As always, AN is on the ground to report on happenings at the world’s largest architecture festival, the Biennale Architettura 2025—no longer the “Venice Architecture Biennale,” per updated style directions from La Biennale di Venezia. To experience La Biennale is to be deluged. You see hundreds of pieces by thousands of architects across dozens of venues, and the overwhelming result of the flood of people, projects, images, buildings, and architecture takes days to make it “intelligible.” (Sorry!) The exhibition, curated by Carlo Ratti, is a snapshot of what’s happening in the global architecture community. It is especially crowded this year, as the official participant list runs to over 750 names (the most ever, so far). And because the main pavilion is closed for renovations in the Giardini, this village is packed into the Arsenale. Rather than being a portrait with a single point of view, Ratti’s vantage is more like the multi-perspective camera used to make Google Street View. It attempts omnivision. How does it look? Upon entrance to the Corderie—through a dissociative starting room of HVAC fan units suspended over a shallow pool, a comment on our hyper-reliance on air conditioning—visitors face an initial shock from the sheer volume of films, sounds, large-scale installations, and information panels. The long, brick former weapons depot is disorienting in scale, and now it is disorienting in content, as a record density of work is on display, with consistent focus on material explorations and technological innovations. The “apocalypse chic” exhibition design by Sub, combined with screens and circuit boards, gives a machine-like feel. After time to acclimate, the curatorial layout softens. The center axis is filled with more visual, 1:1 installations of building parts and other prototypes, leaving little to read and plenty to take in. This central pathway provides drama and feeling, while on the outer edges, more traditional panels show photos and research-heavy explanations. “It’s an exhibition flanked by a magazine,” Aric Chen correctly observed. Nick Axel, editor for the biennale’s main catalogue, short guide, and exhibition, offered that the arrangement allows two speeds of engagement—fast and slow. Notably, the display placards furnish both a participant-supplied text and a shorter, two-sentence AI summary. These summaries are a revelation, and they open up the entire show. Their brevity provides basic information and eliminates repetitive information and long-winded artspeak. Apparently Ratti wanted to do away with the participants’ texts altogether, but settled for the juxtaposition of artificial and natural intelligences on each placard. Notably, there is no AI summary for “A Time of Adaptation,” Ratti’s introductory essay. Robots play a central role in the show. In one installation, a humanoid one dangles within a rebar sculpture; you can duck under and peer up at it as it flails. In another, a robot plays a handpan and copies the notes of a second instrument attendees can play. In what was perhaps the most performative display, Ancient Future by BIG, two Bhutanese artisans hand carve a diamond-shaped wooden beam; the other half is being carved by a robot, though today it was only mounted with a brush tool and was (somewhat sensuously?) cleaning the wood. Live carving with a drill bit wasn’t allowed due to safety concerns, Kai-Uwe Bergmann said. Ratti has said the show is a “people-focused biennale” due to the urgency of climate change, but there are remarkably few humans encountered in the main exhibition. Inside the Danish pavilion, dug up concrete was repurposed with cast materials in part to create display tables. (Hampus Berndtson) Inevitably, there will be activations. At the end of the long gallery, a Critic’s Corner organized by Christopher Hawthorne and Florencia Rodriguez takes the form of an auditorium designed by Johnston Marklee to host talks, including one tomorrow afternoon with Rem Koolhaas. In a smaller meeting room underneath, Hawthorne will tape informal conversations for an upcoming podcast series. The affair takes inspiration from a pencil-shaped kiosk designed by Charles Jencks for the 1980 biennale, the first “official” one. There is, of course, a bit of showmanship: A bridge designed by Norman Foster allows yachts direct access to the Arsenale, but for now it docks water bikes. Carlo Ratti rode one for the cameras. Earlier, he went for a spin with Eric Höweler, who briefly fell into the lagoon. Ratti’s preferred terminology is that the biennale is a “superorganism.” While it seems to have been used almost to the point of eyeroll, the metaphor makes sense. There is a looming sense technology and nature are both reclaiming abandoned, ruined, or half-finished spaces, like the creep of vines or the growth of a fungus. Andrés Jaque and OFFPOLINN contributed an arrangement of stones sourced from across Spain. He suggests stones are alive due to the intensity of microorganisms that call them home, while also noting that most quarried stone is disposed of as waste. He argues architecture ought to be about “entangling different forms of life.” These often-invisible lifeforms and underlying technologies are made visible in the exhibition. Robert Pietrusko with Space Caviar and Ersilia Vaudo of European Space Agency present Symphony of Satellites, a four-part film produced by scraping publicly