Evidently, no one actually knows how to stop climate change. The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale reveals that architecture, the discipline built on structural permanence and a kind of preemptive warfare against nature, is struggling to tolerate the instability of the present. Architecture is caught between speculative futurity and immediacy. In response to the urgent demands of now, pavilions of former colonial metropoles have turned towards aestheticized gestures and techno-utopian narratives in the face of real planetary breakdown. But our ecological crisis is both technical and historical. It is, in fact, a consequence of colonialism. As a way to counteract its complicity in the ecological purgatory of climate disasters, architecture can offer a decolonial ecology centered on non-extractive practices that elevate the political agency of materials.
Curated by landscape architect Bas Smets along with neurobiologist and botanist Stefano Mancuso, the Belgian Pavilion’s “Building Biospheres” offers a reflection on the potential of ecological intelligence. Upon entry into the brightly lit, minimalist exhibition, the all-white walls neatly frame a curated assemblage of over 200 subtropical plants. These ecologically displaced plants were set center stage and elevated as the main act in this botanical theater. Circumnavigating the installation, visitors discover sensors intricately woven among each plant like an artificial, super-terranean root system constructed out of IV-like cables. The plants clean and purify the air, which cools the room. The adjoining exhibition rooms provide a contrast to this central space and reveal that the plants have all been selected for their promise as symbiotic partners for the future of indoor climate control.
The exhibition is more laboratory than landscape. Admittedly, as a Congolese person, I walked into the Belgian Pavilion with the burden of colonial history—my presence a blight on its elegant, thoughtful sterility. Given the fact that these plants were sourced and relocated from subtropical climates to live indoors in the service of humans, it is evident that the former colonial metropole continues to aestheticize ecological futures in a way that replicates extractive colonial logic. In effect, it reprises the legacy of sourcing inspiration from foliage similar to the eco-futurist Art Nouveau movement, which was initially referred to as “Style Congo,” not to denote cross-cultural “symbiosis,” but colonial conquest.
In Congolese cosmology, plant intelligence is relational. You do not harvest without consequence.1 To claim communion with plant intelligence while omitting the colonial roots of your materials lacks reverence and reciprocity. The greenwashed sterility of the Belgian Pavilion assumes an epistemic authority over plant intelligence and, however unintentionally, glazes over Indigenous intelligence. The plants in the exhibition are proof of an ethical intent, yet their raw essence has been cleansed of any animist ritual and offers no soul in their barks. Smets sees the future of architecture in cultivating “a new collective intelligence between humans, plants and buildings,” grounded in what he calls “a moral obligation to face that challenge with optimism and invention.” While this is admirable, and indeed important, Belgian ambition once turned sap into rubber and rubber into rule. New approaches—not new species—are what is needed.
The Anthropocene has created a condition where materials refuse to die. The chokehold of plastic and the industrial detritus of steel, cement, and glass live in tandem with conditions of socio-political instability. According to Emilio Ambasz, “What we now have is no longer the nature we were given. We have the nature we have made.”2 The Danish Pavilion “Build of Site,” curated by architect Søren Pilhmann, provides a practical and structural contrast to Belgium’s rampant speculative futurity and extractive materiality. Pihlmann responds with an honest “reuse” of materials, which offers an ecological memory aware of its entanglements with overproduction and carbon responsibility. This low-tech solution is available now without the aesthetic of scarcity often attributed to survival architecture.
The exhibition is essentially a demolition site designed to reveal the process and potential of repair. The excavation both exposes the building’s original materials and creates a visual archive in the form of drafts and notes laid out on a long makeshift, concrete table in the central space. The archive details the provenance of the materials, including mounds of earth and gravel slabs that are placed categorically along the periphery of the room. The floor of one exhibition space has been entirely removed, uncovering the earth and rocky foundation that held decades of exhibitions in the space. Slightly above this, a video projected onto a large screen documents the research team’s process of disassembly and material gathering. Notably, the only new materials introduced to the space are the natural bonding agents sourced locally from the Venetian lagoon. This openness, both conceptually and spatially, serves to demystify the material gathering process and allows it to focus on local, industrial materials that have already been processed by virtue of human intelligence. These materials, loaded with history, permit a second life through reuse.
Pihlmann’s approach, with its emphasis on locality and resistance to the new, radically downscales architecture. While not overselling the narrative nor claiming any political authority over this approach, this focus on “the existing,” as Pihlmann calls it, is anti-globalist and potentially, even, anti-imperialist. These materials comprise industrial detritus acting as organic architecture; not natural but ethically sourced. Is this interdependence a form of contemporary European animism, or perhaps, a new socio-industrial ecology? By putting materials back in circulation, the historical and social narrative built into building materials negates architecture’s tendency to assume a sort of tabula rasa, centering, instead, a material afterlife. It is a synergy with the ghosts of mass production after the materials have been exhumed and excised.
This localism creates an almost tribal ecology reminiscent of forest-dwelling Indigenous groups in the Congo who use raw materials like wood and palm leaves and accept ephemerality as a condition of coexistence with nature. Led by plant intelligence, their dwellings are meant to degrade with nature and are built again in accordance with the climate. Pihlmann’s approach shares this deep ecological intuition. It is improvisational, responding to what a site has to offer. As he writes in the book accompanying the exhibition, Making Matter What Too Often Doesn’t Matter, “At the core of my pursuit is not so much a directive for how buildings should look but how they should and could be made, and eventually remade in the future.”3 This suggests that the act of building is not a blueprint imposed but a collaboration and dialogue with existing conditions. The outcome of this is contingent on what is revealed in the material remains of processed detritus. It is an architecture of repair that prioritizes process over prescription.
A true postcoloniality in architecture would imply a rupture of the aesthetic systems imposed by modernity. While this will likely never happen, the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale uncovers a European movement towards a morally corrective politics of repair, with a tension between local and global interventions. Global interventions, as evidenced by the Belgian Pavilion, diminish their potential as a sustainable solution because of the reliance on outsourcing non-native forms of intelligence; becoming yet another example of the European narrative around intellectual authoritarianism and erasure. The method demonstrated in the Danish Pavilion lends itself to an improvisationality that effectively decentralizes aesthetic authority, depending on the site of repair. This logic could be lent to other communities while allowing them to define their unique aesthetic of repair and build their own counter-archives. While it does not offer a complete rupture, there is, at least, no denial of history. At the risk of falling into speculative futurity, it would be interesting to see how Pihlmann’s approach translates to a city like Kinshasa: a city where materials and their afterlives are in constant flux; where nothing is ever truly discarded; a city where architecture is already, by necessity, a choreography of the provisional.
Bas Smets, quoted in Edwin Heathcote, “’The trees will be cyborgs’: meet the architect turning to plant intelligence,” Financial Times, April 24, 2025.
Emilio Ambasz, “Built Ecologies,” Museum of Modern Art (@themuseumofmodernart), Instagram, 2024, ➝.
Søren Pihlmann and Adam Dickinson, Making Matter What Too Often Doesn’t Matter (Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 2025), 13.
