Thirty years ago, EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth, a geodesic dome in which people sped through the history of telecommunication, peddled the future miracle of video chat, sponsored by AT&T. To me at the time, video chat seemed more amazing than the moon landing because it wasn’t heroic and it wasn’t abstract—it was interactive and productive. As a 9-year-old, video chatting with a pen pal was clearly so much better than writing to one. Riders at EPCOT passed through a blinding laser field at the story’s apex, mimicking the video’s signal itself; we traveled at the speed of light, dazzled, and blissfully unaware of what this miracle would one day require from all of us.
Today, we know too well the costs of technology and its latest harbinger, AI, because they encroach on our independence, and we have become the signal itself, on our wrists, in our pockets, and around our homes, quite frequently on a video call. I used to read books on planes. Now I dream about reading a book anywhere.
The mien of this year’s Biennale Architettura 2025 is not the one of hope AT&T peddled in 1989 at Spaceship Earth, but it’s not exactly one of despair, either. We all got the video future we dreamed of; now we just need morality.
Some exhibitors faithfully interpret the three subthemes of Ratti’s Intelligens, like the UAE partnership Design and More International, in its “Probiotic Tower,” a proposal to use bamboo cross-laminated timber, algae bioreactors, solar arrays, and shrubby barnacles called food trees to adapt a water tower to greater social and environmental goals. Others push a looser interpretation, like the Brooklyn-based designer Olalekan Jeyifous, whose photo collages in hyperreal colors called “Even in Arcadia…” conflate verdant scenes of an aquifer-obsessed society interested in replenishment and renewal. (He won the Silver Lion in the previous architecture Biennale.) These imagined futures don’t really seem as happy as the one AT&T promised us via EPCOT— and yet, here we are in the exact future it promised, and all too often abused by the urgencies of FaceTime, Signal, Slack, and WhatsApp. So, we pine for spruce and pine (or bamboo), and we must imagine ourselves happy as we consider digging wells with our children for fun and, evidently, survival.
Ratti comingles exhibitors who explore high and low technologies, so nothing really seems as if it belongs squarely in some untouchable realm. Nothing seems outlandish or dreamlike. There’s a robot this year with a milky-white polymer mask that can respond to our prompts in any language. That’s uncanny. Hempcrete takes center stage in one part of the show. That’s unusual. Banana leaves that can be woven into superstrong rope are featured in another. That’s unexpected. Even the AI-generated text that accompanies each exhibitor’s statement, novel as it seems, offers the kind of alacrity you’d see in a decently reported news story by a human being assigned to the metro desk.
Where comingling high and low technologies gets interesting is in the work itself— and you can escape the closed loop between what’s noisy and uncertain and what’s familiar and tactile in examining firms that are sharply attuned to vernacular traditions by designing and building in them.
Take MASS Design Group’s work with the Rwandan Institute for Conservation Agriculture and the Dian Fossey Foundation; Kazunori Hamana’s restoration of abandoned Japanese homes; Antonia Rossi’s multifamily homes in Ostana, Italy; and So? Architecture’s floating A-frame houses called “Hope on Water.” (In the national pavilions, Oppenheim Architectures’ projects in Anneke Abhelakh’s Albanian pavilion and Arquitecturia Camps Felip Las Tejedoras in Tarragona, exhibited in Spain’s pavilion, come to mind, too.) Shigeru Ban was also in Venice at the invitation of the European Network Architecture for Health to talk about his experience working between high and low technology.
Hovering above these projects is the specter of Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 book Architecture Without Architects. The vernacular traditions Rudofsky chronicled were meant to be an antidote to modernism. (Its original subtitle was “a short introduction to non-pedigreed architecture.”) After its publication 60 years ago, we all started using “the vernacular” as a shorthand for received traditions in design and building rather than the appliqué of a design strategy or a theory. But one of the qualities of “the” vernacular is that it reflects a cultural and social process, not a style. It’s meant to be wisdom in wood and stone; it is a method suited to context; it adapts. The vernacular is the signal itself, full of nameless architects and builders.
Maybe the best Rudofskian moment of this show was outside the main exhibit hall in the crook of the courtyard, where an unadorned wooden pergola hovers over a gleaming outdoor escalator, whose treads ascended evenly into dappled sunlight. This isn’t an installation; it is literally an outdoor escalator, an invention whose basic form and essential function have remained unchanged for almost 150 years. Although its materials have been improved over the years, it demands nothing from us. It just works.
As I was appreciating this device, I saw Bjarke Ingels taking a phone call in its shade. He was in town to see the Bhutanese carvers his firm, BIG, hired to etch motifs into glulam beams alongside a robotic arm—except the robotic arm was stripped of a blade in favor of a brush, owing to safety concerns. In the end, then, only the humans were left holding the weapons.
William Richards is a writer based in Washington, D.C., and Paris and the cofounder of Team Three, an editorial and creative consultancy.
→ Continue reading at The Architect's Newspaper
