In the lagoon of Venice, where time often feels suspended between stone and sea, the 19th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia offers a surprisingly future-facing provocation. Under the curatorship of Carlo Ratti, this year’s edition—titled Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.—places A.I. at the core of architectural thinking.
But this Biennale is not about automating buildings or generating sleek facades with machine learning, as one may expect. Instead, it asks a deeper question: What does intelligence mean in a world reshaped by climate collapse, demographic implosion and information overload?
This is an Architecture Biennale less concerned with form and more focused on mind. It offers not so much a display of buildings (or even ideas for these), but a map of how intelligence, one which is algorithmic, biological and communal, is reshaping the built world. And so, amid rising seas and increasingly autonomous systems, this edition casts architecture as a matter of survival. “Architecture must learn. Must listen. Must adapt,” declares Ratti in his opening statement. Here, the exhibition pivots from mitigation to mutation, positioning A.I. not as an assistant but as a co-author in the transformation of our environments.
From mitigation to mutation
Architecture, once obsessed with mitigation in the forms of carbon-neutral footprints, smart buildings and biomimicry, has been asked here to mutate. Ratti’s curatorial framework proposes that the era of mitigation is over. “Adaptation,” he insists, “must take center stage.” In this spirit, A.I. is not a tool but a collaborator, an intelligence that co-designs with humans, with nature and even with the built environment itself. Think less AutoCAD, more co-evolutionary symbiosis.
In the Corderie dell’Arsenale, visitors are met with a stark visual reflection: global temperatures rising while global population trends shrink. From this point, the exhibition unfolds across three interlocking thematic ecosystems: Natural Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence and Collective Intelligence.
Algorithm as architect
A.I. is no longer a buzzword. One of the standout clusters, “Robotic Constructs: New Human-Machine Alliances,” showcases projects that rethink the very language of architecture through sensors, actuators and predictive modeling.
Take A Robot’s Dream by Gramazio Kohler Research at ETH Zurich which offers an unsettling and beautiful meditation on autonomous design where robot arms learn spatial choreography from biological forms. In Machine Mosaic, MIT’s Daniela Rus envisions modular buildings that reconfigure themselves in real-time through robotic networks. It is a vision of architecture of flux, a discipline rethinking not only form, but cognition.
MIT’s Senseable City Lab contributes Data Clouds, a spatial system powered by environmental data streams that transforms weather fluctuations,
In Co-Poiesis by Philip Yuan and Bin He, led by Tongji University and Hangzhou’s Unitree Robotics, A.I. and robotics guide a collaborative process of material design, where additive manufacturing becomes a dialogue. Architecture here is open-ended, reactive and alive.
Aesthetics of intelligence: A.I., ethics and ecologies
But the Biennale is not starry-eyed. Several installations engage critically with the implications of A.I. and automation. Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s “Calculating Empires” (an art world’s darling project these days, just shown simultaneously at both the Media Majlis Museum at Northwestern Qatar in Doha and at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo) provides a forensic genealogy of A.I. as a system of extraction, from lithium mines to data centers. Their cartographies reveal how intelligence, both artificial and colonial, has always depended on networks of power, resources and invisibility.
This critical thread continues in the Italian Pavilion. Terrae Aquae. Italy and the Intelligence of the Sea, curated by Guendalina Salimei. Here, intelligence is not digital but tidal. The Mediterranean is rendered as a neural network of currents, coasts and ancient maritime knowledge. It’s a counterpoint to Silicon Valley’s take on intelligence: slippery, unstable and entirely intertidal.
Computational A.I., in this context, becomes epistemological: a way of knowing and unknowing. The most progressive projects here ask: What if we trained an algorithm not on real estate data, but on the rustle of leaves, the rhythm of tides or the collective memory of displaced communities?
Venice as a platform
Perhaps the most radical gesture of this Biennale is architectural rather than aesthetic. Venice itself becomes a lab. With the Central Pavilion under renovation, the city is the exhibition. The streets, canals, courtyards and ruins of La Serenissima host installations that rethink mobility, heat, sound and social encounter. Installations, performances and prototypes across the Giardini, Arsenale and beyond turn the city into a feedback system where natural, artificial and collective intelligences collide.
