Venice Biennale, 28 days later
This year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture was a lot. Yuki Sumner thought she could cram it all into her three days on La Serenissima, but instead got turned into a humanoid-zombie from the sheer amount of content, especially in Carlo Ratti’s tech-infused main exhibition. Here are some of the memories that stayed with Sumner a month later.
“Only in Venice do you get FOMO,
even when you’re in Venice,” quipped my photographer husband. This was my
fourth time attending the vernissage – the pre-opening for press and participants
– of the architectural biennale. I thought I was well organised. My plan was
simple: Day 1, cover the Arsenale site; day 2, the Giardini, then day 3
for everything else. If possible I planned to attend talks, visit OMA’s
exhibition at Fondazione Prada, see Tatiana Trouvé at Palazzo Grassi, and get
to David Chipperfield Architects’ work to the Procuratie Vecchie, a part of
which is the new San Marco Art Centre.
It turned out that three days in Venice was nowhere near enough. I still missed things. OMA, Trouvé, SMAC? Forget it. But I still saw a lot – in the main exhibition alone, within the Arsenale’s Corderie where mooring ropes were once made, some 750 architects, artists, scientists, philosophers, and researchers contributed nearly 300 exhibits. In addition, 66 nations participated, many spilling beyond Arsenale and Giardini.
My hope of emerging as a more intelligent, AI-enhanced version of myself vanished quickly. I ended up feeling more like a humanoid-zombie hybrid. I’ve been ruminating on what to write – not quite for 28 days, but almost. Here is my attempt to summarise the experience, before it gets subsumed by AI-generated event roundups.
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All captions in the main exhibition were conveniently compressed into two or three sentences using AI. At first I was grateful, but as I read them, I wondered what I was missing. What AI deems important often differs from what I do (my interest lies closer to what is considered “a glitch in the matrix” on How To with John Wilson), and what’s interesting about us humans is that each of us experiences the world differently. Hence, consensus is hard. Could AI help bring us closer together, to agree, say, on how to save the planet? Could it smooth out the bumpy road called time? This year’s curator, Carlo Ratti - a professor at MIT, inventor, data analyst, and technophile - seems to think so.
Ratti doesn’t try to “tame the wild profusion of existing things,” as Michel Foucault wrote in The Order of Things (does anyone still read Foucault? Tom Emerson of 6A Architects quotes him in Dirty Old River, nudging my memory). Instead, he gives us an infinity pool of possible futures. The exhibition theme, Intelligens: Natural, Artificial, Collective, includes a made-up word – intelligens– which made me think of germs infused with smarts.
The division between natural, artificial, and collective is also unclear, but it seems Ratti wants architects to adapt to climate change by collaborating with scientists and AI to develop solutions for our increasingly inhospitable planet.
The first room in the Corderie is hot and sticky. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see fans – normally attached to building exteriors – moving above tanks of black liquid, with a curved walkway weaving between them. It feels like a cross between Richard Wilson’s 20:50(first shown at Matt’s Gallery in 1987) and the backdrop of Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 Chungking Express. It’s eerie and dramatic - a promising start.
![]()
Next, a towering wall embedded with red fishing net appears to bleed between its blocks. It charts the exponential curve of the world’s population. Thankfully, I ran into Beatriz Colomina, one of the design team behind The Other Side of the Hill . “The drop in population is imminent,” she explained, leading me around the wall to reveal a blobby, moss-covered city inspired by bacterial intelligence. “Bacteria have adapted for billions of years. They’ll outlive us. We need to be more like them.” I wasn’t thrilled by the idea – or the look – of this new city.
A sculpture made of seaweed – Living Kelp Archive – stops me. Seaweed, a better carbon sink than trees, might one day store “cold” data – long-term data that no one accesses for years – eliminating the need for sprawling rural server farms. As I wonder if my seaweed-rich diet makes me a potential human data archive, I run into Kengo Kuma beside a den-like structure made from flood-felled trees in Italy. The trunks are joined by 3D-printed AI-designed joints. When my questions get too technical, Kuma points to a nearby screen. I get little from him but a selfie.
