Photo: Luca Capuano/Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
When entering the Corderie dell’Arsenale, the main exhibition space of the Venice Biennale of Architecture, it would be easy to mistake what’s on view for the Consumer Electronics Show. The halls are filled with glowing LCD screens, robots, 3-D-printed installations, renderings of blobby, oozing buildings accompanied by jargon-filled texts, and interactive gimmicks. But much of it feels oddly familiar, artifacts from an earlier era of technological optimism.
The sense of déjà vu is unexpected, considering the Arsenale is bursting at the seams with more than 750 participants (usually it’s a fraction of this), many of whom are participating for the first time. Among the CES-lite installations, there was Philip F. Yuan and Bin He’s “Co-Poiesis,” in which Boston Dynamics robots play instruments and dance under a canopy made of wood recovered from trees felled by the Beibiya typhoon in Shanghai. What’s intended as a display of “environmental adaptation” lands as an unintentionally apocalyptic scene from a future where climate-change-induced disaster can offer us building materials, even if no one is left to live in it. Takashi Ikegami and Luc Steels’s “Am I a Strange Loop?” features a humanoid robot that takes audience questions in an attempt to persuade the crowd that it is self-aware. Someone asked, “Are you feeling anything right now?” Its answer, along the lines of “I am a robot, though it may look like I have feelings,” was a non-statement if there ever was one, though the crowds didn’t seem to get tired of the spectacle. Both offered a rudimentary display of algorithmic learning that would make more sense in the beta-testing phase of a robotics start-up than the Biennale, a forum where I expected a more critical, even radical approach to architectural experimentation.
Photo: Andrea Avezzù/Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
Perhaps this is to be expected from a Biennale directed by Carlo Ratti, founder of the MIT Senseable City Lab. Ratti, a longtime figure in the smart-cities set, is an architect-engineer and a robotics start-up founder — his companies Makr Shakr and Scribit aim to develop robots that can do the work of bartenders and draftspeople, respectively. Likewise, his MIT lab aims “to use big data to observe urban phenomena in order to develop new approaches to understanding, designing, and studying the built environment” — i.e., an academic’s Sidewalk Labs without the public processes built in. One can understand how his Biennale came to be organized under the theme of “Intelligens,” referring to so-called intelligences grouped into the natural, the artificial, and the collective. But if the robots are any indication, it’s clear that what really excites Ratti is artificial intelligence, or at least a tech-driven one, with other forms of intelligences playing a supporting role. Ratti’s brand of optimism has always blurred the line between big data and surveillance, and, as a robotics pioneer, he’s also long gravitated toward the post-human, the dream of a world made and managed by machines. That mind-set offers an escape hatch from confronting urgent problems like climate change, which the Biennale is ostensibly focused on. For thinkers like Ratti, the time for stopping or slowing climate change has passed, and the time for climate adaptation is upon us. As he states in the introductory remarks: “Architecture must pivot away from mitigation, reconnect with its longer history of adaptation, and rethink how we design for an altered world … Architecture must become as flexible and dynamic as the world we are now designing for.”
The biggest names of the architecture world seemed only too happy to play along. Zaha Hadid Architects’ “Participatory Urbanism” was essentially a configuration of the city of London that can be played in the game Fortnite with a VR headset. There aren’t any substantial architecture or urbanism ideas at play here, but there is a desperate attempt at marketing the services of both to an imagined audience of the young and very online. The worst part is: The game is boring. Thomas Heatherwick gave a lecture at the Russian Pavilion, a questionable choice in itself and one that drew calls for a boycott, considering Russia’s curators canceled the country’s participation in the Biennale because of the country’s aggression in Ukraine. Then there was his uninspired use of the Arsenale as a platform for his usual shtick about how everything from climate change to affordable housing could be solved if buildings were simply less boring. His contribution, “Space Garden” — an alienlike, tentacled contraption with teeny-tiny portals in which one can grow radishes — purports to be an “orbiting, autonomous greenhouse that will support cutting-edge agricultural research and global engagement in the future of our Earth-Space ecosystem.” Apparently, the firm expects the project to actually go up in space in the next five years. Sure thing, man!
“Space Garden,” by Heatherwick Studio, Aurelia Institute, and Brent Sherwood.
Photo: Marco Zorzanello/Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
But by far the most alarming display in the entire Biennale was by the Bjarke Ingels Group. In “Ancient Future: Bridging Bhutan’s Tradition and Innovation,” two Bhutanese artisans carve traditional motifs into a long wooden beam as a robot arm attempts to do the same, but much more crudely. Not only was it a startlingly superficial attempt to show the symbiosis between humans and technology, it resembled an Orientalist human zoo, where craftspeople performed for spectators at an event that seems to long for their obsolescence.
Across the board, what I witnessed in the Ratti-zone of the Arsenale was a mode of architectural speculation that harked back to the 2010s — hell, the late ’90s — a naïve vision of a world in which technology will save us and the computer will liberate architectural form-making without the pesky restraints of material, cost, or human labor. As we slide into an age of tech feudalism, with AI slop dissolving the internet and the U.S. government unfurling a Palantir-backed surveillance dragnet over the social-media views of its residents and visitors, the uncritical embrace of technology at the Biennale is stunningly obtuse. On display here is a crisis of disavowal, in which architects are relegated to playing mad scientists in a lab completely cut off from the world. Most of the hundreds of projects pitched on the main Biennale floor would require the forces of society to be rearranged from the ground up, or at least serious political changes in the way it functions for them to be actualized.
