The Biennials Won't Save Us
Some thoughts on the Venice Architecture Biennale from someone who spends a lot of time there.
You might have read that headline thinking to yourself No shit, Jennifer, as if they were ever gonna save us. No exhibition truly has the power to solve the climate crisis, but this Biennale made me realise that to a much deeper extent than before.
This is my third Architecture Biennale. As you might know, I’m here in Venice every year and I spend a whole lot of time seeing the Biennale. This year, it’s all about Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. I was excited about this one. Excited because it was presented with a sense of urgency: Architecture needs to be hands-on, solution-oriented, and respond now. Architecture needs to adapt, to use curator Carlo Ratti’s (Gen X, Italian) words. Enough wasteful luxurious comfort, enough elusive concepts, enough poetry. Some might say that art can be powerful in addressing crisis. But when a house stands in flames, I want people to get water and help, not recite poems about how the fire makes them feel and how it needs to be stopped.
With Underground Climate Change, Northwestern University illustrates how the rising ground temperatures can at least generate free and renewable energy. Huang Jia Wei’s Hyper Sponge proposes regenerative urban planning systems that alleviate the pressure of flooding in Kuala Lumpur. There are plenty of inspiring projects. Too many, perhaps: most are confined to panels on the walls. Just texts and some pictures, take it or leave it.
And just as every year, there are useless projects in between. Not useless because they tried something risky that didn’t work out. Canada’s National Participation Picoplanktonics presents research on living sculptures infused with plankton absorbing carbon dioxide: An experiment that unfortunately doesn’t thrive under the new exhibition conditions. The projects I’m referring to are useless in a “We live in a society” ahh way because they hyperfixate on a small idea and how to present it in the most aesthetic way possible. EMBT Architects’ The Architecture of Virtual Water is such a case: A complex layered envelope made of wood and paper that abstractly spells the word “Acqua” presents the idea that water is, in fact, important and scarce. It’s not an architectural piece that proposes a strategy on how to protect this resource.
Addressing Emotion
It might have sounded earlier as if I completely discarded the potential of art in addressing crisis. Art can fuel emotions — data alone can’t. Triggering an emotional response can be the tipping point of radicalization. Radicalization that leans into conspiratorial thinking, hostility, fear, and hatred. Or it can start radicalization that resists hopelessness: A radicalization that recognizes one’s power and chooses to care instead of shutting off. Rachel Carson’s (1907-64, US-American) Book Silent Spring (1962) is powerful not because of its meticulous research and complex analysis of datasets. It’s powerful because it ultimately makes one single idea stick: If we keep on poisoning and destroying our world, spring without birds will be silent.
Carlo tries to address emotions. Transsolar’s Terms and Conditions introduce the Main Exhibition in the Arsenale. It’s a dark room warmed up to 40°C by the reversed air conditioners hanging from the ceiling. Mirrors artificially extend the claustrophobic space. The Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte’s The Third Paradise Perspective water basins obstruct movement, so you have to carefully navigate the darkness through the tight paths. Once outside in the next room, a chill breeze from the air conditioner offers relief.
Germany’s National Participation Stresstest uses a similar strategy: Heat panels raise the temperature in a room, and infrared cameras underneath visualize the impact on the body. But both in the German Pavilion and in the Main Exhibition, the heat experienced on one’s own body isn’t the desired wake-up call. It doesn’t give me the panic attack I had at the French Pavilion last year. It’s a temporary condition. A selfie occasion (don’t you think I’m the exception, I took one, too). People stop right at the beginning of the Main Exhibition to take a picture. To take a video. To take several videos. The heat doesn’t bother them at all. They take their time strolling through slowly. They’re like the frog in the nice warm water heating up to boil. The spectacle is too impressive to feel one’s body. Who thinks of heat when looking at San Marco for the first time, right? I get to choose how much time I spend in there, unlike the people somewhere on the other side of the world who face the consequences of my comfort.
The exhibition doesn’t play into emotions enough, I’d say. Instead, the first sense of unease (if you even felt it at all) triggered through the introduction with its uncertain outlook into the future is quickly replaced by upbeat enthusiasm. The fact that Canal Café, a project which essentially says, if they can’t drink clean water, let them drink coffee, won the Golden Lion seems sadistic. Naive, to say the least. And it doesn’t even use actual filtered canal water as it claims…
Phineas Harper legitimately calls the exhibition “A Tech Bro Fever Dream” for ArtReview. High praises for AI and yet nobody has in mind how to minimize that carbon and water use. The Economist has published some articles on how AI can make dirty industries more efficient and therefore cut emissions. Something, at least. So far, only one project in the exhibition stood out as a critical counterpoint to AI enthusiasm: Lucia Rebolino’s Unpredictable Atmosphere brings to light AI’s blind spots in weather forecasting and its tendency to ignore unusual patterns in its calculations.