![]()
The most unsettling sight was a pair of Bhutanese artisans chiselling ornate woodwork as a robotic arm brushed away their carvings. Their work will feature in a new airport designed by Bjarke Ingels Group in Bhutan, with Ingels saying that the carvings are meant to “instil mindfulness” in the stress of travel, but his AI–human collaboration is unnerving. Elsewhere, self-learning humanoids jump and float, observing us from above. This must be the artificial intelligens room. Frankly, it feels more like an expo than the Osaka Expo I also just visited – gadgets, beeping panels, blinking robots everywhere.
At one point, we’re invited to peer behind a mega-screen of smaller screens, tangled in a mesh of wires. The curator seems to say: “LOOK, WE HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE. TRUST US.” Yet the workings of AI remain opaque, controlled by a few who accumulate wealth and power.
![]()
Amid the techno-fetishism, there are moments of hope. Thai architect Boonserm Premthada, Founder of Bangkok Project Studio, has built an arch using elephant dung. No, dung won’t solve planetary crises, but walking through the arch, I feel lighter. It is to be permanently installed in a Buddhist temple garden in Venice and has been blessed by a monk – no wonder it felt good. Real elephants in Thailand are now living better lives. That makes me happier as well.
The Corderie exhibition ends in a section titled Out, focused on space travel for the chosen few. Thomas Heatherwick envisions an orbiting space greenhouse. A mannequin girl in a sleek astronaut suit recalls The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968), only now on Mars.
![]()
I was relieved to see some architects still using models. I peer into Lina Ghotmeh’s detailed Hermès Workshops model in France and lose myself in the craftsmanship. It’s like reading a book. Vector Architects’ Revival of the Ordinary Trees model from China is sliced with surrounding land, letting visitors walk through it – as if we’ve been given Moses’ power to part the Red Sea. The architectural models representing the Venetian shipyards of Chania at the Greek pavilion and paper models portraying the congested city of Macao satisfy my hankering for human touch outside of the Corderie.
![]()
If it all becomes too much, some national pavilions offer respite. Time seems to slow in the Bahrain pavilion, where visitors linger not just for the giant beanbags (actually, sandbags used to hold back seawater) but because the room is cool – climate-controlled sustainably with a geothermal well. It’s a design for cooling public spaces in Bahrain, literally saving lives, with the pavilion winning the Golden Lion for best national participation. The “ventilated canopy,” supported by the central core, elegantly cantilevers out, like a mother eagle spreading out its wings to protect her young.
Peru and Mexico look to ancestral knowledge for sustainable solutions. Living Scaffolding in Peru uses Aymara techniques to construct a 20-meter totora reed raft. In Mexico’s Chinampa Veneta an ancient agricultural system is revived with endemic Venetian plants. Visitors can sow seeds, which will later be transplanted to the lagoon. Ukraine’s Dakh: Vernacular Hardcore revisits resilient vernacular structures to instil hope amid war.
![]()
In the Giardini, the British pavilion is cloaked in clay beads. Its exhibition, Geology of Britannic Repair, critiques colonialism and is fortunately disconnected from Ratti’s theme – curators Owen Hopkins, Dr Kathryn Yusoff, and Cave Bureau from Nairobi selected before Ratti’s appointment. Inside, a South-upwards map of Africa challenges colonial worldviews. A cast cave from Kenya appears like a mummified body. A Gaza room honours subjugated peoples and fuels visions of equity.
The US pavilion also offers a welcome contrast to the AI-heavy Corderie. Its new porch, built by architects including Marlon Blackwell and Julie Bargmann, shelters visitors and conceals the 1930s neoclassical pavilion. PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity is folksy and human-scale, with shelves displaying fragments of American life and quilts hanging throughout – a quiet nod to “collective intelligens.” It’s a reminder of America’s potential.
