You spend five years studying architecture. Five. That’s half a decade of foam models, AutoCAD crashes, bloodshot eyes and near-religious debates about Corbusier’s chairs. You wield Revit like a shield and learn to speak fluent design-speak where ‘placemaking’, ‘thresholds’ and ‘liminality’ infiltrate your vocabulary and the (mostly) non-existent social lives of to-be architects outside the studio. You sincerely believe architecture can help save the world (or at least make it slightly less beige).

And then you graduate.

Here's when you realise that architecture (the profession) is not the same as architecture (the idea). You are not part of a team designing free utopian social housing (spoiler alert: it doesn’t exist). You're detailing staircases, toilet blocks and circulation cores for wing G of a suburban shopping mall. The dream, to start with, was to be a cultural agent (at least in due course); the reality, often, is that you're a CAD monkey with a caffeine addiction. Architecture, the capital-A you believed in, has been relegated to a spreadsheet for construction. A column of clients and costs. A grey (RAL7016, to be exact) disillusionment. If you didn’t drop out in the first year of studio, you’re now tempted. Some drift. A brave (privileged) few pursue design-adjacent careers: photography, UI/UX, journalism, set design, game design, lighting. Some end up going rogue.

All of these often brilliant second acts, or if I may, the afterlives of architectural knowledge, are the soul and substance of the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025.

On view from May 10 – November 23, 2025, at the Giardini in Venice, and cheekily titled There Is Nothing to See Here. Export Your Knowledge!, Hungary’s exhibition is a deadpan, oddly empowering and absurdist celebration of those who’ve jumped ship, and are sailing just fine. Curated by Márton Pintér, an associate professor and creative director, commissioned by Julia Fabényi and with graphic design by Gergely Lukács Szőke, it’s a self-aware, quasi-satirical look at what happens when architects stop building and start creating along its peripheries.

“What happens”, Pintér asks, “if we unrestrict such a complex knowledge like architecture from the demand of the overquantified construction industry?” That’s not a rhetorical question—it’s the whole show.

There Is Nothing to See Here. Export Your Knowledge! is not a tombstone for architectural ideals (at least not entirely). It’s more like a group therapy session for ex-architects such as myself, and “proves that an architect can make more than just a house…,” as the press release puts it. It introduces us to those who studied design, and then designed other things: objects, apps, TV sets, mathematical models and communities. According to the press release, the scenography is styled like a “now abandoned, once prestigious architecture studio”: deserted workstations, suspended ceilings, the faint emotional whiff of burnout.

“Nowadays, architects are not asked but commanded,” Pintér says. “Buildings are no longer designed, but [are] just speculative Excel sheets gaining concrete volumes [with] no cultural, social and innovative impact on the world anymore—it is about numbers, and numbers only… It is a little spooky, even depressing”, he adds, “but with the right amount of sense of humour. The exhibition space introduces bits of stereotypical capitalist office standards like the workstations and the suspended ceiling imitation as a broken mirror, inviting visitors to a rather self-reflective and critical approach.”

It works. The exhibition design is at once familiar and uncanny: lethargic red mannequins mimic the dead-eyed stares of faceless architectural workers, slumped around architectural models, while a conference table waits balefully with client complaints and countless schematic prints. The pavilion is organised by the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, with the exhibits RGB colour-coded by existential genre: red for the people (‘escapees’), green for their ‘successful’ exported ventures and blue for survey responses by students who (surprise!) are already contemplating life beyond architecture while still at university. The message is clear: architectural knowledge doesn’t die; it mutates—into music production, mathematics, pedagogy, political discourse, animation, films and even psychogeographic systems analysis (yes, really).

Architects may stop building, but they don’t stop designing. Here’s what some of the design installation’s participant testimonials share:

“There is no difference between designing a website and designing a space,” believes creative developer Csaba Kelemen. “Both function by the basic principles of design: form, structure, function.”

“I’m happy to design anything”, says researcher Attila Bujdosó, “a house, a book, software, a city, a work of art, a community, a process or a system – as long as it has an impact on the world.”

Mathematician Krisztina Regős says that “you can do much more with a degree in architecture than you think; try your hand at as many interdisciplinary areas as possible!”

