e-flux Architecture is proud to announce a collaboration with the 2026 cohort of the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program (CCCP) of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP). Each of the cohort’s eleven participating members—Eric Chen, Ida Marie Hansen, Andrew Hébert, Amora McConnell, Camille McGriff, Satyam Mistry, Yvonne Mpwo, Olímpia Solà Inaraja, Emily Mei-Mei Taw, Paula Volpato, Yifan Wang—will publish a review of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, delving into and exposing the plurality of ideas, positions, and practices contained therein. We start with a collectively written review of Carlo Ratti’s 19th International Architecture Exhibition, “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.,” which will be followed over the coming months by specific contributions engaging the main exhibition, national participations, collateral events, and beyond.
In the main exhibition of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Carlo Ratti insists on quantity. Located primarily in the Arsenale’s Corderie building, a 317-meter-long former rope factory, over 300 contributions attempt to provide a cross-section of today’s architectural innovations. It effectively lands, however, on a tone of overwhelming dread and futurist escapism through its aesthetic of crisis. Disjointed and overwhelming, the exhibition appears like a brain mid-synapse, before the thought has fully formed. The broad categories of intelligence (“Natural,” “Artificial,” and “Collective”) divide and separate works that were otherwise selected for their interdisciplinarity and boundlessness. This intellectual and spatial partitioning mirrors the very crisis of coherence unfolding in contemporary knowledge systems raised by the exhibition itself. Its title evokes a celebration of the multiplicity of intelligence, but what results is a cognitive overload.
The Corderie’s clutter can be partially attributed to the renovation and closure of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, where much of the main exhibition is typically presented. More significantly, however, is the fact that Ratti implemented an open call for contributions to the exhibition for the first time in the Biennale’s history. Yet the outcome of the open call for “new forms of intelligence” is, apparently, a cast of familiar faces and Biennale regulars, from the likes of Bjarke Ingels, Alejandro Aravena, Norman Foster, Thomas Heatherwick, Kengo Kuma, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro to the slightly less famous but still well-established practices of Andres Jaque, Lina Ghotmeh, Ensamble Studio, Gramazio Kohler, and SO-IL. The soaring and photogenic installations of these select few are framed by endless pairs of one-by-three-meter-tall recycled particleboard panels, each featuring one or two contributions of lesser pedigree. Despite the fact that these more peripheral projects tend to feature more daring or radical thought, this exhibition strategy produces an ideological subsumption, leaving the larger works to speak for the smaller ones. The result is a visual hierarchy of curatorial importance, where only the most distinguished are permitted to express their ideas in three dimensions.
Bjarke Ingels Group, Laurian Ghinitoiu, and Arata Mori, Ancient Future: Bridging Bhutan’s Tradition and Innovation, 2025. Installation at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” Photo: Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia.
The material and conceptual accumulation of hundreds of projects in the Corderie could be interpreted as a clever curatorial gesture of intentional disarray—if only any logic could be identified in how adjacent projects relate to one another. Instead, the exhibition’s density tends to produce overlap and dissonance, not only visual, but also ideological. Transforming Legacy: The Evolution of Extractive Cultures in the European Arctic (by Stefano Tornieri, Agatino Rizzo, Johan Sandström), for instance, critiques the extractive nature of “smart” urbanism in the European Arctic by contrasting it with the Sámi indigenous practices it destroys. A small project of two images and 250 words, it defiantly rejects the current trajectory of technocratic solutionism. Nonetheless, it is quieted in the presence of the neighboring Space Garden (by Aurelia Institute, Heatherwick Studio, Brent Sherwood), a massive full-scale mockup envisioning the growth of agriculture in space as an exercise of “advancing planetary stewardship,” meaning exporting our polluting industries off-planet. Space Garden’s treatment of space as a terra nova for humanity’s exploitation sits squarely within the colonial logic that Transforming Legacy opposes.
Yet, there are some moments of fruitful relation. Deep into the exhibition, squeezed against the amphitheater of Speaker’s Corner (by Christopher Hawthorne, Johnston Marklee, Florencia Rodriguez), Organizing in the Lobby (by The Architecture Lobby) highlights our time’s labor crises through video interviews with architecture activist groups, contributing a frame of reference for the current state of organizing within the profession. Managing multivocality on a cross-organizational scale with loud and provocative graphics, Organizing in the Lobby anchors the Corderie’s main public program space with timeliness and focus.
Christopher Hawthorne, Johnston Marklee, and Florencia Rodriguez, Speakers' Corner, 2025, with Organizing in the Lobby by The Architecture Lobby visible in the background. Installation at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” Photo: Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia.
If there is one clear trend in the curatorial strategy of “Intelligens,” it is a turn away from an architecture of collectivity and instead toward an architecture of technocracy. Numerous interventions propose a technological capture of nature, harvesting it in an attempt to ensure human survival. The result is a dark stewardship of Earth, one where our design systems algorithmically adapt to the inevitable deteriorating conditions of our planet and intelligently soften the blow of ecocide on our personal comfort.
SpaceSuits.Us: A Case for Ultra-Thin Adjustments (by Emily Ezquerro, Jerónimo Ezquerro, Charles Kim, Stephanie Rae Lloyd, Emma Sheffer, Sam Sheffer) epitomizes this curatorial message. Utilizing NASA’s material strategies for surviving extreme environments, it proposes tailoring pre-existing architectures with a second skin of exterior insulation, shielding its inhabitants from the worst effects of global temperature rise. While its authors sought to promote a novel technique to salvage and rehabilitate crumbling housing, its placement within the epilogue of the Corderie—insidiously titled “Out”—reinforces a message of individualized mitigation within existing architectures and implies that building technologies will stay on course beyond the point of no return. Planting Buildings (by Material Cultures) uses exactly the opposite approach. Stemming from an experimental research studio at ETH Zurich, it seeks to materially reimagine architecture from the ground up, replacing contemporary construction materials with building envelopes that are specific to the “ecoregion” they are built within and using locally available materials. This project presents a form of technology that does not seek out the new but rather looks towards what already exists. It provocatively asks where intelligence is located but unacknowledged, and how it can be deployed within extant structures of culture, site, and production.
“Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” proposes rethinking the concept of intelligence, historically conceived as an exclusively human attribute, into an expanded system beyond the human. The curatorial statement proposes reconsidering architecture through these multiple intelligences. Yet rather than depicting a genuine engagement with this multiplicity, the exhibition does little to clarify the curator’s intentions or engage meaningfully with the implications of such a claim. Although the curatorial team awarded philosopher Donna Haraway with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement for her intellectual contributions, such as the notion that “natural, artificial, and collective intelligences act together,” this Biennale does a disservice to the complexity and nuance of Haraway’s work. It neglects her commitment to transhumanist solidarity, socialist feminism, and her opposition to blind faith in technology. Instead, the exhibition shows little humanistic reflection and fails to position itself with regard to the concept of intelligence. What is missing is the conceptual scaffolding provided by philosophy, deep scholarship, and the broad landscape of what we might still dare to call human intelligence. Instead, “Intelligens” uncritically approaches the multiplicities of intelligence, and as a result, makes no coherent arguments, stakes no claims, and takes no risks.