![]()
Denmark invites visitors to peer beneath its stone floors during renovations. Korea opens its roof to offer a new Giardini view. Japan flings open the back door, encouraging free movement. These are like airing out cupboards – welcoming and necessary. Still, the aloofness of Japan’s In-Between exhibition, curated by Jun Aoki, is worrying. Rebecca Solnit writes in No Straight Road Takes You There that “all bias is deviation from an unbiased centre” – but centralism is its own bias, blinding us to some of today’s ugliest assumptions.
The Swiss Pavilion, reimagined by a team of four women, offers an alternative: What if Lisbeth Sachs, a contemporary of its architect Bruno Giacometti, had instead designed the building? New oblique walls and flowing curtains dissect the space. Simple and effective. A new world order doesn’t have to look so different.
Just behind Stirling’s newly refurbished bookshop, I meet Yasmeen Lari, the legendary Pakistani architect behind the temporary Qatar Pavilion, made from bamboo and rattan. She’s long empowered women to build homes from simple materials. Lina Ghotmeh will design the permanent pavilion.
Elsewhere in Arsenale, I miss Elizabeth Diller, who drinks coffee from her firm (Diller Scofidio + Renfro)’s Canal Water Cafe, using a hybrid purification system. I drink it. I’m still here and the café won a Golden Lion. Women architects are present. Queer voices, however, are rarer. The Netherlands Pavilion’s unforgettable purple-and-yellow sports bar spoof and Nordic Pavilion’s raunchy performances brought flashes of energy.
![]()
I managed to make time to visit offsite pavilions too. In Squero Castello Gallery, Togo’s inaugural biennale appearance displays canvas-mounted photos of its architectural heritage, weighted with earthenware pots. Curated by Studio NEiDA, it could help preserve these buildings. Togo is one of just three African nations present, alongside Morocco and Egypt.
Nearby, in a park clearing, stands one of the Biennale’s best: Deserta Ecofolie, a 1:1 dwelling for Chile’s Atacama Desert. It features wind turbines, solar panels, water-harvesting devices, dry loos, and an eco-kitchen. A collaboration between institutions in Chile, Denmark, and Portugal, it’s part Howl’s Moving Castle and part IKEA. Designed for everyone, it includes a framed photo of Reyner Banham biking through the Mojave, nodding to his book Scenes in America Deserta. Banham made cool more accessible.
The Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto said in Wim Wenders’ 1990 documentary: “I don't believe in tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. I know me, in the present, who is dragging the past.” Rather than over-relying on AI to fix our future, perhaps it’s better to confront the fractures in the present - before we all become robot zombies.
![]()
It turned out that three days in Venice was nowhere near enough. I still missed things. OMA, Trouvé, SMAC? Forget it. But I still saw a lot – in the main exhibition alone, within the Arsenale’s Corderie where mooring ropes were once made, some 750 architects, artists, scientists, philosophers, and researchers contributed nearly 300 exhibits. In addition, 66 nations participated, many spilling beyond Arsenale and Giardini.
My hope of emerging as a more intelligent, AI-enhanced version of myself vanished quickly. I ended up feeling more like a humanoid-zombie hybrid. I’ve been ruminating on what to write – not quite for 28 days, but almost. Here is my attempt to summarise the experience, before it gets subsumed by AI-generated event roundups.
All captions in the main exhibition were conveniently compressed into two or three sentences using AI. At first I was grateful, but as I read them, I wondered what I was missing. What AI deems important often differs from what I do (my interest lies closer to what is considered “a glitch in the matrix” on How To with John Wilson), and what’s interesting about us humans is that each of us experiences the world differently. Hence, consensus is hard. Could AI help bring us closer together, to agree, say, on how to save the planet? Could it smooth out the bumpy road called time? This year’s curator, Carlo Ratti - a professor at MIT, inventor, data analyst, and technophile - seems to think so.
Ratti doesn’t try to “tame the wild profusion of existing things,” as Michel Foucault wrote in The Order of Things (does anyone still read Foucault? Tom Emerson of 6A Architects quotes him in Dirty Old River, nudging my memory). Instead, he gives us an infinity pool of possible futures. The exhibition theme, Intelligens: Natural, Artificial, Collective, includes a made-up word – intelligens– which made me think of germs infused with smarts.