At the Arsenale, The Tide by Marco Bressan and team deploys interactive buoys in the Venetian canals. These devices “listen” to the voices of young people around the world, collecting hopes, fears and visions for climate futures and translating them through A.I. into sound and light installations. Intelligence, here, is polyphonic and political.
In the Giardini, Andrés Jaque’s Transspecies Kitchen reimagines intelligence as digestion. Fermentation becomes a metaphor for interspecies communication. Bacteria, humans and data converge in a performative space where food becomes code and ecosystems are tasted, not visualised. Elsewhere, Gateways to Venice’s Waterways imagines new forms of aquatic movement that meld natural forms with electric propulsion. Designed by the Norman Foster Foundation and Porsche, it’s as if a gondola met a Tesla in a dream.
This approach, using Venice as a thought platform rather than a show container, reframes the entire premise of the Biennale. Architecture is not something to be preserved in vitrines or galleries. It is something to be rehearsed, contested, hacked and prototyped in the real world.
Intelligence is circular
A deeper thread weaves through the Biennale’s material construction itself: circularity. The exhibition embraces a radical version of the circular economy, laid out in its own manifesto co-developed with Arup and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
Pavilions are modular, prefabricated and designed for disassembly. Over 50 percent of materials are recycled, reused or reclaimed. Zero construction waste is the aim. The majority of the exhibition is built from recycled wood panels that will be shredded and reconstituted into new materials post-show. Even the architectural imagination is treated as an organism: regenerative, adaptive, alive.
One standout in this framework is Constructing La Biennale, a project by Northeastern University and the Politecnico di Torino by Albert-László Barabási and Paolo Ciuccarelli. A fake layered façade tells the story of the Biennale itself since its beginning 45 years ago, documenting how curatorial vision, material flows and environmental impact are entangled. “We ended up exploring the full history of the Biennale,” Barabási says, “mapping out the 12,000 architects that were exhibited since 1974 and their 3,800 projects—and identifying the network that connects them all.”
“Mapping out every single project and every architect from the history of the Biennale was a massive data science project,” he continues. “We had to find out who was there every year, who helped the project and in what capacity.”
Map of Glass, a haunting topographic rendering of Venice made from recycled glass and organic cement by Barkow Leibinger, turns the city into a bio-digital diagram—mapping fragility, memory and heat flow in architectural materiality.
Intelligence is not a thing
What ultimately binds the Biennale is not a definition of intelligence, but a refusal to define it. Ratti’s Intelligens is a neologism, yes, but also a provocation. Intelligence is not confined to ChatGPT or quantum processors. It emerges from fermentation (see Transspecies Kitchen), from protest architecture, from the sounds of crickets long thought extinct and now amplified in Venice’s urban “sound gardens.”
The Biennale proposes that intelligence may no longer reside in objects, but rather in relations between disciplines, between species, between past and future. In this sense, it is deeply aligned with the emerging ethos of “hyper-imaging” that we have theorised: where architecture no longer represents space, but enacts it; where the drawing is the protocol for collective emergence.
Are we at the edge of a new architectural renaissance?
Biennale Architettura 2025 offers then no singular vision. Instead, it offers a score, a chain reaction, an invitation. We can read it in five minutes or live it over five days. Either way, the message is urgent: Architecture is not about form. It is about the survival of places, peoples and plural intelligences. And perhaps that is its greatest intelligence of all.
This year’s Biennale resists spectacle in favor of inquiry. It offers scaffolds: spaces to think, to test, to rehearse forms of life. As curators ourselves, we see this almost as a turning point. Architecture in this acceptance is not a style, but a strategy.
Ratti’s title, Intelligens, is indeed a linguistic invention. But it is also a provocation. What if intelligence is not the outcome of systems but the space between them? What if the future of architecture is not built but grown, whispered into existence by machines, microbes and communities alike? In this age of adaptation, the most radical architecture may not be what we build, but how, and with whom, we imagine building at all.
