What Cities Can Learn from the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale: Our Top Picks for Urbanists, City Leaders, and Thinkers

The theme of the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture, curated by Carlo Ratti and his team, is Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective. It asks how architecture can evolve by learning from “natural intelligence (the biosphere), artificial intelligence (code and machines), and collective intelligence (social systems and communities).”

This year’s Biennale featured an overwhelming volume of exhibitions, ideas, and provocations — from robots and techno-optimism to immersive environments and speculative prototypes. As we navigated the Giardini and Arsenale, we sought projects with traction: grounded, system-oriented approaches to climate, housing, circularity, and spatial equity. These are the pavilions, projects, and ideas that stood out for us — and which we believe resonate with urbanists, city leaders, and thinkers around the world.

‍

Heatwave - Kingdom of Bahrain Pavilion‍

‍

The standout of the Biennale — not for eccentric lights or spectacle, but for its humble, intelligent design. Curated by Andrea Faraguna, Bahrain’s Heatwave pavilion responded directly to the urgent challenge of extreme urban heat by installing a working prototype: a low, perforated metal canopy supported by a single central column. Beneath it, cooled air was dispersed through a mechanical system of ducts and nozzles. The floor, covered in sand and bordered with sandbag-style cushions, evoked both construction sites and communal spaces. The pavilion blended traditional Bahraini cooling wisdom (like wind towers and solar chimneys) with contemporary engineering to show how infrastructure can be intimate — and how resilience and social interaction can be fostered in public space.

Alongside the physical installation, the pavilion also presented a conceptual proposal through plans and drawings: a geothermal cooling well for urban plazas. This passive system would pull cool air from underground via a thermo-hygrometric axis, offering a low-energy, scalable vision for future climate-adapted public space.

‍

‍

Agency for Better Living - Austrian Pavilion ‍

‍

Austria’s pavilion titled Agency for Better Living, curated by Sabine Pollak, Michael Obrist, and Lorenzo Romito, posed an urgent question for cities globally: How can we design socially equitable, affordable housing? Through a deep dive into Vienna's (and Rome) housing delivery, the exhibition layered case studies, policy insights, and 3D models—delivering exactly the kind of depth of information urbanists have been longing for about Vienna's much lauded social housing delivery and culture. It didn’t just showcase architecture, but showed how better living is planned, designed, delivered and, governed.

One of the most compelling visuals — a graph tracking housing construction against population growth — showed how Vienna has kept pace with its growing population. Projects like Sonnwendviertel and Seestadt Aspern show new districts being built from scratch, and a public commitment to long-term affordability. With 45% of Vienna’s homes within the social housing system and about 80% of residents renting, the city continues to build and adapt at scale — backed by policy, public land, and delivery systems.
‍

‍

Alternative Urbanism: The Self-Organized Markets of Lagos – Tosin Oshinowo (Oshinowo Studio)

‍
This installation foregrounded the intelligence and complexity of Lagos’s informal economy. Focusing on three major markets—Ladipo (car parts), Computer Village (electronics), and Katangua (recycled fashion)—the project unpacked how these unplanned, self-regulating systems function as factories of circularity. Discarded goods from formal economies are reworked, resold, and revalued - more than just places of exchange and trade. Through maps, materials, and spatial diagrams, Oshinowo's approach treated these markets as infrastructure in their own right—offering a critical counterpoint to formal urban planning.

Learn more here
‍

Climate Realignment: Tactical Adaptations to Urban Heat – Roofscapes Studio

‍
Unlike many conceptual exhibits, this project was built and tested in the real world. It serves as a timely reminder that nature-based solutions can play a crucial role as European cities grapple with intensifying heatwaves — and as debates continue around the most effective ways to cool both buildings and people. In 2024, Paris-based startup Roofscapes, founded by MIT graduates, partnered with the City of Paris to install a full-scale prototype on top of the Académie du Climat. The goal: to reduce extreme rooftop temperatures by adding greenery, wooden walkways, and shade structures to the city’s zinc roofs.

Sensor data showed a temperature drop from 67.6°C to 35.7°C on the roof surface and up to 17°C cooler inside the building below. At the Biennale, Roofscapes visualised the project through thermal maps and a physical model.

Read more about the pilot project here.

‍

‍

Recycling Intelligences – Lluis Ortega, Enrique Romero, Julia Capomaggi, Nil Brullet

‍

‍

This installation blended machine learning with social housing innovation. Researchers from UPC and the University of Girona compiled a large dataset of Spanish housing proposals and used it to train an AI model that generated new typologies. The result: 370 3D-printed models mixing real and AI-generated housing designs, displayed on a glowing 12m² table.

Rather than treating AI as a design gimmick, the installation showed how it might support context-sensitive housing solutions, community-informed variations, and even climate-responsive forms. For urbanists, it posed a serious question: how can data and design co-evolve to meet urgent housing needs? Learn more here.

‍

Internalities: Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium – Pavilion of Spain

‍

Spain’s national pavilion once again affirmed its reputation for outstanding curation, deep research, and compelling exhibition design.Titled Internalities: Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium and curated by Roi Salgueiro and Manuel Bouzas, the exhibition responded to the Biennale’s theme by focusing on the internal processes often overlooked in architectural discourse. “Internalities,” as described by the curators, is a counterpoint to “externalities” — the hidden or ignored costs of construction such as carbon emissions, labour conditions, and resource extraction.

The central hall presented projects by a new generation of Spanish studios committed to local, regenerative, and low-carbon design practices. Surrounding rooms explored five critical themes — Materials, Energy, Trades, Waste, and Emissions — making visible the ecological and social impacts behind building. Notably, the pavilion drew attention to the fact that construction accounts for nearly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions, making these internal systems not only architectural, but planetary in consequence. Read more here.

‍

Special Mentions

• Ingesting Architectures – Sumayya Vally (Counterspace): A multisensory installation exploring the relationship between food, ritual, and space, using scent, sound, and texture to reflect on cultural memory and embodied experience. Watch here and visit counterspace-studio.com‍
• Rolex Pavilion – Mariam Issoufou Kamara: A serene and luminous space crafted with Murano glass, creating one of the Biennale’s most beautiful atmospheres. More information here.‍
• Qatar Pavilion – Yasmeen Lari: A bamboo-framed pavilion that feels perfectly situated in the Giardini — though temporary, it will be replaced next year by Qatar’s permanent national pavilion. ‍‍
• Germany Pavilion – Stresstest: An immersive exhibition simulating extreme heat scenarios and climate stress through visuals, materials, and spatial temperature mapping. Learn more here.‍
• Egypt Pavilion – Let’s Grasp the Mirage: A floor of interactive blocks arranged in sand explores how communities make trade-offs between development, preservation, and shared futures.‍
• Uzbekistan Pavilion – A Matter of Radiance: A large-scale model and fragments from a Soviet solar furnace explore the architectural legacy of scientific infrastructure in Central Asia. Learn more here.

‍