"We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."
— Native American Proverb
“The titles of the International Architecture Exhibitions are usually announced in both English and Italian. In 2025, however, the title will be condensed into a single word for both languages, drawing from their common Latin root: Intelligens. From intelligens derives the modern word ‘intelligence’; this choice also indicates an expansion of its associations. Translated separately, the final syllable ‘gens’ means ‘people’: from here emerges an imaginary alternative root, suggesting a future of intelligence that is more plural and inclusive, one that escapes the excessive limitations of today's AI-centered focus.”
“The 19th International Architecture Exhibition will be dedicated to the built environment and the many disciplines that shape it. Architecture is at the center of them all,” says the Curator, “but not alone: it is part of a broader team that must integrate art, engineering, biology, data science, social and political sciences, planetary sciences, and other fields, connecting each of them to the materiality of urban space.
The built environment is among the major contributors to atmospheric emissions. In this sense, architecture can be held largely responsible for the environmental degradation of our planet. Faced with the accelerating climate crisis, must we resign ourselves to this role, or can we still offer solutions—substantial rather than cosmetic, effective and quickly implementable?”
The Exhibition will seek to chart new paths forward, suggesting a range of solutions to the most pressing problems of the present. It will bring together a collection of experimental design proposals, inspired by a definition of "intelligence" as the ability to adapt to the environment using limited resources, knowledge, or power.
Objects, buildings, and urban plans will be arranged along the axis of a multiple and diffuse intelligence—natural, artificial, collective. Some ideas may fail. But others could point the way forward.
The Exhibition imagines architects as mutagenic agents, capable of triggering evolutionary processes and directing them in new directions. Learning from multiple scientific disciplines and advancing through trial and error, this Exhibition aims to accelerate the transformation of the present in search of better futures.
Four Methodological Pillars
- Transdisciplinarity: Architectural projects will promote collaboration among diverse professionals, with the aim, wherever possible, of advancing scientific knowledge.
- Living Lab: In 2025, the Central Pavilion in the Giardini will be under renovation. It will therefore be replaced by a series of special projects capable of transforming parts of Venice and outdoor areas of the Exhibition venues into Living Labs—spaces where multiple forms of intelligence converge.
- Idea Collection: Adopting a collaborative design approach is crucial, especially in a time of crisis.
On 7 May 2024, the Biennale website opened a space for idea collection, to expand the diversity of voices, visions, and suggestions. - Circularity Protocol: The Exhibition aims to achieve particularly ambitious goals of circularity. Through the development of a Circularity Manifesto, precise guidelines will be defined, setting a new standard for future cultural events.
A Common Theme Proposed to Participating Countries
In order to reintroduce a degree of coordination and coherence among the National Pavilions with the main International Exhibition’s theme, the Curator encourages participating countries to explore the shared theme “One Place, One Solution”, “to highlight,” Ratti explains, “the ways in which human ingenuity can provide responses to the key challenge of our time—a challenge that can only be addressed collaboratively, through a plurality of different approaches. We invite all countries to share their success stories: together, they will form a ‘toolbox’ for a better future.”
President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco added:
“In the title Intelli/Gens, meaning and sign converge. If intelligence is the basis of the individual’s evolutionary process—in the noblest sense of being civis (a third-declension noun, thus both masculine and feminine)—then architecture is the space in which it can unfold, through constant negotiation with the territory. By stating functions, drawing symbols, and fostering relationships, intelligence builds architectures in ethical, aesthetic, and above all ecological terms.
Not by chance, remaining within the realm of etymology, oikos in Greek means both house and environment.
That’s why Ratti’s statement of intent asks: ‘Will we be able to design buildings as intelligent as trees?’
This question is the inspired heresy of the architect who leads the MIT Senseable City Lab in Boston, a sign of a path in which circuits and silicon are but tools to return to our origin—perhaps with greater awareness.
This is Ratti’s autobiography of Venice, Hydropolis, which no utopia ever dared to imagine but which the ingenuity of a people has managed to create—through its very history—by composing poetry with nature through architecture. The city of water is thus the local model to be interpreted on a global scale.
A laboratory of complexity par excellence, where useful solutions for the whole world may be found. A supreme example of Intelli/Gens, where the duality of nature vs. artificiality is overcome through the fusion of civilization and environment.
A living organism, a wondrous balance of human and natural history, in which we can glimpse the refuge city hoped for by the current Pontiff, Pope Francis, during his historic visit to the Venice Biennale, welcomed as a ‘place of cultural encounters and exchanges.’
‘Utopia is on the horizon. I take two steps closer, and it moves two steps away. I walk ten steps, and it moves ten steps farther. So what is the point of utopia? It keeps us walking.’
— Eduardo Galeano
And from Venice, the journey extends even to Space—through natural, artificial, and collective intelligence.
A path in the form of a script for 2025. At the close of each section, there is deliberately a question mark: the punctuation mark of possibility—the home of the future. The answers to these questions will lay the foundation of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition.
As usual, the 19th International Architecture Exhibition will feature National Participations with their own exhibitions in the Pavilions at the Giardini and the Arsenale, as well as in Venice's historic center.
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