The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, titled Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. and curated by Carlo Ratti, has just opened for previews. Following the public opening on Saturday, May 10, the exhibition will run through November 23, 2025. While on site in Venice, ArchDaily had the chance to meet with the curator Carlo Ratti to discuss the first impressions and the main themes of this edition of the Biennale. Featuring 65 national pavilions, 11 collateral events, and over 300 contributions from more than 700 participants, the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale is set to be the largest in the Biennale’s history.
Ratti discusses how the Biennale has been conceived not just as a passive viewing experience, but as a space for active engagement, where the audience can interact with the content on multiple levels. Drawing inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part, which depicts a whirlwind tour of the Louvre in just eight minutes, the Biennale has been designed to allow visitors to traverse the entire exhibition in five minutes. For those wishing to dive deeper, the space invites longer engagements, with the potential to explore it for hours or even days. Ratti describes the exhibition’s structure as a “fractal organism,” creating a dynamic and flexible environment where different resolutions of engagement are possible.
At the heart of this year’s Biennale lies the theme of bridging natural, artificial, and collective intelligens through architecture. Ratti explains that the exhibition aims to explore how architecture can respond to a rapidly changing world by synthesizing these diverse forms of intelligence. By splitting the exhibition into three sections, natural, artificial, and collective, the curatorial team provides visitors with a clearer framework to understand how these realms interact, all while highlighting their inherent interconnections. With over 700 participants from fields as varied as architecture, design, sociology, and fashion, the Biennale becomes a platform for cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration. Ratti likens the exhibition to a “super organism,” where diverse voices and approaches converge and intertwine, creating a cohesive yet multifaceted narrative.
Another key theme explored at the Biennale is the urgent need for architecture to respond to global crises, whether environmental, social, or political. Ratti encapsulates this idea with a simple yet profound statement: “Architecture is about survival.” The exhibition examines how architecture can harness various forms of intelligence to address these pressing challenges and offers a platform for ideas that seek to create solutions for a changing planet. By fostering a forward-thinking dialogue on the intersection of architecture and global crises, the Biennale encourages both visitors and practitioners to think critically about the role of architecture in shaping the future.
Reflecting on the chain reaction sparked by the Biennale, the curator emphasizes how this process began with intimate discussions and collaborations among architects, designers, and thinkers from around the world. This chain reaction is not confined to the Biennale itself but is expected to continue beyond the event, shaping both the architecture discipline and the broader conversation on how to tackle the critical challenges of our time.