“To be good architects, you actually need a little bit to not be architects,” says Máté Győrffy (now a politician).

And, in perhaps the elegant (and slightly ironic) mic-drop: “Once an architect, always an architect.” – Imre Rimóczi (art director and eternal optimist).

Pintér, who started at the Biennale in 2014 as an OMA*AMO intern working on Fundamentals directed by Rem Koolhaas, stumbled upon this pattern among radical career changes during his own ‘self-analytical’ doctoral thesis: “A lot of those stories were dedicated to former architects,” he tells STIR. They weren’t failures; they were futures. “They inspired me to go further with my thesis and [eventually] create the winning proposal. I invited them to participate, [and] all of them happily agreed [to]... A decade later, I’m leaving the profession right here, so it is as full-circle as it gets.”

So why bring this critique to the Venice Architecture Biennale this year? Because here is where architectural ideas come to unhinge themselves, or perhaps, softly rebel. “The Biennale is always about creating discourse, being critical about the status quo, proposing hot takes on the future that live beyond the exhibition,” Pintér explains. “[For] celebrating and conserving the highlights of the present, there’s the Expo.”

And what about the design exhibition’s cheeky, slippery title: There Is Nothing to See Here? Pintér calls it his Trojan Horse. “It was a two-sided trick”, he says, “from a moderately open-minded and progressive country to an ultimately high-culture international event.” His opening speech (unofficial, of course) captured its multiple meanings:

“There Is Nothing to See Here is a self-reflection.
There Is Nothing to See Here is a critique outwards.
There Is Nothing to See Here is police slang.
There Is Nothing to See Here is an invitation for discourse.
There Is Nothing to See Here is the title of the exhibition, by the way.”

Catharsis simmers just under the surface of this mischievous anti-spectacle. Every ex-architect’s journey is told with wit and honesty, many as accidental reinventions. Pintér admits the process became “a kind of group therapy. Planned? Not at all. But yes, therapy.” And it shows: the stories are personal but not sentimental, professional but free. No slick branding. No hero renders. Just a gentle, powerful nudge that you can survive architecture by walking away from it. “The personal insights and sometimes even relics were not something we designed, it was rather a beautiful outcome of an open-minded dialogue between the team and our exhibitors,” he shares.

A timeline tucked near the end of the show charts the slow existential unravelling of the field: Less is more (Mies van der Rohe, 1938); Less is a bore (Robert Venturi, 1966); More is more (Rem Koolhaas, 1990); Yes is more (Bjarke Ingels, 2009) and No is more (There Is Nothing to See Here! Export Your Knowledge, 2025). The last one seems to stick. “There is nothing more sustainable than not building,” the pavilion proffers, meekly, brazenly. You could roll your eyes, or you could see the sense. "There Is Nothing to See Here is a riot, a self-reflecting critique and a hot take on architecture as we know it today. We are here to say yes to no, and thus our contribution to One Place, One Solution is: #noismore,” the release states.

In fact, the pavilion’s architecture implies that ‘exporting’ architectural knowledge—rather than confining it to syllabi, bricks and concrete—might be the best or an honourable, alternative use of a design degree. It’s also the perfect time to remind yourself that Tom Dixon dropped out (or was expelled) and started welding chairs, Ernő Rubik (yes, that Rubik) was an architecture grad who gave the world a cube and Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright left architecture school to eventually become Pink Floyd.

And to the purists clutching their sketchbooks and Macs in panic: the pavilion and presentation aren't professing to stop building (or shed the all-black outfits). It’s simply holding your hand to posit that not building (or even building more conscientiously) might be revolutionary in itself, and that it’s really not the end of the world if one stops practising architecture.

So yes, there is nothing to see here. No billion-euro masterplans, no elaborate concept diagrams. And somehow, in that absence of construction, of spectacle, of institutional ego, there is a lot. Architecture’s most radical future(s) may just lie in its (freer, more fun and creative) afterlives.

The 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia is open to the public from May 10 to November 23, 2025. Follow STIR’s coverage of Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 (Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective) as we traverse the most radical pavilions and projects at this year’s showcase in Venice.