Adapting the Biennale to the Corderie

Daunting, dense, and diverse are just a few alliterative words that begin to describe Carlo Ratti's ambitious curation of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective. Nearly 300 projects by more than 750 contributors are packed into the Arsenale's Corderie building, the linear space made famous in the first Venice Architecture Biennale, Paolo Portoghesi's The Presence of the Past, in 1980. Instead of amplifying the linearity of the Corderie, like Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara did with their FREESPACE exhibition in 2018, the building is partitioned into three distinct exhibitions within the larger whole: Natural, Artificial, and Collective.

Where the Corderie ends, 316 meters (1,037 feet) from the entrance, a fourth component of the exhibition, Out, is located in the adjacent Artiglierie, while contributions within the fifth component, Living Lab, are scattered about the grounds of the Arsenale and the Giardini. Ratti, an engineer and inventor as well as an architect, must like the number five: Not only are there five sections to Intelligens, but his curatorial statement describes different ways of experiencing the exhibition, all rooted in the number:

• “In 5 minutes, you’ll glimpse the essentials— Natural, Artificial, Collective (and Out).
• In 50 minutes, you’ll dive into major projects, guided by AI-generated summaries.
• In 5 hours, you’ll experience the heart of the exhibition.
• In 5 days, you’ll absorb every theme, every caption, every connection.”

The two days of the vernissage meant World-Architects could experience the exhibition somewhere in the large gap between five hours and five days. With 280 contributions in the Corderie, split between 127 installations occupying most of the floor area and 153 projects mounted on panels along the brick walls, we focused on the former, taking photos and taking note of the most interesting and impressive installations. A dozen such installations—sorry Mr. Ratti, we're not beholden to the number five—are discussed below.

Before reaching the first and largest section of the exhibition, Natural, an Intro wall at the entrance describes Ratti's curatorial ambitions and prepares visitors for what follows. In a nutshell, Intelligens is “a call to action” for architecture to learn from different disciplines toward climate change adaption: “To do so, it must engage all forms of intelligence—natural, artificial, and collective,” Ratti writes. Why the climate crisis is so urgent is forcefully expressed in the room that follows, a hot and humid space filled with air conditioners and amplified by pools of liquid at waist height (the two installations in the image above). It is counterintuitive: why is it so warm and sticky if there are so many air conditioners? Moving through the threshold to the space beyond, one sees the answer: a wall of AC units conditions the next space, while waste heat from the units is dumped into this space.

Once through the doorway, visitors confront the view atop this article: a wall of bio-cement blocks with an arc that describes the dramatic, more-than-exponential acceleration of human population growth. The top of the wall represents 10 billion people, after which population is projected to fall almost as rapidly as it climbed. The other side of the hill, as the piece also illustrated below is called, is that post-peak future, “the unknown future of our species and the planet,” per the project team. There, crusty accretions representative of “the complex cities that microbes collaboratively make for themselves” theorize a future in which humans learn from microbes and microbial intelligence in order to prolong the species. While clearly aligned with Ratti's plea for adaptation and his assertion that “architecture is survival,” the installation is also indicative of the way some installations fill the Corderie and vie for our attention.

If the famous Maison Dom-ino depicted by Le Corbusier in 1914 is version 1, and if the full-scale model of it in engineered timber built by the Architectural Association at the 2014 Biennale is version 2, then Kengo Kuma and company are apparently taking a crack at the next iteration. Domino 3.0 takes trees felled by a storm that hit northern Italy in 2018 and, instead of discarding them, uses 3D scans and an AI model to determine how the trunks can be used as structural members. It is not an elegant construction, but it is stable, thanks to custom 3D-printed joints, and it is described by the project team as “an experiment in resilience, one that redefines architecture as a living, evolving endeavor.” While the trunks mean Domino 3.0 fits into the exhibition's Natural section, the 3D-printed joints veer into the artificial—indicative of how boundaries are blurred and how architects engage with, to use Ratti's phrase, multiple forms of intelligence.

Very few installations in the Corderie physically engage with the building itself, but one that does it lightly yet incontrovertibly is Necto, a knitted surface in a flowing hypar shape, strung with LEDs that trace the forces of tension at apparently random intervals, as seen in the photo below. During the vernissage, the installation in the center of the space was the setting for dance performances, though the project team envisions it as “a prototype for temporary architectures, offering lightness, modularity, and latent intelligence.” The last comes from a bio-resin embedded as an invisible nanoscale layer of information into the knitting. Stretched into place, Necto is unavoidable, a surface visitors must duck under or move around, yet ironically it was sent to Venice in just a few pieces of luggage—evidence of its wider application for temporary structures in other places.

When Carlo Ratti defined the Intelligens theme in May 2024, one of the four “methodological pillars” (alongside the Space of Ideas) was a Circularity Protocol that would “set unprecedented goals for circularity” and include a Circularity Manifesto that would “define clear directions and a new standard for the future of cultural events.” This pillar's expression is the Circularity Handbook, a whirlpool of shapes and figures inspired by Buddhist philosophies of circular life and time, as seen below. It is made from paper cut-outs that have depth when unfolded and displayed but can be flattened after the Biennale for easy transport and recycling. The large installation is accompanied by a literal book that was made to help the contributors achieve Ratti's zero waste goal. Moving about the Corderie, I often wondered how some of the larger, especially high-budget installations abided by the mandate, if at all, but the most successful ones heeded the call in explicit, yet creative ways.

