Biennale Architetura 2025. Intelligens

“INTELLIGENS develops the knowledge
and capacities that help us evolve, lest we
succumb to a burning planet. INTELLIGENS
loves nature, millions of years of building,
destroying, recycling—trial-and-error
evolution. INTELLIGENS acts, generating
a new repertoire of solutions - ready for
testing, feedback and safe failure.”
Carlo Ratti

The 19th International Architecture Exhibition, curated by Carlo Ratti, to be held from 10 May to 23 November 2025 in Venice, is titled Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. The Exhibition, as the Curator himself explains, “will search for a path forward, proposing that intelligent solutions to pressing problems can take many forms” and “will present a collection of design proposals and many other experiments, exploring a definition of
'intelligence' as an ability to adapt to the environment with limited resources, knowledge, or power” (Carlo Ratti).
The Catalogue, published by Edizioni La Biennale di Venezia, is as always printed in two volumes. It follows the Exhibition itinerary accompanying visitors and art lovers through the exhibition spaces of the Giardini and the Arsenale, and presenting other projects on display in various locations around the city of Venice and Forte Marghera, in Mestre.
Volume I of the Catalogue is dedicated to the International Exhibition, curated by Carlo Ratti. The first pages of the volume open with the statement by President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and the presentation by the Artistic Director of the Architecture Department Carlo Ratti who details the main themes of the Exhibition. The volume then presents the Circularity Manifesto, which outlines “a new standard for future cultural events” that follows the example of Biennale Architettura 2025 to achieve
“ambitious goals of circularity”.
Volume I is then divided into two parts.
Part one, titled Intelligens, is dedicated to presenting the sections of the International Exhibition: Intro, which starts from Venice to “elaborate innovative living solutions”; Natural Intelligence, which investigates how architecture “relies on nature today to reorient practice”; Artificial Intelligence, which reflects upon “how the profes-sion will change when generative models can produce construction drawings from simple text”; Collective Intelligence, which explores “how we can bridge old and new to leverage the endless possibilities of collective intelligence”; and finally Out, in which the projects seek “an alternative perspective” that “may lie just out of reach”. Each project on display in the Exhibition is accompanied by a critical text and a rich apparatus of photographs.
Part two of the volume, titled Venice as a Living Lab, presents “a number of special projects that will leverage Venice and the outdoor areas of the Biennale Exhibition venues as a Living Lab, merging interacting forms of intelligence”.
The volume is enriched with a series of critical essays and inter-esting “Impossible Conversations” that explore the themes of the Exhibition in depth.
Volume I ends with the biographies of the participants and a detailed register of the projects on exhibit.
The National Participations and the Collateral Events participating in the 19th International Architecture Exhibition are gathered in Vol-ume II and presented with illustrated texts that explore the projects proposed by the National Pavilions and the Collateral Events at the Giardini, the Arsenale and in various spaces throughout Venice.
The graphic identity and the design of the publications for Biennale Architettura 2025 are by Studio Kasper-Florio, St. Gallen (Switzerland).