Philip Maughan took the Architecture Biennale personally
Chances are you have never been to the architecture biennale. Statistically speaking, you’re much more likely to have attended the art biennale, which alternates with the architecture biennale, biennially. According to official figures, 700,000 tickets were sold for the Biennale Arte in 2024, compared to 285,000 for the Biennale Architettura in 2023. I personally don’t understand why contemporary art is necessarily more compelling than buildings, urbanism, infrastructure, and the like. But then again, my favourite colour is grey.
I don’t like Venice – not particularly. The city itself is of course amazing: a diorama of medieval urban mercantilism built on an upside-down forest. It will be a shame to see it sink into the Mediterranean, taking the historic churches, bridges, and palazzos down with it. Not that I think the locals will care. The reality of Venice in 2025 is that there are tourists everywhere, and to make things worse, the Italians kept lumping me in with them. I battled mosquitos every night I was in town and ate nothing of note, save for several scoops of ice cream from Gelato di Natura, each of which was speculatular.
This year’s biennale theme is “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” The main group show, curated by MIT professor (and robot mixologist inventor) Carlo Ratti, was crammed into the Corderie, an 11,430-square-metre factory where ropes for mooring and sails were once made, back when La Serenissima was at her height.
Following a grim layover in Frankfurt, I took a wallet-gouging vaporetto ride to the Arsenale. Already overheated, I plunged into the exhibition. There, suspended over waist-high tubs of water – glistening in the low light like vats of black oil – hung a series of air-conditioning units. Instead of cooling the space they were running in reverse, blasting hot air into the already stifling room. It was a fiery commencement to a show that had many longing for escape.
Reading the show’s reviews after the fact, nobody seemed pleased. ArtReview called it “a claustrophobic mess of bio and techno theatrics, relying on expensive machines to solve problems that didn’t need fixing in the first place.” The FT’s Edwin Heathcote complained there wasn’t enough architecture, by which I think he meant models, drawings, pictures of buildings, stuff like that.
The Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright points out there were 750 participants, which is about 10 times the usual number, adding: “While the main exhibition might leave you with indigestion, the Giardini – the garden that is home to most of the national pavilions – provides a refreshing foil this year, partly because so many of the pavilions are closed.”
Ouch. It’s true that the most memorable encounters I had on my long weekend took place outside the Corderie and Giardini. In a space close by the entrance, Icelandic duo s.ap architects presented Lavaforming, a speculative sci-fi thriller in which the nation’s sons and dóttirs learn to sculpt liquid basalt fresh from the island’s volcanoes to create a black arcology. It was cool. There wasn’t much practical application to be considered, but at least it owned up to that, rather than agonising over the twin extremes high and low-tech solutionism, as was the primary dialectic elsewhere.
Another great pavilion was Uzbekistan’s. A Matter of Radiance took as its subject the physical structure and ambivalent history of the Sun Heliocomplex, a “solar furnace” in the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains near Tashkent. Renamed the Sun Institute of Material Science in post-Soviet times, this is an knowledge-creating instrument at architectural scale – one of only two such facilities in the world. It boasts a field of 65 heliostatic mirrors, which direct the sun’s rays into an enormous convex concentrator, and from there into a 40-centimeter diameter “oven.” The institute tests materials for aerospace, manufacturing, and military applications, rapidly driving temperatures up to 3,000 degrees Celsius using nothing but the light of our nearest star.
Speaking of ovens, that night I ate a pizza on Campo Santo Stefano with an American friend, William. This was right as the new American pope was announced. Our waiter was so excited he insisted William foot the bill, explaining joyfully that now Italy would be freed from Trump’s tariff regime. Each night in Venice involved a slow progression toward a single bar, Vino Vero, on Fondamenta La Misericordia. I don’t know why that bar was chosen, but I met some great people outside: a Serbian woman whose lover had bought multiple icebreaker ships; an Iranian-Turkish-Swede who goes on an extreme holiday every year on her birthday, which was, as it happened, just days away (the last time I checked her Instagram, she was camping in the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia, the hottest, lowest, and driest place on Earth.)
On Saturday morning, I took part in a “revolving conversation” at Palazzo Diedo, home to the Berggruen Arts and Culture organisation, and twin exhibitions by the technology think tank Antikythera and MIT’s architecture department. A research project of mine about the history of simulations, Infinity Mirror, was recently published as part of the new Antikythera journal (which you should check out.)
I spoke with MIT Press director Amy Brand, Google DeepMind researcher Winnie Street, and historian of ideas (and homie) Thomas Moynihan, led by the think tank’s director, Benjamin Bratton. It was a fun event. I spoke three times in total, attempting to distill a 12,192-word essay in a series of anecdotes connecting recent developments in AI, climate simulation, geopolitics and clean energy to the arms race to produce better video game graphics in the early 2000s. It’s all true. I have the receipts.
A lot of the crowd from Diedo headed over to an EU-sponsored event called “Archipelago of Possible Futures,” which people kept referring to as “the showdown.” I thought they were joking. Sadly, they were not.
The final talk of the day was a debate titled “Post-Extractivist Ecologies: Alternative Futures for Data Centers and AI Infrastructures,” featuring Bratton with Kate Crawford, Evgeny Morozov, and Marina Otero. You sort of had to be there to experience the awkward gasps and polite rending of garments in the room, but I’ll do my best to summarise.
Bratton made an analogy between nuclear power and AI, whereby a well-meaning constituency (primarily old greens in Germany and Italy) scuppers the safest, cleanest energy source we have, leading to far worse outcomes over the long term, like Germany reopening its coal plants. Crawford played to the room with familiar tropes about tech overlords and how AI is racist, thirsty, colonialist, and actually getting worse, not better.
Morozov made the totally reasonable point that being pro-regulation does not make you a technophobe, but did so while constantly interrupting and ultimately ranting about communism. Meanwhile, Otero, the only architect on the panel, described some work she’d done on data centres and water usage while the other three tore each other apart.
One of my heroes, the science-fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, was scheduled to attend that day but apparently caught the latest version of Covid while visiting the Svalbard Seed Bank, which sounds like a plotline from one of his books. After another too-late night at Vino Vero, I spent a few hours on my last day visiting the OMA/AMO exhibition “Diagrams” at the Fondazione Prada, a dim, cool sanctuary away from the rising intellectual and atmospheric temperatures outside.
The show explored how diagrams can adapt to any media, showcasing 300 brilliant items, from the 12th century to the present, which visualise, persuade, and frame information in domains from health and inequality to war, truth, and the environment. There were spiritual diagrams, economic diagrams, maps, crime scene videos, and agricultural flow charts.
As a lifelong wordcel, it was nice to study each of them to make sure I understood what they were trying to say about the world, often without language. This might be why I like architecture, too – whether buildings, transit systems, or computer chips – any design system that upon close inspection reveals something of our collective hopes and fears. Overall, the biennale seemed full-to-bursting with what we should do, and less interested in how we got to where we are. After one last ice cream, I headed to the airport.
| Text | Philip Maughan |