The division between natural, artificial, and collective is also unclear, but it seems Ratti wants architects to adapt to climate change by collaborating with scientists and AI to develop solutions for our increasingly inhospitable planet.
The first room in the Corderie is hot and sticky. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see fans – normally attached to building exteriors – moving above tanks of black liquid, with a curved walkway weaving between them. It feels like a cross between Richard Wilson’s 20:50(first shown at Matt’s Gallery in 1987) and the backdrop of Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 Chungking Express. It’s eerie and dramatic - a promising start.
Next, a towering wall embedded with red fishing net appears to bleed between its blocks. It charts the exponential curve of the world’s population. Thankfully, I ran into Beatriz Colomina, one of the design team behind The Other Side of the Hill . “The drop in population is imminent,” she explained, leading me around the wall to reveal a blobby, moss-covered city inspired by bacterial intelligence. “Bacteria have adapted for billions of years. They’ll outlive us. We need to be more like them.” I wasn’t thrilled by the idea – or the look – of this new city.
A sculpture made of seaweed – Living Kelp Archive – stops me. Seaweed, a better carbon sink than trees, might one day store “cold” data – long-term data that no one accesses for years – eliminating the need for sprawling rural server farms. As I wonder if my seaweed-rich diet makes me a potential human data archive, I run into Kengo Kuma beside a den-like structure made from flood-felled trees in Italy. The trunks are joined by 3D-printed AI-designed joints. When my questions get too technical, Kuma points to a nearby screen. I get little from him but a selfie.
The most unsettling sight was a pair of Bhutanese artisans chiselling ornate woodwork as a robotic arm brushed away their carvings. Their work will feature in a new airport designed by Bjarke Ingels Group in Bhutan, with Ingels saying that the carvings are meant to “instil mindfulness” in the stress of travel, but his AI–human collaboration is unnerving. Elsewhere, self-learning humanoids jump and float, observing us from above. This must be the artificial intelligens room. Frankly, it feels more like an expo than the Osaka Expo I also just visited – gadgets, beeping panels, blinking robots everywhere.
At one point, we’re invited to peer behind a mega-screen of smaller screens, tangled in a mesh of wires. The curator seems to say: “LOOK, WE HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE. TRUST US.” Yet the workings of AI remain opaque, controlled by a few who accumulate wealth and power.
Amid the techno-fetishism, there are moments of hope. Thai architect Boonserm Premthada, Founder of Bangkok Project Studio, has built an arch using elephant dung. No, dung won’t solve planetary crises, but walking through the arch, I feel lighter. It is to be permanently installed in a Buddhist temple garden in Venice and has been blessed by a monk – no wonder it felt good. Real elephants in Thailand are now living better lives. That makes me happier as well.
The Corderie exhibition ends in a section titled Out, focused on space travel for the chosen few. Thomas Heatherwick envisions an orbiting space greenhouse. A mannequin girl in a sleek astronaut suit recalls The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968), only now on Mars.
I was relieved to see some architects still using models. I peer into Lina Ghotmeh’s detailed Hermès Workshops model in France and lose myself in the craftsmanship. It’s like reading a book. Vector Architects’ Revival of the Ordinary Trees model from China is sliced with surrounding land, letting visitors walk through it – as if we’ve been given Moses’ power to part the Red Sea. The architectural models representing the Venetian shipyards of Chania at the Greek pavilion and paper models portraying the congested city of Macao satisfy my hankering for human touch outside of the Corderie.
If it all becomes too much, some national pavilions offer respite. Time seems to slow in the Bahrain pavilion, where visitors linger not just for the giant beanbags (actually, sandbags used to hold back seawater) but because the room is cool – climate-controlled sustainably with a geothermal well. It’s a design for cooling public spaces in Bahrain, literally saving lives, with the pavilion winning the Golden Lion for best national participation. The “ventilated canopy,” supported by the central core, elegantly cantilevers out, like a mother eagle spreading out its wings to protect her young.
