The Biennale displays many examples of new technologies to reconcile humanity and nature in the built environment. We highlight three here.
If you are in search of stunning state-of-the art buildings, don’t bother with the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, which opened this past May and runs through November. You won’t see the next Guggenheim Bilbao, nor any challengers to reining supertall towers such as Dubai’s Burg Khalifa or any models for mixed-use developments with shimmering luxury finishes such as New York City’s Hudson Yards.
On the contrary, the revolutionary idea at this year’s biennale is that to properly deal with climate change, which many consider the greatest threat to contemporary civilization, the design profession needs to do a major reset. Indeed, this year’s exhibition takes the moniker “sustainability” to a whole new level and many exhibits focus on using high-tech tools such as AI and 3D printing to optimize building materials, that were used in ancient and indigenous cultures, like trees, rocks and elephant dung bricks.
Counting Carbon, No Longer Enough
Considering the climatic challenges on the horizon, current environmental building and product standards fall far short of what is needed, according to the curator of the 2025 Biennale, MIT professor Carlo Ratti.
“Ever since we started counting carbon, architecture’s response has been centered on mitigation—on reducing our impact on the climate,” he writes in his manifesto, adding, “That approach is no longer enough.”
Many of the exhibits at this year’s architecture biennale function more as artistic statements than actual blueprints for the future. There is a giant screen at the entryway to the main show at Venice’s Arsenale complex showing excerpts from Architecton, a film about the collapse of civilizations, which is followed by the Third Paradise Perspective, which is comprised of circular reflective pools that reflect Italian Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s call for a reconciliation between humanity and nature.
However, interspersed throughout the massive Exhibition, there were examples of new technologies that potentially someday in the not too distant future could be showing up in building supply stores or showrooms. Below are three examples.
Tree Form: Multi-story Building
Tree Form by Sheila Kennedy, Caitlen Muller and the MIT School of Architecture and Planning’s Digital Design Group at The Next Earth Computation, Crisis Cosmology Exhibit in the Palazzo Diedo.
Tree Form shows a model of a multi-story building with whole trees and branches supporting the structure instead of beams and columns. This new tree technology utilizes cuts down on waste inherent in the production of milled beams according to Sheila Kennedy, who is a landscape architect and professor at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning.
Tree technology can also have advantages over milled columns according to Kennedy because they utilize the structural nodes between the branch and the trunk which can be the strongest part of the plant.
Each tree selected as a support is carefully analyzed using emerging 3D scanning, algorithmic design, and automated engineering analysis techniques.
HVAC with a Garden of 200 Plants
Building Biospheres by landscape architect Bas Smets and neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso at the Belgian Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale
Biospheres transforms the entire Belgian Pavilion into a laboratory that seeks to supplant traditional Heating Ventilation Cooling Systems with a garden of 200 plants at the center of the pavilion. These plants are growing under a skylight. The objective is to examine how plants can help reduce or even eliminate the need for mechanical systems by using their natural properties to filter the air and lower temperatures. Various catheters and thermometers measure the plant health and their impact on the building and the data is displayed dynamically in real time on pictorial images of the trees in a darkened room adjacent to the plant installation.
In another room, there are displays of the building biosphere concept being incorporated into buildings with open courtyards. Hopefully, the installation will be able to significantly lower the heat of the Belgian Pavilion because summers in Venice can certainly be sweltering.
New Net-zero Material by Holcim
Transforming Buildings into Carbon Sinks by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Alejandro Aravena and Holcim is part of the Time Space Existence exhibition sponsored by the European Cultural Center near the entrance to the Giardini dell Biennale.
Transforming Buildings into Carbon Sinks is a drab gray cross-section of a house built to scale with a staircase and latticed panels made from Biochar, a new net-zero material by Holcim that is made from recycled aggregate and a process called pyrolysis that transforms organic waste. The material functions as a bio-sink by sequestering carbon–a greenhouse gas–from the decaying organic material that would have otherwise been released into the environment.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that if biochar replaced other industrial materials throughout the world, it would have the potential to eliminate 2.6 billion tons of CO2 per year. This is equivalent to removing 565 million passenger cars from the road.
