Three forms of intelligence to rethink the way we build and inhabit the world. Natural, artificial, collective: the Biennale Architettura 2025 explores how these forces have shaped cities and how they can guide future choices. Starting from Venice
A title, a single word with multiple meanings: Intelligens, recalls intelligence in all its forms—natural, artificial, collective—and at the same time contains the Latin root of gens, meaning community, people.
The 19th International Architecture Exhibition—from Saturday, May 10 to Sunday, November 23 (preview May 8-9)—transforms into a widespread laboratory, among pavilions, experimental projects, and visions for the future.
The Turin-born architect and engineer Carlo Ratti, curator of the Biennale Architettura 2025 and director of the MIT Senseable City Lab, starts from a clear vision: architecture is an interweaving of possibilities made of experiments, installations, and provocative scenarios, designed to dialogue with science, technology, the environment, and people, necessary to address ongoing transformations and find new answers. Venice is the place to put them to the test.
The Exhibition Path
The exhibition opens with an immersion into the future: at the Corderie dell’Arsenale, transformed into a flooded landscape, a Venice one hundred years from now is simulated. Thanks to studies by scientists, architects, and engineers, this scenario comes to life, offering a concrete vision of what could happen.
“The climate crisis is a fact and is accelerating faster than expected. Architecture must stay one step ahead as a means to rethink the way we live, build, and adapt to ongoing transformations”. Architects and non-architects have been invited to present projects, promote a circular economy, involve students and emerging professionals, with the goal of charting new routes for the future.
The exhibition then moves to another epochal transition: the rapid global demographic decline. An imminent phenomenon destined to transform the way cities develop and are populated. What does it mean to build in a world that is no longer growing?
Three main sections structure the exhibition path:
- Natural Intelligence
Nature’s strategies as models for architecture, following the logic of organic structures, bio-inspired materials, replicable ecological balances. - Artificial Intelligence
The evolution of AI (which goes beyond ChatGPT) in design and construction, through generative algorithms, automation, synergies between humans and machines. - Collective Intelligence
The architecture of the future is an open process, capable of responding to global challenges. How shared human experience and participatory processes can shape new spaces and living models.
Out is the final part of Carlo Ratti’s Biennale, which shifts the gaze beyond the boundaries of our planet to question how to build in still unexplored contexts. The themes are: architecture for space, extraterrestrial exploration, future habitats on other worlds.
Venice: Container and Content of the Biennale
For the first time in the history of the Biennale, the Central Pavilion at the Giardini will be closed for renovation. This will alter the dynamics of the Biennale, which will spread throughout the city more than in previous editions, transforming Venice into a living laboratory.
Architects, scientists, urban planners, and engineers will work in the field, developing ideas that can be applied to the city and other urban contexts with similar characteristics or issues. The relationship with the citizens and inhabitants of Venice will be central, taking the form of a plan to listen to and observe their reactions.
A Kaleidoscope of Stories and Ideas
The invitation to participating countries is to embrace the common theme One Place, One Solution, through an approach designed to show how human ingenuity can respond to contemporary challenges collaboratively.
The proposal is therefore to gather the best examples of already realized projects and success stories, which become a sort of handbook for a better future, in order to foster the exchange of ideas and virtuous practices among different international realities.
A further objective of the Biennale is coordination and coherence: Ratti hopes to strengthen a strong connection between the National Pavilions and the main theme of the Exhibition, so as to create a unified and synergistic exhibition path.
Among the new features of this edition are 66 national participations, which will organize their exhibitions distributed among the Giardini (26 pavilions), the Arsenale (25 pavilions), and Venice (15 venues). Four are new participations, including the Republic of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, testifying to an international panorama in constant evolution.
The Municipality of Venice confirms its presence with the Venice Pavilion at the Giardini, hosting the exhibition Libraries. Building Venetian Intelligence, a project that highlights the fundamental role of knowledge and culture in shaping the future.
Read all about the Italian Pavilion.
Architecture as an Agent of Change
The Architecture Exhibition imagines the architect as a mutagenic agent, an activator of evolutionary processes that directs change toward new directions. Architecture thus becomes a tool to experiment, adapt, and transform reality, just as happens in nature through evolution.
Architects act as catalysts for transformations, addressing contemporary challenges and shaping more sustainable futures: they experiment with new solutions by drawing inspiration from other disciplines and testing innovative ideas to transform space and improve the relationship between environment and society.
Curator Carlo Ratti explains that architecture has always been a response to the hostilities of climate and that human creations have sought to bridge the gap between hostile environments and livable spaces: “The Biennale Architettura aims to be more than an exhibition: an experiment in uniting different voices and forms of intelligence to offer new insights.” And echoing the words of American architect and designer Buckminster Fuller—”We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims“—Ratti declares that architects have the power to shape tomorrow. “Depending on how they relate to the environment, they can transform into active protagonists or remain passive. This is the fundamental principle of architecture: it arises from the need to tame a hostile environment, analogously to how new discoveries, with their both positive and negative impacts, must always be put to the test.”
