Carlo Ratti’s Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, a preview

Carlo Ratti’s Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, a preview

The 19th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, entitled “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective,” was presented to the press on Tuesday, Feb. 11.
Curated by Carlo Ratti, the exhibition, which will be open to the public from May 10 to Nov. 23, 2025 (with a pre-opening for the press on May 8 and 9), will be staged at the Giardini di Castello, the Arsenale and various venues in Venice.
The awards and opening ceremony will be held on Saturday, May 10, 2025.

Above: photo by Giulio Squillacciotti; courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

The title
Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective is the title of the 19th. International Architecture Exhibition. The Latin term “gens,” or people, underscores the curator’s intention to emphasize intelligence’s broad and inclusive meaning, escaping the limitations of contemporary interpretation obsessively focused on artificial intelligence. In the curator’s words, Intelligens is thus an invitation, a solicitation for “different kinds of intelligence” to collaborate, working together to rethink the built environment.

New challenges for architecture: from mitigation to adaptation
Architecture and planning have tried to respond, with mixed results, to the challenges posed by climatic conditions; but today, Ratti says, the planning approach needs to be taken to a new level, precisely because the climate is becoming less and less forgiving and is surprising us with extreme phenomena, from fires to floods, that we are witnessing with increasing frequency. The year 2024 also marked a critical moment in which the Earth recorded its hottest temperatures ever, pushing global averages well beyond the +1.5°C limit set by the 2016 Paris Accords. And so, extreme phenomena resulting from climate change are pushing us to take more decisive action, moving from mitigation to adaptation; says Ratti “…rethinking the way we design for a profoundly changed world.”

Complexity and collective intelligence
In this Age of Adaptation, architecture, which has always been at the center of the disciplines governing the built environment, can no longer act without the involvement of different expertise.
Says the curator:” In the age of adaptation, architecture must draw on all forms of intelligence: natural, artificial, collective. In the age of adaptation, architecture must address multiple generations and multiple disciplines, from the exact sciences to the arts.”
This Biennale will be a laboratory of new ideas for the future, and will suggest solutions to the most pressing problems of the present: it will present a collection of experimental design proposals inspired by an “intelligence” defined as the ability to adapt to the environment from a wealth of resources and knowledge. The Exhibition envisions architects as “mutagenic agents” (In biology, a chemical or physical agent that causes mutations to occur) capable of triggering processes, learning from multiple disciplines, and advancing by trial and error.

Carlo Ratti, photo by Andrea Avezzù

THE ARSENALE EXHIBITION
The exhibition at the Arsenale’s Corderie opens with some evident data: as global temperatures rise, the world’s population declines. This is the reality that architects must face in the age of adaptation. “Starting here,” Ratti explains, ”visitors will traverse three thematic worlds: Natural Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, and Collective Intelligence.

THE CENTRAL PAVILION
The Central Pavilion at the Giardini is being renovated throughout 2025, so the city of Venice will be the backdrop for a new kind of diffuse exhibition, in which installations, prototypes, and experiments will be scattered among the Giardini, the Arsenale, and other neighborhoods of the lagoon city.

COLLEGE ARCHITECTURE
Eight projects selected for the 2nd edition of Biennale College Architecture 2024-2025: Joelle Deeb (Syrian Arab Republic), Jia Wei Huang (Malaysia), Caterina Miralles Tagliabue (Spain), Agnes Thomasina Parker (England), Lucia Rebolino (Italy), Tanvi Khurmi (Canada), Rita Espinha Dos Santos Abreu Morais (Portugal), Florian Kilian Jaritz (Germany), Franziska Gödicke (Germany), Jaakko Julius Heikkilä (Finland), Emil Oscar Lyytikkä (Finland).
The goal of the Architecture 2025 College is to complement the 19th. International Architecture Exhibition with a research and experimentation laboratory to develop projects that use natural, artificial, and collective intelligence to combat the climate crisis.

SPECIAL PROJECTS by the Venice Biennale
The Margherissima project, inside the Austrian Powder Mill at Fort Marghera in Mestre, focuses on the Marghera area and the polluted area near the Ponte della Libertà bridge. It was conceived by Nigel Coates, Michael Kevern, Guan Lee, John Maybury, and Jan Bunge,  participants in the International Exhibition competition.
The Applied Arts Pavilion, presented for the ninth consecutive year by the Venice Biennale and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is entitled On Storage. Curated by Brendan Cormier, in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), it explores the global architecture of storage spaces in the service of object circulation and includes a new six-channel film, directed by DS+R.

COUNTRIES
66 national participations will hold their exhibitions in the Pavilions at the Giardini (26), the Arsenale (25), and the historic center of Venice (15). Four countries are participating for the first time in the Architecture Biennale: the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Sultanate of Oman, Qatar, and Togo.

ITALIAN PAVILION
The Italian Pavilion at the Tese delle Vergini in the Arsenale, supported and promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, is curated by Guendalina Salimei with the project TERRÆ AQUÆ. Italy and the Intelligence of the Sea.

VENICE PAVILION
The City of Venice is participating in the historic Venice Pavilion at the Giardini with an exhibition entitled Libraries. Building Venetian Intelligence. The exhibition will also be located in other institutional spaces in the city, including the Iuav University.

Canal Café.
Participants:
Aaron Betsky
Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Natural Systems Utilities
SODAI.
Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

La Biennale di Venezia
19th International Architecture Exhibition
Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.
Venice, May 10 to November 23, 2025