philosophers, artists, writers, woodcarvers and even fashion designers, as well as architects. “In the face of the climate crisis, imagination alone isn’t enough,” Ratti explains. “Artists and architects need science to provide frameworks and validate possible outcomes.That is why this Biennale is extremely interdisciplinary.”

As a result, this year’s exhibition is a hodgepodge of art projects, ecological design products and esoteric science experiments, many of which incorporate artificial intelligence. And while there are robots zooming around the Corderie, along with one hanging upside down in a steel cage, the palette for the exhibition is predominantly earth tones. The building blocks for the future mostly consist of trees, stones, fungi and newfangled biodegradable materials such as elephant dung bricks.

One exhibit by the Danish Architecture firm BIG features several Bhutanese craftsmen dressed in native attire chiseling images of sinuous dragons and elaborate dharma wheels into large cross-laminate timbers alongside robots who are replicating their work on nearby timbers, a meditation on a future where high-tech learns from and exists alongside traditional art practices (hopefully without supplanting the actual artisans).

Circular economy

While the wide array of exhibits does feel chaotic, most at least pay lip service to the Biennale’s circular economy manifesto and are recyclable or reusable in some fashion.

Showcasing alternatives to milled wood beams, which generate considerable waste, several exhibits feature structures built from whole trees. The irregular forms have been optimised for assembly and stability through 3D scanning and artificial intelligence.

One Biennale special project even displays whole trees supporting floors in a house in lieu of traditional columns and beams. Sheila Kennedy, a landscape architect who is one of the designers of the arboreal building model, says the tree technology has recently been made available for the consumer market. In addition to being more eco-friendly, whole trees are stronger than manmade beams, she points out. “Trees have a natural intelligence that our own culture hasn’t taken advantage of,” she says.

Cities of heat

A major theme at the Biennale is adaptation, and several exhibits reveal how changes to existing building exteriors can deal with the urban heat island effect. One has a system of awnings and porches overflowing with plants grafted onto historic Parisian Haussmann-style houses to mitigate rising temperatures. If implemented at scale, it would totally transform the City of Light.

Adapting to a hotter dryer future may also mean changing contemporary approaches to preserving historic buildings. Standing in front of historic stone building fragments he borrowed from the Veneto region, architect Andrés Jaque argues that Western preservation practices which involve wiping historic stone surfaces clean of organic matter are actually damaging, unlike indigenous approaches, such as those practised by the Quechua Indians, who used to throw blood on their stone temples. Jaque says the organic material that accrues on a stone’s surface over time helps preserve it and even sequesters carbon through biomineralisation.

When the visitor emerges from the cavernous Corderie in need of respite from the visual and information overload, there is a convenient rest stop near a canal at the Cool Forest exhibition. It consists of a portable grove of trees growing in sackcloth-covered beds of coconut rinds that serve as benches. The idea could someday be deployed throughout cities as “climatic adaptive urban infrastructure” to help mitigate rising temperatures and aridity in cities without substantial soil beds, such as Venice.

The drinkable canal

Adjacent to Cool Forest is Canal Café, a contraption with a tube leading from a canal to elevated vats stuffed with green biomass designed by a team that included Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architects behind museums such as The Broad in Los Angeles. The installation, which won the Biennale’s Golden Lion Award, filters water from the city’s lagoon, and is used to make coffee for visitors.

Over in the Giardini, among the the national pavilions, the scene is presided over by a series of eight banners by fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg and Greek artist Konstantin Kakanias in a colourful naive-style that portray Venice as a woman and show scenes of her influence on the world as a muse, diplomat, financier etc.

Several of the projects in the Giardini that most directly address Ratti’s guidelines about adaptation and the circular economy use the pavilion architecture as the basis of their actual exhibit. The British pavilion’s Geology of Britannic Repair, which won a special mention from the Biennale’s jury, has façade of clay and agricultural waste briquettes. It highlights eco-friendly indigenous building practices as part of a dialogue between Kenya and Britain that links colonialism with the very materials the pavilion is built from—the product of the polluting industries that are a common target of opprobrium at many exhibits throughout the Biennale.

Salvage cycle

The Danish pavilion’s exhibit features an eco-oriented renovation. Visitors can sit amid piles of rubble on a bench made from a salvaged material and watch a documentary about how the pavilion’s crumbling concrete floor can be chopped up and reassembled into slabs and terrazzo to construct a new one.

Over at the Belgian pavilion, an exhibit explores the potential of living trees to supplant mechanical air conditioning and ventilation systems. It consists of a biosphere hooked up to biometric devices that measure the health of the trees as well as their potential to cool and purify the air throughout the pavilion.

Indeed, throughout this year’s Biennale, the lack of exhibits showcasing completely new edifices in favour of those that emphasise adaptations to existing ones and a more multi-disciplinary adaptive approach is a humbling of sorts for the architectural profession. But then, the advent of artificial intelligence and the growing prominence of professions such as landscape architecture is already diminishing the role of trained architects. This year’s Biennale certainly raises questions about the responsibility of contemporary architectural practices in contributing to climate change. It also provides a slew of interesting and entertainingly displayed models for a radically different approach.