Architecture therefore arises from the need to transform and improve the context in which we live, just like the discoveries that shape our time. The essential element is experimentation: testing, putting ideas to the test, and developing strategies to build a more dynamic and resilient tomorrow.
Manifesto of Circularity
Reducing waste, promoting the reuse of materials, and supporting the regeneration of natural systems are the principles underlying the Manifesto of Circularity proposed by Ratti to the Participants in the 19th International Architecture Exhibition and to the National Pavilions, to collaborate in creating a truly circular Exhibition. The commitment Ratti asks of participants is to create pavilions and spaces that are not just temporary showcases, but that generate a lasting legacy in terms of sustainability.
Developed with the guidance of Arup—a collective of 20,000 designers, consultants, and experts working in 140 countries—and the contribution of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation—a foundation that has been at the forefront of promoting circular economy principles for years—the manifesto asks designers, planners, cities, and all participants of the Biennale Architettura 2025 to rethink their design approach by circulating materials and regenerating natural systems, a revolutionary methodology for planning and construction, with the goal of drastically reducing architecture’s ecological footprint.
A Catalogue Beyond the Boundaries of Time
The Biennale Architettura catalogue deserves a paragraph of its own. The sections Intro, Natural Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, Collective Intelligence and Out compose the area dedicated to Intelligens, where Venice becomes the starting point for new housing solutions, nature emerges as a basis for architectural reflections, generative models offer professional insights, the collective fabric unites past and present, while research pushes beyond known limits.
Further insight comes from the section Venice as a Living Lab, which illuminates the projects destined to transform the city and the outdoor areas of the exhibition venues into open-air laboratories.
Among the critical essays are the Impossible Conversations, an editorial experiment introduced in the catalogue, inspired by a model of intellectual dialogue popularized by Umberto Eco, to explore the exhibition’s themes in an innovative way: thanks to artificial intelligence, figures from the present will dialogue with voices from the past, digitally reconstructed, to discuss the future of Venice, technology, robots, and networks.
- Giorgos Kallis, Professor Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, dialogues with Thomas Robert Malthus
- Stefano Boeri, President Triennale di Milano, dialogues with Ebenezer Howard
- Daniela Rus, Professor MIT, dialogues with Isaac Asimov
- Carlo Ratti, Professor MIT & POLIMI, dialogues with Christopher Alexander
- Andrea Rinaldo, President Istituto Veneto, dialogues with John Ruskin
- Ersilia Vaudo Scarpetta, Researcher European Space Agency, dialogues with Gerard K O’Neill
The second volume features the National Participations and Collateral Events, documenting interventions and projects located among the Giardini, Arsenale, and other venues in Venice. Artist biographies and a collection of works complete the picture. The graphic identity and design bear the signature of Bänziger Hug Kasper Florio.
#BiennaleCollegeArchitettura
New ideas, professionals under 30, and a space open to innovation: as with Art, Cinema, Dance, Music, Theatre, and the Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts, Biennale College Architettura is a research laboratory that accompanies the Exhibition and explores its themes, focusing on the climate challenge.
From a selection held last year, among 16 proposals from Canada, Finland, Germany, England, Italy, Malaysia, Portugal, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Spain, Ratti identified 8 finalist projects that, after a workshop and a contribution of €20,000, will be presented outside the competition within the International Architecture Exhibition.
Who is Carlo Ratti?
Philosopher of the senseable city—as Bloomberg has called him—Carlo Ratti is an observer who blends engineering and architecture for an approach that scrutinizes cities as organisms in constant evolution. Architect, engineer, and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and the Politecnico di Milano, in Turin, New York, and London he leads the studio CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati.
From the Politecnico di Torino and the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, his education deepens at the University of Cambridge and MIT, launching a path that places him among the ten most cited scholars in the world in the field of urban planning.
He has authored over 750 scientific publications, including Atlas of the Senseable City (Yale University Press), written with Antoine Picon. His profile touches multiple points: from academic director at the Strelka Institute in Moscow to curator of the BMW Guggenheim Pavilion in Berlin, to the Future Food District at Expo Milano 2015. In 2019 he directed the eighth Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Shenzhen and, two years later, co-curated the second Design Biennale in Porto. In 2022 he was Creative Mediator for the urban vision of Manifesta 14 in Pristina.
The Digital Water Pavilion, the Copenhagen Wheel, and Scribit appear on the list of Best Inventions of the Year according to TIME magazine. He also serves as co-chair of the Global Future Councils on Cities and Urbanization of the World Economic Forum.
19th International Architecture Exhibition
Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.
From Saturday, May 10 to Sunday, November 23, 2025 (preview May 8 and 9)
Official hashtag: #BiennaleArchitettura2025
www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/2025
Article by Lucia Pecoraro.
All images courtesy of the Press Office Visual Arts and Architecture – La Biennale di Venezia.
