Discover innovative architecture and ideas at the Biennale Architettura 2025 in Venice

The city of Venice is known for its canals, its churches, and La Biennale di Venezia, one of the longest-running cultural festivals in the world. Hosted annually since 1895, the Biennale runs from May to November and alternates between art and architecture each year. In 2025, the focus is on how diverse disciplines and different types of intelligence inform architecture and the built environment. Whether you visit Venice or experience La Biennale from afar, Bloomberg Connects provides insight into some of the many innovative ideas on display.

Biennale Architettura 2025: Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.

The theme of this year’s Biennale is Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. It explores how architecture can engage with natural systems, artificial intelligence, and collective human insight to address global challenges such as climate change and urban resilience. Over 750 participants – ranging from coders to climate scientists, writers to woodcarvers, and farmers to fashion designers – feature in La Biennale, which is curated by Carlo Ratti, an architect and engineer. 

“Architecture has always been a response to a hostile climate,” explains Ratti. “Our creations have always strived to bridge the gap between a harsh environment and the safe, livable spaces we require.” As climate change produces increasingly harsh environments, his edition of the Biennale Architettura becomes a rousing call to action. “The time has come for architecture to embrace adaptation: rethinking how we design for an altered world.”

To hear more from Ratti, you can follow his hour-long audio tour, which guides visitors through the Arsenale complex and surrounding grounds to each of the exhibition’s thematic worlds. In La Biennale di Venezia Architettura 2025 guide, you can continue exploring the exhibition, the national pavilions, and special projects at the Arsenale and the Giardini venues, or experience Venice as a “Living Lab,” or an incubator for ideas, where installations join with with collateral events and national pavilions scattered across the city.

The British Pavilion, located in the Giardini, is one of the 66 national pavilions participating in this year’s Biennale Architettura. A unique UK-Kenya collaboration between a multi-disciplinary team, the Pavilion is curated by Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Cave_bureau, a Nairobi-based architecture studio; UK-based curator and writer Owen Hopkins; and academic Professor Kathryn Yusoff from Queen Mary University of London.

GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair makes a case for architecture as an earth practice, examining the parallels and interconnections between architecture and (British) colonization. The exhibition links Britain in the northwest and Kenya’s Great Rift Valley in the southeast, creating a metaphorical fault-line along which the environmental legacies of colonialism can be plotted and from which “other architectures” may emerge. 

“Emerging from this ‘rift’ are a series of installations that propose architectures defined by their relationship to the ground, their resistance to conventional, extractive ways of working, and that are resilient in the face of climate breakdown and social and political upheaval,” the curatorial team explains. Their most dramatic intervention is Double Vision, which has veiled the Pavilion’s neoclassical facade in a lattice of charcoal briquettes, clay, and glass beads that recalls the Kenyan Masai people’s traditional manyatta dwellings. Each room in the Pavilion aims to dismantle prevalent assumptions about architecture, repositioning the discipline as a non-extractive practice geared towards repair, restitution, and renewal. 

The British Pavilion guide includes a video tour of the exhibition, an exclusive audio interview with the curatorial team, and in-depth information on each of the seven installations. You can also learn more about the history of the British Pavilion, its organizer the British Council, or the Venice Biennale itself.

Located in the heart of Venice, in Le Procuratie on St Mark’s Square, The Human Safety Net is a global movement of people helping people. Their development programs, which span 26 countries, support vulnerable families and promote employment opportunities for refugees.

First built in the 12th century to house procurators from the neighbouring church of St Mark’s, Le Procuratie is now open to the public for the first time in 500 years. It houses the permanent interactive exhibition A World of Potential, which invites visitors to discover personal strengths and ways they can contribute to a more inclusive world. The exhibition is curated by Orna Cohen, co-founder of Dialogue Social Enterprise (DSE), and designed by Migliore+Servetto as 16 experiences that invoke ideals such as curiosity, perseverance, creativity, hope, gratitude, social intelligence, and teamwork.

Also on view at Le Procuratie during the Biennale is the temporary group exhibition Dreams in Transit (May 9, 2025 – March 15, 2026) featuring the work of Ange Leccia, Leila Alaoui, Lorraine de Sagazan, Anouk Maugein, and Sarah Makharine. Through their diverse practices, these artists illuminate the hidden stories of migrants and how their experiences shape identity. Part of the inaugural edition of The Parliament of the Invisibles, a concept by artist Anish Kapoor, the exhibition reflects the overarching project’s mission to unveil what often remains unseen.

You can learn more about current exhibitions, see behind the scenes of the Procuratie restoration project, and hear the stories of parents, families, and refugees who have been supported by The Human Safety Net’s community programs in their guide on Bloomberg Connects.

 La Biennale di Venezia Architettura is on view from May 10 to November 23, 2025.