Peru and Mexico look to ancestral knowledge for sustainable solutions. Living Scaffolding in Peru uses Aymara techniques to construct a 20-meter totora reed raft. In Mexico’s Chinampa Veneta an ancient agricultural system is revived with endemic Venetian plants. Visitors can sow seeds, which will later be transplanted to the lagoon. Ukraine’s Dakh: Vernacular Hardcore revisits resilient vernacular structures to instil hope amid war.
In the Giardini, the British pavilion is cloaked in clay beads. Its exhibition, Geology of Britannic Repair, critiques colonialism and is fortunately disconnected from Ratti’s theme – curators Owen Hopkins, Dr Kathryn Yusoff, and Cave Bureau from Nairobi selected before Ratti’s appointment. Inside, a South-upwards map of Africa challenges colonial worldviews. A cast cave from Kenya appears like a mummified body. A Gaza room honours subjugated peoples and fuels visions of equity.
The US pavilion also offers a welcome contrast to the AI-heavy Corderie. Its new porch, built by architects including Marlon Blackwell and Julie Bargmann, shelters visitors and conceals the 1930s neoclassical pavilion. PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity is folksy and human-scale, with shelves displaying fragments of American life and quilts hanging throughout – a quiet nod to “collective intelligens.” It’s a reminder of America’s potential.
Denmark invites visitors to peer beneath its stone floors during renovations. Korea opens its roof to offer a new Giardini view. Japan flings open the back door, encouraging free movement. These are like airing out cupboards – welcoming and necessary. Still, the aloofness of Japan’s In-Between exhibition, curated by Jun Aoki, is worrying. Rebecca Solnit writes in No Straight Road Takes You There that “all bias is deviation from an unbiased centre” – but centralism is its own bias, blinding us to some of today’s ugliest assumptions.
The Swiss Pavilion, reimagined by a team of four women, offers an alternative: What if Lisbeth Sachs, a contemporary of its architect Bruno Giacometti, had instead designed the building? New oblique walls and flowing curtains dissect the space. Simple and effective. A new world order doesn’t have to look so different.
Just behind Stirling’s newly refurbished bookshop, I meet Yasmeen Lari, the legendary Pakistani architect behind the temporary Qatar Pavilion, made from bamboo and rattan. She’s long empowered women to build homes from simple materials. Lina Ghotmeh will design the permanent pavilion.
Elsewhere in Arsenale, I miss Elizabeth Diller, who drinks coffee from her firm (Diller Scofidio + Renfro)’s Canal Water Cafe, using a hybrid purification system. I drink it. I’m still here and the café won a Golden Lion. Women architects are present. Queer voices, however, are rarer. The Netherlands Pavilion’s unforgettable purple-and-yellow sports bar spoof and Nordic Pavilion’s raunchy performances brought flashes of energy.
I managed to make time to visit offsite pavilions too. In Squero Castello Gallery, Togo’s inaugural biennale appearance displays canvas-mounted photos of its architectural heritage, weighted with earthenware pots. Curated by Studio NEiDA, it could help preserve these buildings. Togo is one of just three African nations present, alongside Morocco and Egypt.
Nearby, in a park clearing, stands one of the Biennale’s best: Deserta Ecofolie, a 1:1 dwelling for Chile’s Atacama Desert. It features wind turbines, solar panels, water-harvesting devices, dry loos, and an eco-kitchen. A collaboration between institutions in Chile, Denmark, and Portugal, it’s part Howl’s Moving Castle and part IKEA. Designed for everyone, it includes a framed photo of Reyner Banham biking through the Mojave, nodding to his book Scenes in America Deserta. Banham made cool more accessible.
The Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto said in Wim Wenders’ 1990 documentary: “I don't believe in tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. I know me, in the present, who is dragging the past.” Rather than over-relying on AI to fix our future, perhaps it’s better to confront the fractures in the present - before we all become robot zombies.