There are some exceptions to this mode of fanciful speculation. Admittedly, these are quieter gestures, such as HouseEurope.eu’s call to end the wasteful cycle of demolition and construction in the field by proposing legislation that prioritizes maintaining existing buildings over demolition. In “Terms and Conditions,” a project within “The Third Paradise Perspective” — a collection of projects that begins with the premise of a flooded, future Venice — Transsolar, Bilge Kobas, Daniel A. Barber, and Sonia Seneviratne have created an appropriately frightening installation in which the greenhouse gases and heat produced by air conditioners are captured inside a room, with nearly 100 units suspended over a black maw of shallow water, reminding us just how much all of this technology will truly cost us.
Photo: Hampus Berndtson
From top: Left and right: The Slovenian Pavilion, “Master Builders,” curated by Ana Kosi and Ognen Arsov and organized by the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO). Photo: Klemen Ilovar and Matic Pandel/ Photo: Klemen Ilovar/
Likewise, many of the national pavilions grappled with questions that those in the Arsenale prefer to dodge. The Danish Pavilion, “Build of Site,” curated by the architect Søren Pihlmann, is my personal favorite, in part because it interrogates the premise of the pavilion itself as a space that must be remade wastefully every single year. The small brick-and-glass modernist structure, designed by Carl Brummer in 1932 with a 1958 addition by Peter Koch, was an active construction zone, and all the building material already on site has been repurposed as exhibit furniture: Concrete blocks form tables, and slabs form benches and piles of rubble. Similarly, the Slovenian Pavilion, “Master Builders,” curated by Ana Kosi and Ognen Arsov and organized by the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), makes the case for human expertise and care over whatever gains might come from technology. By taking viewers through the methods, time, and human labor required to construct four delightful (and a little PoMo) “totems,” the pavilion highlights the way human participation and work are irreplaceable. Architecture is labor, and labor, quite literally, is architecture. The Estonian Pavilion, “Let Me Warm You,” foregrounds the emotions involved in the day-to-day tasks of climate mitigation. This takes the form of a short play in which residents of a block of flats meet an architect, an engineer, and politicians to hash out how to upgrade their homes to meet new energy standards. The play is funny and tender, and it brings architectural speculation down to the level of people’s everyday lives.
If we look at the Biennale as one split between a disavowal of the political and a handful of critical interventions that seek to forge a new, if less spectacular path for architecture, then the American Pavilion can be placed right in the middle of this spectrum. “Porch: An Architecture of Generosity,” curated by Peter MacKeith and the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, begins with, well, a rippling wood-slat porch attached to the front of the Beaux-Arts Pavilion itself. Inside, over 60 different architects and contributors consider the porch, which is presented as a quintessential, democratic feature of the American vernacular. I found myself craving a deeper examination of the porch as a “democratic” space, especially in the context of democratic institutions and norms cratering in the United States. But it seems to have mostly been interpreted for what it does, which is gather and shelter people — its formal and utilitarian purpose. Participation alone seems to be the end goal, the assemblage of a cacophony of voices without any avenues to interrogate the way power is shared or negotiated in collective spaces. The result is overwhelming. It would take over two hours to read everything on the walls — not to mention the literal library scattered throughout the pavilion — and interact with all the different projects. As in the crowded Arsenale itself, anything more radical to be found in the pavilion is buried under dioramas and walls of texts. For such an insistence on democracy, the pavilion is curiously tepid in its politics, save for a kind of vernacular populism and some PBS-esque nods to the Gee’s Bend quilters.
The porch outside the U.S. Pavilion, designed by Marlon Blackwell Architects, Julie Bargmann of DIRT Studio and Ten x Ten Studio, and Stephen Burks Man Made, held events and public talks.
Photo: Tim Hursley/
Photo: Tim Hursley/
Inside the American Pavilion, 54 exhibitors presented works related to their examinations of the porch.
Photo: Tim Hursley
One should look instead to the British Pavilion, a collaboration between the U.K. and Kenya. Britain’s equally neoclassical exterior is veiled in charcoal briquettes, clay, and beads, inspired by the manyatta dwellings of the Kenyan Maasai people. Here, vernacular structures and materialities are meant to invoke not only notions of ecological repair, but the spent and extracted earth left behind by colonial legacies. Inside, a cartography of the empire’s carbon emissions since 1750 forces the viewer to reckon with the scale of the harm caused to both earth and people. The result is visually and emotionally striking. In contrast, the Americans have failed to openly query the fact that, long before Donald Trump, the U.S. has not been a particularly generous host even to its own residents — a porch closed off to most. The loungelike seating arrangements and library in “Porch” aims to bridge a distance between those who have been historically invited and those who have been historically excluded, but the painful, often violent process of enacting change in that dynamic is not meaningfully articulated. In this obfuscation of conflict, and in its sheer scale, the American Pavilion continues a thread that’s visible throughout the Biennale: a tendency to embrace the apolitical at the expense of architecture’s relevance and future. Whether we like it or not, the Biennale is still one of architecture’s biggest testing grounds, a bellwether of sentiment in the field. I walked away from it thinking, If this is how we’re imagining how to reshape the world, obsolescence, here we come.
The Venice Architecture Biennale is on view until November 22, 2026.
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