Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: Intelligence, Imagination & Interdependence
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Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: “Intelligens” explores how collective intelligence can reshape the built environment.
Curated by Carlo Ratti, this 19th edition of La Biennale di Venezia proposes a regenerative, collaborative, and radically inclusive vision of architecture. Organized into four thematic spaces—Ideas, Collaboration, Planet, and Visionaries—the international exhibition centers on ecological interdependence, transdisciplinary design, and the power of community-led innovation. With 66 national pavilions and the first-ever open call, this year’s Biennale challenges both who architecture is for and what it’s made from.
Reflection Questions
Where does intelligence in architecture reside?
Is it in the individual, the collective, or the ecological system? How does that inform your current design practice?
What does regenerative design look like beyond aesthetics?
Are your projects truly circular in logic, or only in language?
How can architecture be made more polyphonic?
Whose voices are currently absent from your process, and how might you design with—not just for—others?
Journal Prompt
Imagine your next project as if it were part of Biennale Architettura 2025.
How would your approach change if you had to design with biologists, community organizers, and AI researchers at the table? Sketch or describe how this expanded “intelligens” might reshape your process—from materials to authorship to impact.
From May 10 to November 23, 2025, the 19th International Architecture Exhibition takes over Venice with bold, cerebral, and deeply collaborative energy. Curated by Carlo Ratti, an architect-engineer and MIT professor known for his transdisciplinary vision, the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 arrives with a singular title: “Intelligens”. Exceeding any surface-level reference to natural or artificial intelligence, Ratti reframes “intelligence” through the Latin “gens”—meaning “people”—to emphasize collective creativity and ecological interdependence, as explained in his curatorial statement. This year’s Biennale is less about static knowledge and more about dynamic networks: embodied intelligence, collective agency, and regenerative design. Read onto learn more about this year’s ongoing Biennale.
A Brief History of the Biennale
Since its architectural debut in 1980 under Paolo Portoghesi’s Strada Novissima, the Venice Architecture Biennale has evolved from a Eurocentric exhibition into one of the most globally inclusive and thematically urgent platforms in architecture and the built environment. With each edition, it redefines the limits of the discipline.
Ratti’s 2025 curatorship builds on this legacy, following Rem Koolhaas’s taxonomies of modernity in 2014, Alejandro Aravena’s call for social engagement in 2016, and Lesley Lokko’s 2023 focus on decolonization and decarbonization. But rather than offering a linear narrative, Ratti proposes a choral model of authorship, one shaped by farmers, coders, climate scientists, AI researchers, artisans, and architects working together. Intelligence, in this frame, is an emergent property of collaboration.
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This Year’s Biennale: The Four Spaces of Intelligens
The International Exhibition spans four thematic zones, each hosted across the Giardini and Arsenale. These include the following.
- Space for Ideas – A curatorial showcase of architecture’s intellectual and speculative potential.
- Space for Collaboration – A platform for interdisciplinary work, highlighting shared processes between design and other fields.
- Space for the Planet – Projects that directly engage ecological systems, from bio-materials to planetary urbanism.
- Space for Visionaries – Featuring unconventional thinkers across art, fashion, and activism who are reshaping our notions of space.
“To face a burning world, architecture must harness all the intelligence around us.”
— Carlo Ratti, Biennale Architettura 2025
One of this year’s most radical interventions is the Circularity Manifesto, co-developed with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and Arup. It challenges the Biennale to lead by example in regenerative exhibition-making—featuring recyclable scaffolding, mushroom-based insulation, and AI-generated, fully demountable structures. Even signage and pavilions were constructed from low-impact or bio-sourced materials, emphasizing circular logic over visual excess.
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Notably, Biennale Architettura 2025 features the first open call in the Biennale’s history, enabling lesser-known collectives and emerging studios to exhibit alongside world-renowned names like Studio Gang, Bas Smets, and Tosin Oshinowo. This restructuring of curatorial access reflects Ratti’s commitment to a broader, more democratic architecture.
National Pavilions: Geopolitics Through Space
With 66 national participations, the national pavilions are both reflections and critiques of each country’s architectural priorities and political climate. The Korea Pavilion meditates on aging and spatial care through multimedia installation. The German Pavilion challenges traditional exhibition formats with a “non-pavilion” strategy that addresses reconstruction and memory. The Mexico Pavilion offers a searing look at informal housing and community-led renovation, while the Polish Pavilion turns inward, examining the intimate architectures of domesticity in post-pandemic Poland.
The Hong Kong Archive, a collateral event supported by the Hong Kong Institute, explores the urban palimpsest of the Pearl River Delta through archival material, virtual reality, and community mapping. Countries like Togo, Qatar, and Oman present Biennale debuts that are modest in scale but expansive in implication, signaling a tectonic shift in who gets to define architectural relevance.
Each national pavilion extends the conversation started in the Central Pavilion to create a vast, polyphonic display of installations, prototypes, films, and provocations.
Critique, Friction, and Future Heritage
The Biennale thrives not only on harmony but on contradiction. Some critics have noted the performativity of “green” aesthetics, questioning whether regenerative language always translates to regenerative practice. Others raise concerns about the exhibition’s intellectual density and its ability to connect with broader publics.
Yet Biennale Architettura does not shy away from complexity. As Andrea Avezzù’s photography of the installations reveals, beauty and tension often coexist. The Biennale invites us to live in the friction between spectacle and substance, between optimism and urgency.
Honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award, botanist Stefano Mancuso has long argued that plants possess their own form of intelligence, challenging the anthropocentric bias in architecture. He urges us to think like ecosystems, blending human design within living systems.
Biennale 2025: Venice as Catalyst
The city itself plays co-author this year. In venues as intimate as church crypts and as grand as the Arsenale, the Biennale spills into the fabric of Venice, which is a place both fragile and resilient. Visitors encounter not only bold architectural statements but an urban environment already grappling with the very issues under debate: rising seas, declining populations, and heritage under siege.
Workshops, events, and university-led special projects punctuate the Biennale calendar. Pop-up salons and roving panels blur the line between formal presentation and spontaneous exchange, drawing voices from London, São Paulo, Kigali, and Seoul. The full program is available via the Biennale website, where tickets, schedules, and accessibility options can be found.
In this space where designers, curators, exhibitors, and the public meet, the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 stakes a powerful claim: that architecture is not a noun, but a verb. A practice. A process. A collective act of intelligence—alive, responsive, and profoundly necessary.
The full program—including opening hours, ticketing, and event details—is available at labiennale.org.
Related Reading
Don’t miss our in-depth interview with curator Carlo Ratti, featured in DesignDash Magazine (Spring/Summer 2025) — available now online.
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