Venice 2025: A Tale of Two Biennales

It’s rather like periodical cicadas: before you know it, it’s here again, and there’s always way too much of it. This past weekend, the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale opened to the public, curated by Carlo Ratti on a theme of Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. RECORD, naturally (and in no way artificially), was present, and honored the spirit of the collective by hosting an informal preview gathering on Via Garibaldi, a street—in a city of canals—that seems to have been designed for the event. Located between the Arsenale and the Giardini (the two main Biennale sites), this wide pedestrian thoroughfare, where happy crowds spill out, dates from 1807 when Napoleon filled in a canal to access his new public gardens. Among RECORDS’s Negroni-sipping guests were REX principal Joshua Ramus, OMA partners Reinier de Graaf and Shohei Shigematsu, Junya Ishigami, Liz Diller, and Alejandro Aravena.

Junya Ishigami of junya.ishigami+associates and Florian Idenburg of SO — IL. Photo © Architectural Record

Frank Barkow of Barkow Liebinger, Ben Gilmartin of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and photographer Iwan Baan. Photo © Architectural Record

Larry Scarpa of Brooks + Scarpa and Carol Ross Barney of Ross Barney Architects. Photo © Architectural Record

Junko Kirimoto and Massimo Alvisi of Alvisi Kirimoto. Photo © Architectural Record

Interior of the Procuratie, home to the new SMAC arts center. Photo by Alessandra Chemollo, courtesy The Human Safety Net

That same evening, Columbia GSAPP dean Andrés Jaque held a sort of midnight conclave at SMAC, a brand-new arts center on the Piazza San Marco that occupies part of the David Chipperfield–restored Procuratie (SMAC chose to kick off its existence with fine shows on the late Austro-Australian architect Harry Seidler and Korean landscape legend Jung Youngsun). With the air of an emergency summit, the event—a series of talks that lasted until 2:00 a.m.—gathered together a host of figures from the GSAPP ecosystem including Marina Otero Verzier (whose Biennale contributions include the Pavilion of the Holy See, which won a special mention from the Golden Lion jury) and Mireia Luzárraga of Takk (a RECORD 2024 Design Vanguard winner and cocurator of this year’s Catalan Pavilion). In a packed room, each speaker set forth his or her tactics of resistance in the face of government hostility to American academia. Also present was Liam Young, the Australian architect-turned-filmmaker, who admitted to being a double agent, since he had just come from a secret dinner that gathered together all the grumpy old white men of architecture—chief among them ZHA principal Patrik Schumacher, who in recent years has never failed to condemn the Biennale—during which they all complained they were never invited to curate major architecture events anymore. For Young, these people, who are arguably at the center where the weight of their multi-million-dollar practices is concerned, have moved firmly to the margins with respect to the evolving discourse of the discipline.

Photo by Andrea Andrea Avezzù, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

However, as the Arsenale offerings showed, that may not be quite true. The difference of approach between a figure such as Ratti, who appears to believe in the power of technological advances and market forces to solve our problems, and those who resist the extractive devastation that corporate profit-seeking can unleash, was palpable throughout. And, for what feels like the first time in living memory, Schumacher actually praised the Corderie exhibition. Two of its displays, which respectively look at wood and stone, those most ancient of architectural materials, illustrate the dichotomy nicely.

Ancient Future by Bjarke Ingels Group. Photos courtesy BIG

On one side is the Bjarke Ingels Group, which paired up traditional Bhutanese wood carvers with an AI-guided robot, the idea being that the latter would learn from the former as they sculpted intricate dragon motifs into a timber beam. As the upbeat explanatory notice had it, this marriage of artisanship and robotics “redefines preservation as evolution, proving technology can empower culture rather than erode it,” since the robots are learning dying skills as well as allowing the few remaining craft workers to focus on creativity while machines do the legwork. In contrast to this positive spin on the march of technology, Jacque and his team at the Office for Political Innovation, who two years ago called out the deleterious effects of producing the titanium oxide that makes the glass at Hudson Yards so shiny, was back with Stonelife, the next episode in a series of research projects looking at fundamental building materials. The basic premise was that we’ve got stone all wrong: rather than a dead, inert material that needs bleaching and pressure washing to remove the slightest trace of moss or algae, it is in fact home to extraordinary ecosystems of countless micro-organisms, and as such is not only important for biodiversity but can also act as a carbon sink.

Stonelife by Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation. Photo by José Hevia

“Thesis, antithesis, synthesis” goes the Hegelian definition of dialectics, and some contributions attempted to embrace the paradoxes. Liam Young’s was one of them, since After the End, his utopian scenario for Australia’s First Nations, not only acknowledges there’s no going back to what has been lost but, as in much of his work, demonstrates an uneasy relationship with what Young describes as the “technical sublime.”

Lavaforming at the Iceland National Pavilion. Photo by Ugo Carmeni

Iceland—present with a national pavilion for the very first time—offered a different kind of utopia-dystopia: produced by a multi-disciplinary team, Lavaforming proposes harnessing Iceland’s lava flows to form building components, which, if feasible, would be a great way of exploiting a hugely abundant low-carbon resource. But the display also tried to imagine the pitfalls, such as the potentially calamitous outcome if the world’s magma reserves were hijacked by a private corporation. Whatever their ideological or ethical divergences, all these contributions had one point in common: they are a way of dreaming the future, which after all is the sinae qua non of architecture.

The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale is now open to the public and runs through November 23. Information on ticketing and more can be found here.

Stay tuned for further RECORD dispatches from Venice.