Bringing together an unprecedented 760 participants for its latest showcase—Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.—the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 opened earlier this month to much pomp but middling approvals. Questioning the soundness of Carlo Ratti’s expansive curatorial vision and the abundance of technology responding to it and realising it, the discourse surrounding the biennale seems as muddled—and even somewhat performative—as some of the chief displays in question. A common denominator, however, outlining both critical reviews and public experience, has been a near constant sense of being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of projects that made the cut. Although it is to be expected from attending the biennale’s two-day Vernissage, I’m afraid to report it never is a good sign when that sense of being overwhelmed sets in early on in the show and stays, not in the least by design. This biennale’s fundamental dichotomy then is between ambition and medium; rather than dialling up that very tension, it seems intent on mounting the medium itself as spectacle.

This observation is particularly true for the Curator’s Exhibition staged in the Arsenale’s Corderie, wherein viewers are taken through an immensely packed showcase with a density per square metre at par with the San Marco square on a summer evening. The intended impact might have been phantasmagoria, or the somewhat messy tabletop of a scientist hard at work in their laboratory—an evocation Ratti has used quite intently in his curatorial notes and opening speech—but it so often ends up having the opposite effect, one that is an all too familiar amplification of general 21st century living, fears and anxieties, all driven by an over-reliance on technology. Between mounds of algae, literal heaps of soil, a robot suspended from the industrial shed’s roof (and then some more) along with an ungodly amount of screens, the exhibition exposes its tech-driven vision for the future in—mildly put—concerning ways.

From an early reading of Intelligens, it did seem that a clear focus on the scientific rigour in architectural disciplines and practice could prove to be a measured departure from the oft-levied criticism on biennales and similar conclaves being “too conceptual”, or too often full of jargon that was inaccessible to the public. Instead, the curation appears to use tech as a neutral vessel driving progress and opening gateways to the next big thing in architecture, as a ground for relatively risk-free displays. In that, it tends to evade the quintessential politics that, pre-COVID, may have been pulling the strings in the background, but now absolutely foreground a contemporary sense of being. By placing technology in a position of salvation, its vast (and somehow still unrealised) potential in architecture is staged as a spectacle that seems to mask its very biased access. The same differential access drives global geopolitics and reinforces incumbent, exploitative, extractive hierarchies—who owns the tech, who borrows it and who is deprived of it decides who is a superpower, who is self-sufficient, who is immune and who is decimated.

What should be urgent screams are thus reduced to faint whispers at this year’s biennale offering and this is despite the extremely urgent climate crisis requiring pragmatic, actionable measures from a profession infamously steeped in revelry and self-gratification. A signboard earmarking the participation of HouseEurope! towards the end of the Corderie’s industrial shed eliciting “We are fucked, but you can change it!” is as didactic as it gets. The rest of the Curator’s Exhibition is rounded out along the three kinds of Intelligens: Natural, Artificial and Collective, with the overlaps unsuspectingly working better than the absolutes. There is definitely something to be said about material enquiries at this biennale, with an abundance of alternative construction material and technologies occupying a majority of the Corderie, prompting a more skeletal look at buildings and at the way we build. Seaweed, hemp, earth, human waste, existing building debris, the usual varieties of recycled plastic and several other potential low carbon materials that can either be compressed in micron-thin layers or fed into a 3D-printing machine vie for the viewer’s attention, just as the exhibition space is turned into a large earthen moodboard.

If the 3D-printing arm wasn’t savvy enough, the section for Artificial Intelligens is further bound to satiate the parametricists and tech-bros. Boasting robots aping attendees and visitors, robots learning to play the pandrums and “dreaming” robots suspended from the middle of the hall, encaged in a mesh of reinforcement bars, it’s a room rounded out by the sonorously excessive beeps and blips entirely reminiscent of a control centre from a ‘90s flick. Unsurprisingly, the biennale’s opening week couldn’t have seen the 'machine learning' fully materialised, with the process expected to take months. Perhaps the most overwhelming and (fever)dream-like, it’s a section of many dissonances and contrivances, none greater than a massive robotic arm dusting away at a meticulously engraved timber segment of the upcoming Bhutan airport designed by BIG, alongside the ‘human’ artisan at work, meant to prove that technology serves to append human creativity and not replace it in ways that are not entirely convincing.

With all the ‘noise’, it is important to note that a visitor’s experience may, to a great degree, be incumbent upon how one navigates the exhibition, further incumbent upon how it’s designed and laid out. Using a complicated grid network of nodes tilted at 45°, the main exhibition’s design sees fully realised architectural projects—intelligens manifest for all intents and purposes—relegated to dense visual panels lining both of the Corderie’s faces, with other displays crowding the centre. The ‘experience’ is complete with elaborate descriptions of each project, frustratingly mounted at varying heights, accompanied by concise albeit not the most judicious descriptions of the projects, yielded through AI. From quick on-ground surveys, while most people preferred the shorter descriptions owing to the quantum of displays and the time at hand, it serves as an interesting rejoinder to the continued relevance of media professions in the age of ChatGPT, especially with the shared sense of design amnesia often accompanying such biennales.

