The first time that the Venice Architecture Biennale attracted serious attention outside the architectural profession was in 1980. It was curated by Paolo Portoghesi: a teacher, theorist and the architect of the first purpose-built mosque in Rome's history. He called it The Presence of the Past. The 1980 Biennale was recently appropriated by Brady Corbet, director of The Brutalist (2024), as a coda for his film. Portoghesi made his Biennale the launchpad for the postmodern wave that went on to sweep the world. Corbet turned it into the setting for a retrospective exhibition marking the rediscovery of his protagonist László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian architect played by Adrian Brody, modelled in equal parts on the real-life Marcel Breuer, and Gary Cooper's risible portrayal of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead (1949). King Vidor's film was based on Ayn Rand's novel of the same name, and culminates with its architect-hero dynamiting his skyscraper masterpiece because it has been compromised by lesser talents.
Portoghesi had in mind the continuing role that history has to play in architecture, not the revival of a once (and now newly) modish architectural style. He was interested in the baroque, not in obstreperous raw concrete. He came to bury the modernists, not to praise them.
The Architecture Biennale of 1980 was a success for two reasons. Portoghesi was able to bring together a range of ideas that were current at the time and make them into a coherent movement, and he presented architecture in a way that made sense to people who could not tell an axonometric from an elevation. He used the skills of Italian film-set builders to create a street inside the Corderie, the ancient rope works of Venice's shipyard – the Strada Novissima. Each façade was designed by a different architect, from Rem Koolhaas to Michael Graves. This was architecture presented not in the form of drawings that would be incomprehensible to most people, or screeds of text on the wall, but as a visceral, full-size experience.
Carlo Ratti, the first Italian director of the Venice Architecture Biennale for 25 years, has worked hard to achieve a similar combination of compelling content and engaging presentation. With 216 people killed in Valencia in the floods of 2024, dozens more dead in Spain's neighbouring provinces, and 29 people losing their lives in the fires in Los Angeles shortly afterwards, this is not a time for architects to be talking about pediments, decoration or architectural wit. Ratti believes that architecture does have to play an important role in difficult circumstances, even if he has given a great deal of space to scientists of all kinds in the Biennale. But he is skeptical about the need for much more building. “We’ve been through attempts at mitigation – now it's the era of adaptation.” Ratti’s theme is embodied by a title that is a collection of four words punctuated by four full stops. Rather than a sentence: Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.
Ratti is interested in exploring the applicability of these concepts as tools to address the two crises that he sees facing the world. The climate emergency has been well rehearsed, of course, but at a moment at which the US is in the hands of climate change deniers, Ratti's Biennale is an urgent reminder of just how bad things are going to get if we don't act now. Visitors' first experience of the Biennale as they enter the Arsenale, the historic factory where the Venetians perfected the mass production of the galleys on which their trading empire depended, is a graphic demonstration of the impact of extreme climate events on Venice itself. The first installation, A Fluid Climate, sets out to answer the question of what tomorrow's climate will look like, and is orchestrated by Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist based at the ETH in Zurich, working with the nonagenarian Italian painter Michelangelo Pistoletto and the German climate engineering consultancy Transsolar. It portrays a world that could see a 15m rise in sea level. After picking their way through this drowned world, visitors are confronted by The Other Side of the Hill, which reflects what Ratti sees as the other big challenge facing the world: collapsing human fertility. UN figures from 2024 suggest that populations have peaked in China, Germany, Japan, Russia and 59 other countries. Japan's population, for example, has been falling for the last 16 years, shrinking by more than 500,000 in 2023.
The Other Side of the Hill takes the form of an installation that was conceived by the British-born theoretical physicist Geoffrey West, who has had leading roles at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Santa Fe Institute, working with the biologist Roberto Kolter, a retired Harvard professor, and Beatriz Colomina, an architectural historian from Princeton. They used the model of microbial communities in which population has a direct correlation with resources, growing exponentially and then collapsing, to consider the impact of human population growth slowing to a halt. Patricia Urquiola had the task of turning this petri dish-scaled concept into an architectural installation.
Every director of a biennale inevitably faces the same question: are they curators, in the sense that they provide a platform for those they select to participate to present their ideas and their work – or do they work with the participants to present their own ideas about the issues that the biennale sets out to explore?
Ratti's content comes from two distinct sources. His strategy has been to ask groups of people from different fields, many of them from outside architecture, to work together to reflect on a series of topics that they have formulated together. But he also issued an open call for submissions about ideas for the Biennale.
Not all the groupings that Ratti tried orchestrating worked out. But he is sanguine about it: “I like bringing together different perspectives. Nature tries things too – some work, and some don't. It is learning by doing.” As Ratti puts it, some blew up, but as participants have withdrawn, others have taken their places. It has certainly produced an exceptionally broad event.
Ratti has organised the sequence of installations in the Biennale to contrast natural with artificial intelligence. The traditional Japanese joinery techniques, used by Kengo Kuma in the Living Structure installation, are capable of turning imperfect timber into a usable structural material as an example of building with nature. It is followed by a collection of advanced humanoid robots that can carry out a full range of tasks on the construction site.
The Biennale explores the potential of new as well as old materials. It asks what we can learn from the informal settlements of Latin America. It makes a brief detour to explore the prospects of colonising the planets, and concludes that abandoning Earth is no way to solve its problems. Ratti says, “We go to space for the blue marble moment – to understand the Earth, not to leave it.”
Ratti is an architect with an unusual history. His grandmother was the engineer who built much of post-war Italy's infrastructure. With the idea of doing something similar, he began his education with simultaneous degrees at Turin's Polytechnic and at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, the grande école that trained Napoleon's civil servants to rebuild France. He decided that he was more interested in the synthesis that architecture had to offer, and completed a doctorate at Cambridge and research at MIT, where he now has a professorship. He also has entrepreneurial instincts, devising robotic drafters and cocktail makers, and organising a start-up fund investing in micro-mobility, leisure and construction projects.
It is a trajectory that has given him the connections to bring an unprecedented number of heavyweight scientists to an architecture biennale. They include Kostya Novoselov, the Nobel Prize-winning co-producer of graphene, and Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal. Perhaps more surprisingly, he has promised contributions from Jean-Michel Jarre and Diane von Fürstenberg. There are plenty of familiar architectural names too. Liz Diller worked with water purification experts for her Canal Café, which serves espresso made with carefully treated water taken from Venice's canals. Rem Koolhaas, Winy Maas and Thomas Heatherwick are all taking part.
The exhibition features over 1,000 participants: architects and engineers, mathematicians and climate scientists, philosophers and artists, chiefs and coders, writers and woodcarvers, farmers and fashion designers. As Ratti concludes, “Adaptation demands inclusivity and collaboration.” It's a hugely ambitious project, not all of which is going to be ready in time for the opening in May. In February, Ratti still wasn’t exactly sure where his floating plaza meeting-space would be moored – “either off the Ponte della Dogana, where Aldo Rossi put his floating Teatro del Mondo in 1980, or if that is not possible, somewhere in the Arsenale.” After its appearance at the Biennale, he is planning to move it to Brazil for the UN Climate Conference in Belém in the autumn.
But there is certainly enough to make it one of the more memorable Biennales.
Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., runs 10 May – 23 November 2025.
This article is taken from Anima Issue 3, to purchase a copy or subscribe head here