From Saturday, 10 May, to Sunday, 23 November, 2025, the BIENNALE ARCHITETTURA 2025, curated by Carlo Ratti, will be open to the public at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and various locations across Venice. The exhibition aims to explore new directions, suggesting that smart solutions to urgent challenges can come in various forms. It showcases a range of design proposals and diverse experiments, redefining "intelligence" as the capacity to adapt to one’s surroundings despite having limited resources, information, or influence.
Exhibitions and installations associated with the Department of Architecture are the following:
Terms and Conditions, situated in the opening room and initiated by Carlo Ratti, was developed and designed by Transsolar (Prof. Thomas Auer), Bilge Kobaş (Chair of Building Technology and Climate Responsive Design), Daniel A. Barber, and Sonia Seneviratne. The installation confronts the hidden costs of climate-controlled comfort. It exposes how cooling systems, while sustaining optimized interiors, externalize heat, emissions, and inequity, fueling a cycle of global warming often ignored by the privileged. By bringing the outside of air conditioning indoors, the space becomes a visceral metaphor for thermal inequality, questioning who benefits from comfort and at what cost. The exhibition urges visitors to confront the uncomfortable truths of climate inequality and to envision a future that can only be avoided through collective action and responsibility.
Stresstest is the name of this year's exhibition of the German Pavilion. Curated by Nicola Borgmann, Elisabeth Endres, Daniele Santucci, and Gabriele G. Kiefer, the exhibition challenges the urgent impact of climate change on urban life, exposing visitors to the physical and psychological realities of the urban climate of the future. Divided into STRESS and DESTRESS zones, the installation allows visitors to experience extreme heat, underscoring the need for action, while simultaneously presenting strategies for resilient urban planning. Operated with solar energy and built entirely from materials designated for reuse, the pavilion embodies the principles of sustainability it advocates.
Architecture as Trees – Trees as Architecture is curated by OLA Office for Living Architecture and the Professorship for Green Technologies in Landscape Architecture (Prof. Ferdinand Ludwig). The exhibition reimagines buildings as living systems by fusing natural growth with technical construction through the method of Baubotanik. The installation features inosculated trees, treetop walkways, and imagery of plants merging with structures, exploring how architecture can evolve, adapt, and shape its environment like trees do, impacting microclimates, resource systems, and public space over time.
Necto, a 3D-knitted anticlastic Media Architecture, is curated by SO-IL, Mariana Popescu, TheGreenEyl, Riley Watts, and structurally engineered by Prof. Pierluigi D'Acunto and Anass Kariouh (Professorship of Structural Design). Necto is a temporary, biodegradable membrane structure that explores the tension between opposites - nature and technology, instability and balance. Shaped by internal stress and designed through a blend of computational and intuitive methods, it is lightweight, reusable, and locally sourced. CNC-knitted from natural fibers, its form follows the flow of structural force. Together with luminous threads and sound animations, it creates an immersive, ever-changing environment. Digital data, including a material passport and machine instructions, is stored in synthetic DNA within a dissolvable bio-coating.
La Libreria, designed and curated by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Diane von Fürstenberg, Schlaich Bergermann Partner, and Transsolar (Prof. Thomas Auer, Chair of Building Technology and Climate Responsive Design), is the bookstore of the Biennale Architettura 2025. It symbolizes Venice as a Woman and its legacy as a hub of knowledge. Designed as a mobile cultural space, it draws from the tradition of lightweight tensile structures, inspired by Robert le Ricolais’s vision of “zero weight and infinite span.” The tent’s fiber-reinforced transparent skin is supported by a tensegrity beam, while the structure remains unanchored from the ground, stabilized by the weight of the books, allowing the bookstore to travel and engage globally.
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WHEN
tuesday - sunday
10.05 - 28.09.2025
11 am - 7 pm
friday - saturday until 28.09.2025
11 am - 8 pm
30.09 - 23.11.2025
10 am - 6 pm
WHERE
Giardini & Arsenale
Venice, Italy
MORE INFORMATION
Biennale 2025
stresstest, German Pavilion
Necto