available satellite data from the European Space Agency. By making seen what we normally take for granted, the visualizations offer insight into how we use space today. “There were spectacular images of the Space Race in the 1960s,” Joseph Grima said. “We wanted to give similar visual weight to the small miracles happening today in space exploration.” Peak Dystopia? Dean Kissick wrote that the Venice Biennale is often the end of things, not the beginning. Is Intelligens the end of something? Have we reached peak apocalyptic aesthetics? Still, there is something poetic about the main presentation in the Arsenale. It is dark, both in illumination and sensibility, but it has a wider range of work than what was anticipated, which is a welcome surprise. The sense of fashion runway–like presentations or doomy visions have been around for a while, especially online. Sub leaned into this for its past work for Balenciaga, and here it is seen in the display system, which is based on a modular column that in section looks like a finned aluminum heatsink. On view is an experimental collection of architecture research, from AI-generated 3D models to schemes for social housing, all under the guise of Intelligens. This wide-angle, crowdsourced framework guides the show, which is catholic in its sensibilities—catholic as in “broad, extensive, and spacious,” not like the Pope. (But we will address the capital-C Catholic agenda tomorrow when we visit the Holy See Pavilion.) Ratti’s circus seems to be offering a direction forward. It spans broad topics and with enough time, one emerges with a redeemed sense of architecture as a valuable technical, visual endeavor. PORCH! Today was also the first IRL glimpse of PORCH, the U.S. pavilion. (AN is its education/outreach partner.) Its wooden addition designed by Marlon Blackwell Architects is impressive in the context of the Giardini, and painting the soffit boards a haint blue is a nice touch. (In the U.S. South, porch ceilings are traditionally painted this color, which comes from Gullah culture.) Already the handful of chairs by Stephen Burks Man Made were being put to use in the nice weather. Inside, models from the selected projects are stacked in displays or on low tables; relevant books run along the wall below a typological history; and objects by Stephen Burks Man Made offer sculptural inserts, including quilts by Gee’s Bend. In the central room, a tall wood sculpture created at the University of Arkansas transforms down from the oculus into a compact seating room. Again, activations are forthcoming! Other Countries Nearby, Qatar has arranged for a bamboo pavilion designed by Yasmeen Lari, Pakistan’s first woman architect, to be assembled to capture the space where a Lina Ghotmeh–designed structure will be built. The radial item is prefabricated and bolted together. Lari said she now only works for the poor and has urged others to do the same. The Danish Pavilion is undergoing restoration, and the process has been expanded into a creative exploration by Søren Pihlmann of pihlmann architects. (His Thoravej 29 project, undertaken with similar ideals, featured on the cover of AN’s March/April issue.) Concrete has been dug up and repurposed, and new cast materials have been made, which in part create display tables in the pavilion. Through thoughtful reuse, the performance of construction unlocks the hidden beauty of what already exists. A documentary about the pavilion is almost done; here’s a teaser. The San Marco Art Centre opened its doors; among its inaugural exhibitions is a show on Korean landscape architect Jung Youngsun, the first licensed woman landscape architect in the country. (Kim Yongkwan/Courtesy MMCA) Location, Location, Location Today was also the opening day for the San Marco Art Centre. Housed on an upper floor of the Procuratie Vecchie, the renovated space begins with two shows, on the Australia-based modernist Harry Seidler (1923–2006) and Korean landscape architect Jung Youngsun, the first licensed woman landscape architect in the country. The venue will operate in a kunsthalle model with traveling shows, according to cofounder David Hrankovic. Beyond the Giardini Other shows and get-togethers are bubbling up. It’s easy to do double takes when strolling the Grand Canal as the scene is a fever dream of architects and hangers-on. Another early highlight is the Tolia Astakhishvili show in Dorsoduro curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist for the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation. The Georgian artist partially demolished an old palazzo and included works by others across its raw floors. Plumbing and raw blocks are exposed, mirrors are applied to jambs, and windows are papered over to create a reflective atmosphere for sculptures, videos, and drawings. We’re about to head out to check out the FormaFantasma installation at the Negocio Olivetti along Piazza San Marcos prior to additional revelry. The plaza hosts what is a strong contender for the best pavilion of the year: Its large paving stones have been ripped out to fix a plumbing problem and are in the process of being re-laid. (Oliver Wainwright dubbed it #PavingIntelligens 🪨✨.) It’s a welcome reminder about the structures, infrastructures, and people that have long enabled civic life. Whew—time for a spritz. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s dispatch.