2025 Summer Biennials
Biennial, did you say biennial? This year, architects and enthusiasts are invited to embark on a cultural journey, starting in Versailles (France) and heading for Venice (Italy), with a midway stop in Saint-Étienne (France). Three biennials, each of different stature but all scientifically rigorous, will attempt to enlighten their visitors on the major trends driving contemporary creation. The focus will be on landscape in Versailles, design in Saint-Étienne and architecture in Venice. Save the dates.
Guillaume Ackel
Architecture and Landscape Biennial (3rd edition)
📍 Versailles (France)
🗓️ from May 7 to July 12, 2025
Behind the sweet name of Bap! lies the Biennial of Architecture and Landscape of Versailles (France), which is back this summer for a third edition under the theme of the ‘living city’. This year’s programme includes a repertory of inventive solutions for repairing and transforming territories and making them sustainable, compiled by urban planner Cécile Diguet and architect Christine Leconte; an analysis, by Tunisian architect Sana Frini (Locus) and Swiss architect Philippe Rahm, of subtropical architectural models that could be built in France today in anticipation of a +4°C rise in temperatures by 2100; the transformation of the King’s Kitchen Garden into a landscape laboratory by landscape designers from Agence TER; landscaping solutions to climate change by Bureau Bas Smets, or how built environments can produce microclimates to increase the resilience of our cities; and a dreamlike immersion in the nightlife of natural areas by photographer Nicolas Davy.
Find out more about the full programme at www.bap-idf.com
International Biennial of Design (13th edition)
📍 Saint-Étienne (France)
🗓️ from May 22 to July 6, 2025
Concerns about climate change and the increasing scarcity of resources are so pressing that the 13th edition of the Saint-Étienne International Design Biennial will focus on this theme. Laurence Salmon, a former design writer and now Scientific Director of the Biennial, is the general curator of the central exhibition “Ressources, Foreseeing Tomorrow”. Helped by 9 designers co-curators (Frédéric Beuvry, Isabelle Daëron, Sylvia Fredriksson, Marlène Huissoud, Anna Saint Pierre, Laurent Massaloux, Étienne Mineur, Philippe Rahm, natacha.sacha) Laurence Salmon curates a nine-stage artistic and scientific exhibition. Extractivism, energy efficiency, living worlds, high-tech and low-tech, generative AI, resource sharing, industrial design, rational consumption: no subject related to resources seems to have been left out of this exhibition. Éric Jourdan, Director of the Cité du design and the Saint-Étienne School of Art and Design, will also be presenting the results of six creative workshops held at the school, in which students were invited to exercise their right to dream.
Find out more about the full programme at www.biennale-design.com
Architecture Biennale (19th edition)
📍 Venice (Italy)
🗓️ from May 10 to November 23, 2025
Last but not least, there’s the Venice Architecture Biennale. At the previous edition, in 2023, the Ghanaian and Scottish architect and writer Lesley Lokko, curator of the main exhibition, had set the bar high (see L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui No 455). This year, the Italian institution is perhaps less daring, entrusting the curatorship of the biennial to a local native, the Torinese architect and engineer Carlo Ratti. While climate change is again at the heart of the curator’s proposal, he is adopting a different approach, one that is probably less obvious, and which he sums up with this title: Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. For Carlo Ratti, architecture has focused for decades on mitigation, in order to reduce our impact on the climate; but, according to the architect, this approach is no longer enough. Today, we need to think about adaptation instead of (or with) mitigation. Therefore, the curator of this new international exhibition is urging architects to call on all forms of intelligence — natural, artificial and collective. Moreover, as Carlo Ratti is Director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — where digital technology and new technologies are at the heart of the work — it’s a safe bet that the issue of AI will be central.
Find out more about the full programme at www.labiennale.org.
