“Venice is the complex result of multiple intelligences,” declares “Intelligent Venice: The Oldest City of the Future,” a Special Project at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale by the Venice Sustainability Foundation (VSF). 1 Installed at the Tesa dell'Isolotto on the Darsena Grande of the Arsenale, the project explores the different forms of intelligence that have made Venice a remarkable example of a city built on water, an artistic capital for centuries, and more recently, one of the most overtouristed cities in Europe, if not the world. In 2023, it received 5.66 million tourists, slightly surpassing its pre-pandemic peak in 2019, with a daily average of 15,519 visitors—86 percent of whom were international. Despite the 2021 ban on cruise ships and other initiatives by local and national governments, the rise of short-term rentals and the lack of effective public policy have deepened the city’s housing crisis. The resident population has dropped from 175,000 in the 1950s to fewer than 49,000 in 2024. Each year, about 1,000 Venetians leave the city, unable to find affordable housing due to the proliferation of tourist accommodations, the scarcity of social housing, and growing economic pressures.
While Venice may be one of the most extreme cases, the effects of mass tourism are increasingly visible across cities throughout Europe and beyond. Despite its significant economic contribution and role in sustaining Venice’s cultural capital, the Biennale subtly contributes to this process, attracting around 5 percent of the city’s total annual visitors (except in 2021, when post-pandemic travel restrictions pushed that figure up to 15 percent). It fuels a refined, less visible form of commodification and touristification. In an attempt to push back against this, since April 2024, the municipal government has imposed a €5 entrance fee on day-trippers during peak periods—a small gesture to reclaim at least a fraction of the economic benefit these fleeting visits fail to generate, despite the heavy impact they leave behind.
Founded in 2022 under the patronage of the Italian government, the VSF seeks to “create a new model of sustainability for Venice and its metropolitan area that allows for the stable recreation of the residential, work, and tourism experience that has made these places unique for centuries.” Curated by Benno Albrecht, Renato Brunetta, Pierpaolo Campostrini, and Paolo Costa, “Intelligent Venice” engages with the crises of the city in a generous and poetic way. Housed in a former shipbuilding warehouse in the Arsenale, the 500-square-meter installation—realized in collaboration with La Biennale di Venezia—offers an immersive journey through the historical development of the city and its lagoon. Organized around five apses, each corresponding to one of five “intelligences”—millenary, regulated, anthropological, civic, and urban—the exhibition brings together over 5,000 archival images, 1,000 historical maps, and large-scale multimedia projections to narrate Venice’s long-standing tradition of resilience and ingenuity in constructing a city atop water. At the center of the space is the Venetian Abacus, a long table running down the spine of the basilica-like interior, curated by the Università Iuav di Venezia. It gathers the tools and techniques that made this urban miracle possible—photographs and architectural drawings of constructive solutions used to build the city in such a specific site—and calls for a renewed form of collective intelligence to imagine how Venice, and cities like it, might continue to adapt to environmental and social precarity.
Venice is presented as a “millennia-old project,” balancing a humanistic and romantic vision of the city of canals with the technical rigor that has allowed it to survive for so long. Beyond traditional intelligences and construction methods, the exhibition also highlights projects that integrate innovation and sustainability—such as advanced energy systems for buildings, digital monitoring of water networks, and smart mobility solutions that optimize both public and private transport.
Crucially, the exhibition brings together a wide array of voices and disciplines (each apse is developed in collaboration with a different institution), offering multiple perspectives on the city— from organizations and experts working to preserve Venice, to examples of environmental resilience, energy efficiency, and the management of tourism and urban infrastructure. In the words of Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, this year’s International Architecture Exhibition “is also the autobiography of Venice, the Hydropolis that no utopia has ever dared to imagine but that the genius and ingenuity of a people were able to create, forcing nature by virtue of architecture.” The VSF exhibition concludes with the section titled “Actors of Today and Tomorrow,” which presents current public and private projects taking place across the city, establishing the exhibition as a potential starting point for the living laboratory that Venice is—and must remain.
Despite its multiplicity of viewpoints and its effort to trace the history of some of the city’s current crises— housing, overtourism, or rising sea levels—the exhibition shies away from deeper political critique of both endemic and contemporary challenges. The transformation of Venice into a tourist attraction and the gradual shift of its economy from industry to tourism has not been accidental, nor has it occurred without political consent. As the curators suggest, Venice is “a living laboratory of innovation and adaptation.” And as such, it is a focal point for many of today’s most urgent urban conflicts. Whether the sum of these five intelligences will be enough to face what lies ahead remains to be seen.
And so, while the world keeps sinking—and the crowds keep flowing through Venice, photographing themselves against its crumbling marvels—stepping outside the Tesa dell'Isolotto, illuminated by Venice’s multiple intelligences, you too can indulge in a moment of fantasy. Just beyond the former boatyards, the Canal Café installation by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Natural Systems Utilities, SODAI, Aaron Betsky, and Davide Oldani, offers an espresso brewed with the very waters of the lagoon that is slowly swallowing the city.
Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this text are from the press release for “Intelligent Venice: The Oldest City of the Future.”