When Ratti was named curator for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, there were some expectations for a tech-heavy Biennale. As executed, the Artificial section of Intelligens, where one would expect to find tech, is fairly compact, owing in part to the prevalence of screens over larger physical constructions. Two pieces stand out. First is Co-Poiesis, which ruminates on “whether our technological ‘off-spring’ might one day rival or reshape their human progenitors,” per the designers. Made up of multiple pieces, the exhibit's Fired Timber Pavilion puts robots on a “stage” made from trees blown down in a typhoon in China; one of them translates the drums of visitors into “percussive responses,” while others puts them into dance. On my visit, the robots were fairly still, barely responding to human inputs, but the robots are supposed to learn and improve their skills over the course of the Biennale's six months, so visitors in the fall, for instance, should see more lively robots.

A few meters farther along the Corderie is another robot embedded in a construction: A Robot's Dream, where a robot floats horizontally in a mesh of rebar, as seen below. The project team would like us to look at the robot and imagine it is sleeping, that its occasional movements are signs of it dreaming; perhaps one day, when robots become more commonplace in our daily lives, maybe we'll dream about them. In the here and now, the fact that the rebar mesh was also made by robots is fitting, and should be expected by a team with Gramazio Kohler, but why not put the robot to work? Why not let the robot transform the mesh over the course of the Biennale, transforming it from an armature to a surface or something else evident of the robot's abilities? 

Near the end of the Corderie, within the relatively small Collective section, is a space of assembly, the Speakers' Corner. Inspired by the section of critics (Charles Jencks, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Vincent Scully) who were invited to have a display at the end of the famed Strada Novissima in Portoghesi's 1980 Biennale, Johnston Marklee designed a pyramidal grandstand that reaches up toward the Corderie's inaccessible mezzanine. Former LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne and Florencia Rodriguez, curator of this year's Chicago Architecture Biennial, organized a series of talks, “Restaging Criticism,” during the vernissage and the first few days of the Biennale for the space. Over the next six months, the Speakers' Corner will be one of the settings for Ratti's GENS public program (the underlined portion of Intelligens) of conferences, workshops, panel discussions, lectures, and other events.

To launch the series on criticism and the future of architectural media, Rem Koolhaas spoke with Hawthorne, Rodriguez, and Mark Lee on Thursday during the vernissage; Koolhaas's presence filled the grandstand, the seats behind the speakers, and turned the aisles around the wooden structure into SRO space for the discussion. It was a disjointed conversation, with Koolhaas saying a few things of interest (“this exhibition now is incredibly Euro-centric and American-centric … the absence of Africa is completely staggering”) but also refusing to answer some questions. He was highly critical of critics today, stating that he “would not know a single name of a critic who is actually having a polemic,” unlike in the 1980s, following the first Biennale, or even the 1920s and 30s, when critics had “very focused and direct intention and ambition.” But at one point Rem deflected a question to the critics who should have been on the panel with him, or instead of him.

Turning the corner at the end of the Corderie into the adjacent Artiglierie, visitors encounter the fourth of Intelligens's five sections, Out, which concerns “looking at Earth from the outside,” in Ratti's words, and applying lessons from space exploration to circumstance on our home planet. The section includes an alien-looking contraption with the recognizable stamp of Thomas Heatherwick: Space Garden looks like an ornate structure for growing radishes, but the project team proposes an “orbiting, autonomous greenhouse that will support cutting-edge agricultural research and global engagement in the future of our Earth-Space ecosystem.” The project ambitiously anticipates “orbital launch and deployment in the next five years.”

At the far end of the Out section is a flying saucer-shaped theater (below photo) built with wood felled from a storm that hit northeastern Italy in 2018 (see also Domino 3.0 in the Natural section). The shape is appropriate, as much of the installation shows the earth from a distance, like the famous Blue Marble photograph from 1972. The screen depicts the satellites in Earth's orbit, and it shifts vantage points in the vein of Charles and Ray Eames's famous Powers of Ten film, though it doesn't have that film's helpful narration. A Satellite Symphony aims to be, per the project team, “an experimental and immersive documentary in which data science and remote sensing play equal roles,” while also presenting, ambitiously, “a closing argument to the exhibition, inviting audiences to rediscover the sense of wonder and respect for planet Earth that was first evoked by the Blue Marble.”

Elsewhere at the Arsenale, a few steps beyond the Corderie and Artiglierie, are some of the outdoor contributions that comprise Living Lab, the fifth (last?) section of Intelligens. Ratti's rational for this section was the closure of the Central Pavilion, though projects like Canal Café sit in the same spot as other installations in previous exhibitions, and that doesn't explain why the Corderie is so crowded. Contributions to Living Lab are basically split between the Giardini and the Arsenale, with Diller Scofidio + Renfro responsible for two of them: La Libreria at the entrance to the Giardini and Canal Café, winner of the Golden Lion for Best Participation in Intelligens. First proposed by DS+R for the 2008 Biennale that was directed by Aaron Betsky but turned down by authorities, DS+R tried again, with Betsky and others on the team, and this time got approval. Called “algae coffee” by some at the vernissage, the contraption embodies Ratti's ambitions for Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective. but it goes further by actually being a functional piece of architecture, not just a representation or commentary upon it.