19TH INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITION
VENICE, 10.05 – 23.11 2025
© La Biennale di Venezia
The 19th International Architecture Exhibition will be held from Saturday 10 May to Sunday 23 November 2025 (pre-opening May 8 and 9), curated by the architect and engineer Carlo Ratti, who has commented: “To face a burning world, architecture must harness all the intelligence around us. I am honored and humbled to have the opportunity to curate the Biennale Architettura 2025”.
An architect and engineer by training, Carlo Ratti completed his PhD thesis as a Fulbright Scholar at MIT and now teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at the Politecnico di Milano. He is the director of the Senseable City Lab and a founding partner of the architecture and innovation office CRA – Carlo Ratti Associati (Torino, New York City, and London)
The title of the Biennale Architettura 2025 is Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. Explaining his choice Carlo Ratti said that «the title of the International Architecture Exhibition is usually announced both in English and in Italian. In 2025 it will be condensed into a single word for both languages via the common Latin precedent: intelligens. The title Intelligens is linked to the modern term “intelligence,” but it also evokes a wider set of associated meanings. In fact, the final syllable, “gens” is Latin for “people”. A new, fictional root emerges, suggesting a future of intelligence that is inclusive, multiple, and imaginative beyond today’s limiting focus on AI.»
«The 19th International Architecture Exhibition will be about the built environment and the many disciplines that shape it. Architecture is at the center – Curator explained – but not alone. It is part of an extended sphere that integrates art, engineering, biology, data science, social and political sciences, planetary systems sciences, and other disciplines – linking each and all of them to the materiality of urban space.
The built environment is one of the largest contributors to atmospheric emissions, placing architecture among the main culprits in the degradation of our planet. As the climate crisis accelerates, must we resign ourselves to this role, or are we still able to offer solutions, substantial and non-cosmetic, effective and quick to achieve?
The Exhibition will search for a path forward, proposing that intelligent solutions to pressing problems can take many forms. It will present a collection of design proposals and many other experiments, exploring a definition of “intelligence” as an ability to adapt to the environment with limited resources, knowledge, or power.
Objects, buildings, and urban plans will be arranged along the axis of a multiple and widespread intelligence – organized as natural, artificial, collective, and combinations of the three. While some ideas are destined to fail, others may point us toward redemption.
The Exhibition will cast architects in the role of “mutagens” stimulating natural evolutionary processes and sending them off in new directions. Learning from many sciences, this exhibition hopes to accelerate the transformation of the present through fearless trial and error, and to find a better future in the process».
