The international architecture exhibition produced every two years in Venice is a sprawling, humid, one-stop shopping experience that brings together designers, critics, and urban planners from around the globe. When done right, it is also an exhilarating showcase of spatial invention and cultural critique. Though the strategy of showcasing architecture’s freshest ideas through national pavilions and exhibition galleries has experienced its share of drawbacks and bureaucratic hurdles throughout the Architecture Biennale’s 30-year history, a collection of high-quality submissions helps make this year’s show feel deeply curated and intellectually engaging. Across the sprawling historic grounds of the Giardini and the Arsenale, recurring threads of sustainability, adaptive reuse, and traditional building methods—while simultaneously planning for an uncertain and rapidly changing future—give the massive exhibition an underlying coherence.
This year’s director, Kazuyo Sejima of the celebrated Japanese architectural firm SANAA, chose a remarkably enigmatic and open-ended theme for the Biennale: "People Meet in Architecture." While this broad mandate risks alienating audiences and architects looking for concrete technical guidelines, its very vagueness serves a powerful purpose, making almost every project feel tangentially or profoundly related to it. The theme forces a fundamental reckoning with the core purpose of the built environment. Is Sejima celebrating the way architecture provides the vital physical place for human exchange, social bonding, and community life, or is she urging architects to refocus their wandering energies back onto people, pulling them away from architecture’s competing priorities of commercial economic development, environmental sustainability, and technological innovation?
This year’s national pavilions and independent exhibitions address these complex questions with varying degrees of directness, moving from playful sensory experiments to sober political critiques. Most of the exhibitions housed in the voluminous, brick-walled rooms of the historic Arsenale take a wonderfully loose and experimental interpretation of the mandate. For instance, artist Olafur Eliasson presents Your Split Second House, a pitch-black room animated by pulsing stroboscopic lights that vividly illuminate wildly lashing water hoses, creating a chaotic environment filled with violent noise. The installation seems to have no grand policy agenda other than to completely intrigue, disorient, and delight visitors through pure sensory immersion. Nearby, the pioneering German climate-engineering practice Transsolar offers Cloudscapes, an atmospheric installation where carefully managed condensed air forms tangible clouds that visitors can walk directly into by ascending curving, translucent ramps, merging meteorological phenomena with architectural space.
Other responses to Sejima’s mandate encourage visitors to fundamentally rethink their direct experience of architecture and how they see themselves physically and socially positioned within it. One of the most playful and provocative looks into this topic can be found inside the Romanian Pavilion. Acknowledging the stark reality of urban density, where the population density in urban Bucharest sits at roughly one person per 1,000 square feet, the Romanian team, led by Tudor Vlasceanu, created an all-white rectangle positioned on a bias within the gallery space, precisely representing the actual dimensions of this urban ratio. Small circular apertures cut into the sides of the construction give casual visitors a voyeuristic view inside the box, while a single operational door allows one visitor at a time to step inside and experience the stark interiority firsthand.
The installation bluntly demonstrates the inherently voyeuristic nature of architecture and the profound way in which buildings devoid of people feel utterly meaningless. When no one stands inside the stark white ark, the constructed space looks like a sterile, lifeless void. But the moment a person steps within it, the space is suddenly transformed into something resembling a highbrow peep show, dramatically heightened by the simple, brightly lit, all-white aesthetic.
It seemed that Sejima’s own firm, SANAA, hoped to elicit a similar type of quiet reflection on how buildings are enlivened by human presence—and vice versa—with their 13-minute film, If Buildings Could Talk…. But whereas the Romanian Pavilion achieves this profound goal with elegant understatement and spatial economy, the 3D film treatment by celebrated director Wim Wenders feels a little overwrought, its interpretation of Sejima’s overarching theme a little too explicit for comfort. The film’s voice-over meticulously explains how SANAA’s famous Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the human beings moving through it are mutually nourished by each other’s presence. Meanwhile, the accompanying cinematic footage shows extreme close-ups of people breathing deeply with their eyes closed. The experience suggests that, sometimes, buildings and spaces should simply be left to do the talking on their own terms.
In contrast, the display at the Kingdom of Bahrain’s debut pavilion, which deservedly won the prestigious Golden Lion Award, proved far more effective at capturing the intimate and often fragile interchange between people and architecture. Titled Reclaim, the exhibition examines the harsh consequences of rapid, unchecked urban development on a tiny island nation that has historically lived off fishing and pearling in the surrounding sea. Installed directly within the exhibition space are three small, weathered wood shacks that once served as traditional fishermen’s shelters along the coast. Flat screens mounted within the rustic shacks show moving video footage of local fishermen lamenting their profound loss of connection—not only to the sea that sustained them for generations, but also to these vernacular structures that anchored their communities.
Elsewhere across the grounds, numerous national pavilions reassure visitors that architecture remains the single best tool for ensuring a more sustainable future, primarily through the creation of better, denser, and more equitable urban communities. The U.S. Pavilion, titled Workshopping, takes a modest, pragmatic look at architecture’s genuine problem-solving capacity at the grassroots level. Forward-thinking practices such as Archeworks, which exhibits an innovative mobile agricultural project, and cityLAB, which cleverly demonstrates how to make Los Angeles significantly denser by adding small, sustainable secondary houses to existing backyards, point out that entrepreneurialism and bold experimentation are critical to the long-term sustainability not only of our cities, but of the architecture profession itself.
Michael Shapiro, director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and one of the core organizers of the U.S. Pavilion alongside the design collective 306090, Inc., also chose to incorporate a historical display highlighting John Portman & Associates’ 40-year-long development of the Peachtree Center in downtown Atlanta. Yet, despite the undeniable individual merits of the projects on display, the seven distinct exhibits within the U.S. Pavilion ultimately struggle to feel fully and conceptually linked under a single overarching narrative.
A more unified and site-specific critique arrived from the Netherlands with Vacant NL, the Dutch Pavilion curated by Rietveld Landscape. The exhibition features a picturesque, sprawling urban blue-foam model delicately balanced on intricate wires strung from the pavilion’s mezzanine level. The striking installation highlights the pressing, under-discussed problem of vacant public and historic buildings throughout the Netherlands, dryly noting the irony that the Dutch Pavilion itself is actively utilized for only three months out of the entire year. Addressing the deeper motivations behind the show, Ole Bouman, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, which organized the presentation, wrote that a genuinely good building makes something happen far beyond the physical confines of the building itself.
That philosophical observation applies equally well to the Biennale as a whole. This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale will undoubtedly extend its intellectual and cultural influence far beyond the temporary exhibition halls, leaving behind a humble yet vital reminder that architecture is only ever as relevant, powerful, or meaningful as the people and their daily activities within it.
