The title of this year’s Architecture Biennale is Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. For some time now, you’ve been betting on the potential of connections, with so-called artificial intelligence being the leading expression of this. What should we do with these exchanges? What information can we gather to make cities more human and sustainable?
In the 19th century, Ildefons Cerdà, the father of modern Barcelona, realised data would revolutionise urban planning. Until just a few decades ago, cities were described in physical terms: buildings, streets, infrastructure. However, we didn’t know how life unfolded within these spaces. As the ancient Romans would have said, we could describe the urbs, the physical city, but not the civitas, its social dimension.
Today, data allows us to explore the city in all its complexity, analysing the flows and interactions between people and space: a great opportunity for urban planning. We can conceive the city not just as a collection of buildings, but as a living and evolving organism, able to respond to various social and environmental needs. As architects and urban planners, we are just beginning to understand how to translate this vision into more effective design.
Venice, so fragile and exposed to the consequences of climate change, is a dramatic test bed for the ability to intus legere evoked by the exhibition’s title – read inside things, inside problems. There is not much time left.
Venice has always lived in a precarious balance with water: designed to rise above it, but dependent on it. Today, it faces its greatest challenge, between mass tourism and rising sea levels. The MOSE system protects it, but for how much longer? 20, 50, 100 years?
There are no easy solutions, but at the Biennale, we propose transforming Venice into a laboratory, involving designers from all over the world and using different forms of intelligence to develop ideas that could help the city – and perhaps other global areas facing similar challenges. This Biennale Architettura aims at sharing ideas, rather than providing a single answer.
The Role of Built Architecture: For Expo 2008 in Zaragoza, Spain, you designed a water curtain as the entrance to the Digital Water Pavilion; in Milan, in Piazza della Scala, inside the winter garden of Maison Trussardi, you created a kind of greenhouse in the shape of a dome, suspended inside a box. What role does what you call “fluid architecture” play?
I am fascinated by the idea of living, dynamic architecture, that adapts to the context. Some buildings evolve slowly over centuries, while others are designed to respond in real-time. The Digital Water Pavilion is an extreme example, with its walls appearing and disappearing, according to the people’s movements. The Trussardi outdoors in Milan is another experiment, where nature becomes a changing backdrop, shaped by the light and the seasons.
Today, such a vision is crucial. Extreme weather events – from the wildfires in Los Angeles to the floods in Sherpur – are changing the relationship between built environments and nature. More than the idea of permanence, it is essential to think of the built environment as a living organism, capable of transforming over time.
The Relationship with Clients: Public and private commissioning has always been a topic of debate. Realistically, what margin for manoeuvre do architects have? What are the resistances and pressures they encounter?
Architecture is never neutral: it exists within power structures, whether political, economic, or social. The resistance architects face can be an obstacle or, conversely, a creative constraint that leads to new and unexpected solutions.
In any case, it is essential to start with people: from their needs, from the rhythm of daily life that a good project should amplify, not limit (and which today, as we said earlier, we can better understand with data). As the great Danish architect Jan Gehl said: ‘Life first, then spaces, then buildings – the opposite never works.’
When presenting Intelligens, you noted that every year urban agglomerations grow so vast that, combined, they are equivalent to a new megalopolis the size of London. This isn’t just about fancy neighbourhoods or spectacular buildings in the Emirates style. It’s mostly about slums, refugee camps, and poor suburbs. You are a supporter of open-source architecture, of bottom-up participatory architecture. But when does this really happen on a large scale?
Real participation occurs when communities are not just ‘consulted,’ but have actual power. Institutions need to stop seeing the low and the high as opposing forces and start using them together.
Moreover, today new digital tools can help rethink participatory architecture. Networks, for example, provide platforms to collect real-time feedback and foster active engagement from all stakeholders during the design phase. When used correctly, they can amplify the voices of citizens and enable ongoing participation, broader than the past. Meanwhile, Large Language Models allow even those without technical skills to turn ideas into sketches to share with others – as we explore at the Biennale in a research project on the Vele di Scampia, in collaboration with the Municipality of Naples.
If architecture is certainly a thing and a place, it is also a how, as the Biennale President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco stated during the press conference, referring to the 2021 Architecture Biennale title by Hashim Sarkis: How will we live together? The question remains extremely relevant…
Certainly, the question is still very much relevant. Intelligens pushes the discussion further: How will we design together? Architecture is not only made of objects but of processes. We are experimenting with new models of authorship, breaking traditional hierarchies. The Manifesto for Circularity also explores how materials, ideas, and knowledge circulate in architecture. Open-source methods, finally, are not just theory but a real process that we applied to select participants through last summer’s call for ideas. In short, it’s not just about what we build, but about the physical and intellectual structures that make design more inclusive.
What suggestions have come from the international call The Space for Ideas that you launched? What do you expect from the architects you have invited and from the participating countries?
The Space for Ideas, the call for projects we opened from May to June 2024, received an extraordinary response, with a wave of proposals from all over the world. It was a challenging situation, as we had to respond to thousands of emails, but it allowed us to discover new voices that might otherwise have been excluded.
Regarding the national pavilions, this year – following Rem Koolhaas' approach to the 2014 Biennale Architettura – we tried to create a common thread, once again through a bottom-up participatory process (four meetings where proposals from each country were discussed together). The theme: One place, one solution. The goal was not to unify responses, but to build a varied archive of ideas from around the world.