Venice will become a living laboratory

Venice. The 19th edition of the Architecture Biennial will be cured by the Italian architect and engineer Carlo Ratti, who at 54, according to the magazine Blueprintit is among the people who will change the world of architecture. The exhibition, which will open to the public from May 10 to November 23, is entitled Intelligins. Natural. Artificial. Collective.

Ratti evoked recent disasters, including Los Angeles fires, floods in Valencia and Sherpur, as well as drought in Sicily, to illustrate the unprecedented acceleration of climate change. According to him, architecture must overcome the mitigation phase that has dominated the last decades and move towards adaptation. The world has already changed dramatically and requires different solutionshe stressed.

This year, the Biennial will face an additional challenge: the remodeling of the central pavilion in the Giardini, which has led to a new exhibition. The facilities, prototypes and experiments will be distributed between the Giardini, the Arsenale and other neighborhoods of Venice, transforming the city into an authentic Living Laboratory and turning it into an innovative model for architecture in times of climate vulnerability.

Ratti proposes an integration between natural, artificial and collective intelligence, principles that structure the Biennial. The Intelligens title is not only a tribute to Latin, but also plays with Intelli/Gens duality. In this context, the termination gens – of the Latin verb gignĕre (trigger, produce) – Suggest creation and evolution. Ratti seeks to overcome individualism and encourage collective intelligence, where each contribution is integrated into the construction of a resilient world.

In addition, the curator challenges the traditional notion of the architect as the only creator, placing it at the same level of other disciplines. Thus adopts a collaborative model inspired by science, where the architect ceases to be an orchestra director to get along with his colleagues, promoting an inclusive approach to face what he calls the Adaptation age.

To select the participants, Ratti opted for a non -elitist approach, opening a global call to which thousands of candidates responded. This process allowed to discover unpublished voices and innovative projects that, otherwise, would have gone unnoticed.

The result is a mass biennial, with more than 750 participants from various disciplines: architects, engineers, climatologists, artists, farmers, programmers, philosophers and even chefs. Among them include emerging young people and historical figures, including Nobel awards, winners of the Pritzker and former biennial curators, who provide a combination of experience and creativity. To this are added the 66 national participations of this year.

Architecture must attract young peopleRatti insisted, noting that in Europe and the United States the interest in discipline decreases. However, in a world in transformation, it remains an essential tool for change.

Ratti has given a proven of what the public can know when presenting an architecture in transformation, with proposals that challenge the conventional: anthropomorphic robots replacing the masons, bricks made of elephant manure as an example of reuse of natural materials and the combination of Traditional Japanese carpentry with artificial intelligence, which converts wood waste into optimized structural material. In addition, microbial communities and their role in the balance of resources will be explored, as well as the constructive ingenuity in informal and favelas markets, where self -construction and collective learning reveal links between economy and social networks.

Architect and Engineer, Carlo Ratti is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute Technology (MIT) and in the Milan Polytechnic, in addition to directing the sensable City Lab and the Cra-Carlo Ratti Associati study. Considered one of the 10 most cited urbanism experts, it has published more than 750 scientific articles and co -president of the Global Council of the future on cities and urbanization of the World Economic Forum.

The Biennial of 2025, under its curatorship, promises to carry an innovative thought, promoting an architecture that not only mitigates, but adapts to a planet in transformation.