The spillovers outside the Corderie within the larger Arsenale aren’t entirely valourous either. Ratti’s “Living Lab” and its crown jewels, the Golden Lion winning Canal Café by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Natural Systems Utilities, SODAI, Aaron Betsky and Davide Oldani with its canal water-filtration system yielding an espresso with the “distinct flavours of Venice” at €1.2 and Gateway to Venice’s Waterways by the Norman Foster Foundation and sponsored by Porsche comprising a shimmery, scaly walkway leading up to a deck with several waterbikes to ‘explore’ the historic waterways of Venice, are both spectacles mounted handsomely alongside each other, pervading substance—the carnival attraction equivalent of the biennale, at the cost of diving deep enough.

There are some clear winners here that shine through quite distinctly, I might add, owing to their virtue of allowing the viewer to slow down and absorb their matter among the techno-fury. The exhibition’s ‘Intro’ is carefully positioned and well layered in three chief displays. A dark, sweltering room with multiple suspended AC units billowing residual hot air is going to be the first point of contact for most visitors, rendering an uneasy portrait of the future by probing how urban environments across the world are differentially impacted by displaced heat from excessive air conditioning. This first section is occupied by Terms and Conditions by Transsolar, Bilge Kobas, Daniel A. Barber and Sonia Seneviratne, along with The Third Paradise Perspective by Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte. On the other side of a thick curtain, a collaborative display by Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley, Roberto Kolter, Patricia Urquiola and Geoffrey West—The Other Side of the Hill—is a fitting setting of stage, using the titular hill to map the pinnacle of human population growth over the next few decades, expounding that the great unknown beyond that will require multiple forms of shared intelligences to navigate, particularly microbial. The Silver Lion winning Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler is an expanded infographic like none other in recent memory, inviting viewers to pause and reflect on temporal connotations of the various spheres of technological advancement, serving up points of solemn reflection on our current predicament with a possible, traceable origin rooted in imperialism and its many forms.

The saviour complex placed in technology and technically sound nations—the developed world—isn’t entirely amiss either, further amplified by a regrettable absence of African nations at the biennale, lopsided participation from the South Asian and South American subcontinents and an affirmative spotlight on Middle Eastern nations, casting an ever-oblique shadow on Global South representation at the global forum, appearing more skewed than usual this time around. There is obviously much more at work than can be encapsulated in a review in what nations get a seat at the table and what practices supercede internal bureaucratic nightmares and funding cuts from their own countries to be able to make it to the biennale. There are fewer more prominent examples of this phenomenon than India, for instance—the most populous nation on the planet and touted to be a creative powerhouse in global circuits—recording a net nil participation at the biennale owing to all the cultural budget of its four trillion dollar economy spent on hosting the G20 summit and the Mahakumbh, among others. Ironically enough, a number of Indian architects including stalwarts like Raj Rewal, Sameep Padora and Vastu Shilpa Consultants earn retrospective mentions at the Qatar Pavilion, amplifying global south discourse with a unified front, but in the absence of state sponsored apparatus. It is precisely tougher provocations like these, among so many other, that the robots and AI jargon tend to gatekeep behind their glitzy fronts.

The national participations, then, mostly outside the purview of the curator’s shows but still partly bound by and responsive to its themes, do offer some respite, though mostly by restraint and in some cases, by total absence. It is providential that a couple of the permanent national pavilions in the Giardini—namely the Czech, Slovak Pavilion and the French Pavilion, mounting its display on scaffoldings outside the main structure—are shut for repairs and renovation, while Denmark’s Build of Site makes a showcase out of precisely that. Curated and ‘performed’ by Pihlmann Architects, the pavilion is a live construction site with well-documented details and construction drawings set in place for future archives. Both the British and US Pavilions, titled PORCH and GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair, are pleasant surprises, considering the increasingly facetious calls of returns to glory days in both countries and the suppression of minority rights in the face of it. While the former takes a remarkable deep dive into extrapolating the importance of porches in American homes and their communal nature that can be employed in architectural planning, the British Pavilion confronts its colonial and extractive roots without recourse in the longest time under Cave_Bureau, Kathryn Yussof and Owen Hopkins.

The Nordic Pavilion’s presentation, Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture, comprising fascinating but tough to watch performances by artist Teo Ala-Ruona, is also worth a special mention for subverting the traditional mediums of the biennale, using the trans body as a lens to critically relook at modernist architecture. Speaking of political accountability or its lack thereof from the previous passage, both Russia and Israel did not mark any participation this year, but the former was set to host an event by the British designer Thomas Heatherwick on his Humanise campaign. On the other hand, both the Lebanon and Ukraine pavilions at the Arsenale wore heartening responses to the devastation wrought by war in their countries, according to the ground and the roofs above our heads as refuge and preservers of memory. 

While the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 mounts an expansive showcase, perhaps more so than in previous years—the shutting down of the Central Pavilion prompted the shift of the Curator’s showcase to the Arsenale and the rest of the city as a “living laboratory”. Despite this unprecedented abundance, the curation felt cautious, constrained and circumspect. The biennale’s focus on tech and an 'in-house' Italian curator marks a departure from some of the most radical presentations in the history of La Biennale and a cooling down from the ‘heat’ of Lesley Lokko’s fiery opening speech in 2023, as well as Adriano Pedrosa’s Foreigners Everywhere. A square focus on techno-driven futures may have seemed like a safe bet, but the fact that a handful of tech mega-conglomerates own most consumer goods and services and an alarming amount of essential ones across the world, influencing spheres from food production to entire governments, should give us all pause. With the current state of affairs, neither architecture, nor technology, nor the people behind either, can afford to appear neutral.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.

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 the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 (Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective) as we traverse the most radical pavilions and projects at this year’s showcase in Venice.