A Game One Can’t Win
The Nature subsection Material Bank offers plenty of materials that are both experimental and reliable. Materials that detoxify the air, insulate buildings, cool down spaces, protect from inundations; materials that are easy to make, install, maintain, and reuse. There are so many brilliant minds, established firms, and young students alike who come up with great ideas. And looking at all that variety, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why do we still struggle?
And this is an inherently naive question, I know that. The better the proposed solutions, the more frustrated I felt: We can have the best proposals in the world, the most groundbreaking ideas, the most life-changing strategies. But as long as architecture doesn’t link with politics, it’s nothing but hot steam. And even when you get politics to hop on, you still need to confront the final boss everything bows to: Capitalism.
Global Capitalism isn’t interested in sustainability because sustainability means that the distributed goods are more durable, less harmful, less expensive, and therefore don’t need to be bought or replaced as often. Capitalism is inherently not interested in solving problems. It sells short-term and mid-term solutions, but never fixes anything in the long run. Where there’s no problem, there’s nothing to sell. Capitalism operates in a vicious circle that runs on artificial deterioration:
Identify problem
Offer a solution that alleviates the symptoms of the problem
Let the untreated root causes amplify the problem
Repeat
Let’s say you’re overworked. Your stress gives you regular headaches. You buy painkillers to deal with the headaches. You alleviate the headaches but you’re still overworked. The painkillers stop working because your body can’t take the pressure. You develop an addiction to painkillers. The painkillers and stress combo starts damaging organs. You get new meds to deal with the damaged organs. Those meds come with new side effects. Those side effects need extra treatment. And just like that, you’ve become entirely dependent on solutions for a problem that was rooted not in your headaches but in being overworked. Exploitation is the cause and the cure. This is not a bug. This is by design.
So we can warn all we want about water and food shortage, about new viruses, about worsening air quality, about crumbling livelihoods. The inherent monster that Capitalism is, it will grin with darkened eyes and only ask: How can we make that happen faster? Companies don’t believe in basic human rights because rights mean an absence of customers. Every resource becoming rarer means an increase in demand and value. And of course it is dumb. Of course, Capitalism would be its own demise if it ran out of all the resources it speculates with. But the system is so parasitical, not because it’s so smart but because it operates on greed. And greed is hard to beat with facts.
This is why seeing the German Pavilion feels so heartbreaking to me. We already have all the tools to tackle rising temperatures in cities. We don’t even have to reinvent the wheel: Plant trees, unseal surfaces, use reflective construction materials, reuse more, build less. It really is that simple!!! And yet, real change feels like an elusive wish, not a real possibility. The Office for a Non-Precarious Future presented by the Czech National Participation back in 2023, humorously pointed out the stubbornness young architects face when creating projects: Make it cheap, simple, and grey.
Architecture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It needs to reach out to decision makers just the way it helps shape environments that make people make better decisions in the first place. Austria’s National Participation Agency for Better Living compares Vienna and Rome and their historical and contemporary approaches to the housing crisis. Estonia’s National Participation Let me warm you acts out scenarios where landlords, architects, politicians, activists, and residents work together and against each other the way it tends to be in reality.
Special Mention Prize Winner Tosin Oshinowo’s Alternative Urbanism: The Self-Organized Markets of Lagos centers on the smooth working of Lagos’ informal markets that rival Western buy-and-toss economies. ELEMENTAL’s From Belongings to Belonging visualizes how the architecture studio fights drug violence, poverty, displacement, and corruption in Chile by building sustainable and affordable houses in less than 24 hours. They take away the one card the cartels play to recruit, which is a sense of care that the overwhelmed government doesn’t provide. Architecture is powerful when it recognizes what it can do for people instead of portfolios.
How are we gonna make it? Bro, I don’t know what to do either. But I don’t want to be hopeless. The most powerful projects seem to be the grassroots movements, not the monumental ones.
Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. 19th International Architecture Exhibition, until November 23, 2025, at La Biennale di Venezia.
La Biennale di Venezia
Giardini & Arsenale
Venice
Website
Instagram: @labiennale
What do you think? I’ll see some more pavilions out in the city, maybe we can make a lil guide for my favorite ones. In the meantime, like, comment, and share. Thank you!
See you soon!!!
Jennifer
The Gen Z Art Critic
"And even when you get politics to hop on, you still need to confront the final boss everything bows to: Capitalism."
The wording makes my day, but the content gives me sleepless nights. You're right, no tech-bros' wet AI dream will solve the problem within a capitalistic system. So we are doomed to drown or burn.