Titled Intelligens, the 19th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale was the occasion for its curator, Carlo Ratti, the opportunity to urge architects to draw upon all forms of intelligence – natural, artificial, and collective. The editorial team of AA travelled to the Serenissima to report on this latest edition.

The Poetry of Dust

For this 19th International Architecture Exhibition, curator Carlo Ratti – a true northern Italian – promised, during his inaugural lecture last May, a minestrone of projects, exhibitions, theories and utopias. To digest it all, he offered ten thematic threads to choose from – ‘Tree Tech’, ‘Staying Cool’, ‘Robotics Constructs’, to name a few. Whether by coincidence or as an inherent reflection of the profession – or both – AA chose instead to weave an eleventh thread: that of the building site. From Denmark to the Vatican, from Hong Kong to France and Bahrain (awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation), certain national pavilions made efforts to reveal what unfolds downstream of the models and upstream of the inaugurations.

The French and Danish exhibitions, for instance, had to contend with the ongoing refurbishment of their official pavilions (dating from 1932 and 1958 in Denmark’s case, and from 1912 for France). Meanwhile, the Vatican – under the direction
of Tatiana Bilbao and the Spanish architecture practice MAIO – made use of a former hospital founded in the 12th century, the Complesso di Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, to explore the idea of temporary occupation alongside renovation, which took place before the eyes of visitors. Elsewhere, the Hong Kong pavilion invited shifu (master craftsmen) to reconstruct the iconic bamboo scaffolding that enables the peninsula’s towers to rise. Far from the main exhibition halls of the Arsenale – with their infatuated gazes cast towards technology – certain architects seemed instead to favour taking the time to reflect on the human processes at work on construction sites. And, subtly, to make visitors feel the material being bent, poured, cut; the wind whipping through plastic sheeting; the labyrinth of grating walkways; and, beneath the discomfort of blistering suns, the dust.

Scars

Curated by Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of the Nairobi-based studio cave_bureau, alongside British curator and writer Owen Hopkins and Professor Kathryn Yusoff, a specialist in ‘inhuman geography’, Geology of Britannic Repair interrogates Britain’s historical role in the plundering of the African continent. From the outside, one immediate question arises: is it the neoclassical façade of the British Pavilion that first catches the eye, or the beaded curtain that shrouds it – composed of coal and clay spheres, vernacular Kenyan materials, interspersed with glass elements reminiscent of Murano beads, once traded as imperial currency? Neither ornament nor disguise, this veil casts upon the building the shadow of dispossessed lands, displaced peoples, and cultures erased by the colonial enterprise. Yet in framing the question of repair, it inverts the logic: it is no longer
the colonised who must conform to the imperial gaze, but the Empire that must reckon with its own reflection. A special mention goes to the installation ‘Objects of Repair’, presented by the Palestine Regeneration Team, whose work lays bare the enduring impact of geological extraction and territorial disfigurement in Palestine since the British Mandate of 1920 – revealing the unbroken lineage of supremacist violence enacted upon the land and peoples of Gaza and the West Bank.

Espagne, again and again

Long-standing readers of AA will be all too familiar with the editorial team’s sustained admiration for the Spanish architectural scene – remarkable for its mastery of tight budgets and local thermal constraints, as well as its capacity to work intelligently with the elegance of modest materials, steering clear of both rusticity and stylistic affectation. A compelling illustration of this is found in the superb national pavilion, Internalities, which articulates its narrative through a series of keywords – materials, energies, achievements, labour, residues, emissions – to uphold a principle that has become a golden rule: the use of local resources. At the heart of the pavilion, around twenty outstanding projects demonstrate just how closely one can approach a true economic and ecological equilibrium. Not only does the exhibition offer a clear and accessible reading of a nation’s architectural model, it also delights the eye with subtly top-down photographs by Milena Villalba, Caterina Barjau, Ana Amado, María Azkárate and Luís Díaz Díaz.

Welcome to Togo

The year 2025 marks Togo’s debut at the Venice Biennale, with its first national pavilion housed in the Squero Castello, located midway between the Arsenale and the Giardini. Commissioned by Sonia Lawson, founding director of the Palais de Lomé, the exhibition Considering Togo’s Architectural Heritage presents a series of photographs printed and stitched onto fabric panels, suspended from the beams of the exhibition space and weighted with clay pots. A celebration of Togolese craftsmanship – still largely unknown on the Western architectural scene – this scenography, conceived by Studio NEiDA (co-founded by Franco- Togolese architect Jeanne Autran- Edorh and Austrian curator Fabiola Büchele, working between Lomé and Berlin), was first shown during the Rencontres Architecturales de Lomé #1 (Lomé Architectural Encounters), held at the Palais de Lomé in November 2024. This inaugural pavilion offers a journey through Togo’s architectural heritage: from the troglodyte granaries carved into the Nok caves in the northern part of the country, to the modernist architecture that emerged in the 1960s, and the remarkable Afro-Brazilian constructions developed by formerly enslaved people who returned from Brazil at the end of the 19th century.

Biennale Architettura 2025
→ Until 23 november 2025
More information on the biennale's website

This article was featured in AA's latest issue: AA No.465, available on our online shop