Under the curatorship of Carlo Ratti, a professor at MIT, where he directs the Senseable City Lab, this year’s Biennale is the largest and most interdisciplinary in the event’s history. Ratti’s conceptual focus (itself a hybrid construct, encompassing “intelligence” and the Latin gens, meaning people) involved inviting participants to respond to the complex relationship between architecture, intelligence (human, ecological, augmented, algorithmic), and the twinned contemporary crises of climate breakdown and population expansion, and to imagine how these forces might, in his words, “collaborate to adapt to a planet in flames.” The curatorial choice of an open call sought to bring architects and designers into dialogue with mathematicians, engineers, data scientists, climate theorists, indigenous ecologists, chefs, carpenters, and other experts in a “living laboratory,” and it has produced an event of enormous scale: seven hundred and fifty participants, sixty-six national pavilions, and close to three hundred projects. The result is a lively but disorienting and oversaturated array of work: from the Arsenale’s first room, the exhibition space unfolds in a dense and sprawling array of interventions. The exhibition space has the feel of a school science fair, with each “experiment” (replacing “installation,” at Ratti’s instruction) competing for attention. Several installations reflect the Biennale’s theme of learning from non-human intelligence and ecological adaptation. “Necto” SO – IL’s and Mariana Popescu’s tensile structure, animated by dancers and spun from 3D-knitted, DNA-coded fibers, mimics spider webs to explore computational biomimicry. Meanwhile, Bahrain’s award-winning “Heatwave” creates a microclimate through passive cooling, inspired by traditional desert architecture. Its shaded, beanbag-strewn space offers not just relief, but a viable model for sustainable site design.
Upon entering Venice’s Arsenale — a former rope factory, and the central exhibition space of this year’s Architecture Biennale — the bright spring sunshine of the city streets gives way to a wall of damp heat emanating within a dimly lit space, rigged with suspended air conditioning units and inlaid with a mirror-like surface of ink-black water. Once visitors’ eyes have adjusted to the darkness, a matrix of industrial infrastructure becomes half-visible among loops of neon lights, accompanied by the ambient whirring of the AC units which, rather than cooling the space, have been engineered to pump it full of their humid exhaust. Designed by Transpolar Studio in collaboration with Bilge Köbaş, Sonia Seneviratne, and Daniel A. Barber, “Terms and Conditions” is a comment on the costs and inequalities that surround the provision of thermal regulation, now such a standard fixture in the architecture of the Global North that it is rarely given a second thought. Confronted with this stifling heat, visitors are immersed in a sensory approximation of a future in which chronic overdependence on fossil fuel extraction and soaring global temperatures have compromised the viability of thermal-regulated environments: as the latest IPCC report attests, current global finance flows are insufficient to prevent temperatures exceeding 1.5°C this century. With its emphasis on giving physical, perceptible form to the abstract and often invisible forces propelling climate breakdown, “Terms and Conditions” exemplifies the approach of many of the Biennale’s contributing designers, who have responded to this year’s theme with hybrid forms of engagement with architecture’s responsibility to adapt to planetary transformation.
Across the event’s dispersed sites, its key provocation – what does it mean to design with intelligence, across multiple scales, systems, and species? – is met by a number of notable interdisciplinary works that illustrate repair and remediation as a preoccupying theme. Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s “Canal Café” filters Venice’s lagoon water into drinkable espresso using reverse osmosis, UV light, and wetland plants — a wry yet poignant commentary on water scarcity and green tech. First conceived in 2008, its message feels more urgent than ever in today’s climate. In the Gardini, the Spanish Pavilion’s “Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium,” curated by Roi Salgueiro and Manuel Bouzas, highlights the relationship between construction processes and their “geographies of origin” –– forestry plantations, quarries, mines –– presenting a range of “internalized architectures” balanced across a set of symbolic (if a little on-the-nose) weighing scales. In the Danish Pavilion, Søren Pihlmann’s “Build of Site” turns two existing buildings into a live experiment in architectural reuse. A companion booklet, co-authored with poet Adam Dickinson, imagines materials as “on loan from the past,” invoking salvage as a strategy for future-making. Similarly attentive to the “forgotten encounters” between architecture and natural resources, Sylvia Lavin’s “Amid the Elements,” situated in the James Stirling pavilion, takes the form of a living library carried in a translucent ship-like structure within the Gardini’s sea of trees. Focusing on the material history of early-modern architectural book-making and its circulation of ideas and information, the structure’s cargo of manuscripts, models, and recycled books, contributed by practices MOS, AD-WO, Besler & Sons, and First Office, form a “capacious record” of the exertion of earthly elements in a “progressively more synthetic environment.” As these works illustrate, designing with intelligence, then, involves a decentering of humans as the sole agents of design, and a magnified attention — through biomimicry, bioremedial materials, salvage, or synthetic technologies — to the organically equilibrious ecological mechanisms that a future architecture might learn from.
Elsewhere, however, the use of augmented intelligence comes off as gimmicky, even laughable — especially after the somber realism of the Arsenale’s initial room. Bjarke Ingels’s installation “Ancient Future,” which proposes a collaboration between AI scaling technologies and traditional craftsmanship, presents a pair of artisanal Bhutanese woodcarvers busy engraving a beam for the upcoming Gelephu International Airport, while an AI-powered robotic arm produces a far more rudimentary version nearby. Ratti is sensitive to the ethical complexities surrounding advancements in AI technologies (he has spoken about the slowness of human adaptation “when machines impose a paradigm shift,” and about the dangers of tech monopolies and the risk of AI supremacy), but there is still a distinct tone of techno-optimism surrounding this year’s Biennale. “Optimism is a duty,” says Ratti, “If we manage these technologies well, they could really become fundamental tools to improve the lives of many people.” The risk, of course, is that this focus obscures the real-world politics of design, and the inequalities surrounding its access and execution. While the Biennale positions architecture as a universal problem-solver with the keys to restoring democracy and repairing a damaged planet, its direction might have benefited from a consideration of the practical limits of what design alone can claim to do. Alongside this faith in technology for planetary salvation, too, the palpable influence of new materialist and posthumanist philosophies on the Biennale’s curatorial vision — epitomized by the selection of cyber-feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway for the Lifetime Achievement Award — skirts a similarly apolitical edge in privileging principles of trans-corporeality and flat ontology over the exceptionalism often required to take meaningful political action around climate. The open call, however, has provided some activist voices, who might otherwise not have made the selection, a welcome platform at the event: protest architecture from Germany’s Hambach Forest, for example, and the Architecture Lobby’s oral history of labor organizing.
Given the event’s climate consciousness, the biggest elephant in the room is, of course, the carbon footprint of the biennial itself. Amid its celebration of technological solutionism and geo-engineering, little mention was made of the Biennale’s largest climate impact: the aviation emissions created by the hundreds of thousands of visitors who travel annually for the event. What’s more, the AI-driven designs on show — while certainly thought-provoking — would no doubt be heavily extractivist and energy-intensive in practice if ever rolled out at scale. This year, participants were supplied with a Circular Economy Manifesto, which encouraged the minimization of waste and the recirculation of materials, but the pamphlet’s voguish typeface and accompanying visual installation — suggestive here of style raised above substance — speaks to the broader weakness of this year’s event: though it constitutes an earnest response to crisis, its signal is often lost in its noise, and its overall impression is of technological spectacle over substantive discourse.