Moving through “Intellgens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.,” in the Corderie area of the Arsenale, projects are piled closely together, each competing for attention. Whereas previous editions of the Biennale opted for more generous spatiality and concision regarding quantity, Carlo Ratti instead favors a constellation of contributions that fill up the space. This sets up both a friction and potential for this year’s exhibition scenography; an intervention of detailed column extrusion sections designed by sub. These column sections, each around forty inches in height, come in three material configurations: eye-catching, tendon-like 3D-printed knobby assemblages; extruded aluminum; and wood. Sophia Kuhn, sub’s design director, said the material selection of the columns is meant to reflect “natural,” “artificial,” and “collective” forms of intelligence, respectively.
Modules of these sections interlock and stretch over three meters tall, guiding visitors’ eyes up toward the expansive height of Corderie and providing a moment to catch one’s breath. Columns are also oriented horizontally as crossbeams, forming semi-enclosed areas. In arrays, they delineate individual project territories. The profile of the structure also acts the mounting framework for two-dimensional exhibition content, with display panels inserted into the extrusion’s grooves. This not only frames a vertical cue for navigation, but also a referential rhythm in the overloaded venue. Arguably over-engineered or excessively detailed for its function, sub’s design establishes a visual direction and sensory narrative for the exhibition.
The sterile slotted aluminum extrusion and vernacular wood joinery each stand for a point in time where architectural material proliferates under a form of technological allowance and efficiency. The bulbous nodes of the “natural” section’s protruding knobby forms, however, open up a field of discourse on the ongoing elaboration of post-human aesthetics. Their tendon-like articulation operates as ornamentation while disrupting binary thinking around materiality and form-making. Their computationally-engineered organic musculature expose a tension between the decorative and the restrained, the pulsating and the machinic.
This aesthetic rendering of cyborgian mutation is a nod to one of the defining visual codes of the 2020s: a speculative techno-gothic mode that transfers media material back into the built environment, as if a reversed digital twin. Like many of sub’s other work, the exhibition design of “Intelligens.” goes full-on into a prototype-driven synthetic methodology. Instead of foregrounding contextual agendas, it prioritizes narrative-driven posture.
Under this entangled correlation between media and the built environment, sub’s other intervention in the main exhibition renders the physical exhibition venue of the Arsenale back into media space. Spatial Intelligens is an artificial-intelligence-powered personal guide that functions as a digital-twin companion to the biennale. My Spatial Intelligens presents a cyborgian-biological interface, allowing visitors to input their specific interests or “inquiring attitude.” In return, the web app mutates the digital twin and re-maps projects within the Arsenale, tailoring navigation through the exhibition to each individual visitor.
sub’s ongoing investigation of mutating form has resonated in the commercial domain, such as their collaborations with Balenciaga. Indeed, in describing the choice to appoint them as exhibition designer, Carlo Ratti pointed to their “capacity to connect with a larger audience.”1 sub’s lead designer, Niklas Bildstein Zaar, noted that his fascination with gaming and virtual reality, prior to entering architecture, has led him and his team to inhabit a hyphenated zone: a corridor where architecture and media are no longer separate domains.2 What was once confined to a simulation of the physical is now mutating physical artifacts and contesting anthropocentric modes of material formation.
These column sections create a visual scaffolding and narrative backdrop for projects to unfold, while also opening up an expanded dialogue on other mutating structural anomalies within the exhibition across the Arsenale and Giardini. This year’s Canadian Pavilion, “Picoplanktonics” by the Living Room Collective, features a series of porous cellular structures that challenge both form and material through physical and biological mutation. These biomimetic structures house an ancient strain of marine bacteria called cyanobacteria (picoplankton) that grows across their lattice surface, gradually reinforcing it through mineralization and carbon absorption. Over the course of the exhibition, these structures will continue to grow, visibly changing in color and mass in response to daily spraying media solutions and carefully maintained humidity and salt levels.
Though these mutating formations are still largely reliant on existing 3D-printing technologies, new printable materials have surfaced. The Living Room Collective’s structures and biotic cycles are part of an ongoing research project by ETH’s Digital Building Technologies (DBT) department led by Andrea Ling. Another entry developed in collaboration with DBT, titled Anti-Ruin by OZRUH, is present both as part of the main exhibition in the Corderie and the Turkish Pavilion. The project features a new stone fabrication method called binder-jetting, which consolidates marble dust—50 percent of marble quarry waste—into solidified form. OZRUH leverages this new post-manufacturing process to produce a novel form that stands beyond the reach of conventional stone-working. The resulting volumes are monolithic stone blocks that resemble ancient stone ruins, with carved-like surfaces oscillating between computational control and the temporality of fragmentation. The blocks are interlocked together with expressed tectonic joints, forming a media artifact situated between relic and speculation.
Through material investigation, each of these projects propose a new way of negotiating artificial intelligence and evolving digitality. At the same time, their ecological performance is more of a consequence of their material formation: sub’s columns are fully degradable and will be repurposed after the exhibition; the Living Room Collective’s bacterial insertion unfolds as an archi-biological laboratory; and OZRUH’s fabrication ignites conversation on converting waste materials.
The main exhibition foregrounds the urgency of climate breakdown on top of the already expansive “Intellgens.” agenda. Within this context, attention to ecological responsibility risks steering projects away from articulating their entanglements with emerging intelligence. In spite of this, these three projects throw into question the relationship between formal expression and ecological responsibility: Which comes first, and which should be prioritized? What if formal mutation is emphasized, and ecological obligation seeps in as an undercurrent—instead of starting as the prerequisite?
As architecture stands to become only further entangled with intelligence over the coming decades, moral obligation might not be a mandate, but rather an effect of its outcomes. What follows may simply be an open invitation to mutants of new material and tectonic expression. A lighter burden of responding to obligations might better position architecture to ease its growing urgency, while letting social and ecological accountability unfold over time.
Thomas Rogers, “A Touch of Apocalypse Chic in Venice,” The New York Times, May 7, 2025.
Niklas Bildstein Zaar, “Manticore,” presented at The World Around & Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Summit, 2024, video recording.
