Biennale Architettura 2025 | Artificial Intelligence takes center stage at the Biennale Architettura 2025

Artificial intelligence takes center stage at the 19^th International Architecture Exhibition – Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. – curated by Carlo Ratti and organized by La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, open to the public until Sunday November 23, 2025, at the Giardini, Arsenale and Forte Marghera. To the rich calendar of the Exhibition’s GENS Public Programme — aimed at engaging the public and creating connections between various disciplines through an experiential exploration of the Exhibition’s themes (full program available at www.labiennale.org) — two new digital companions are now being added. Spatial Intelligens is developed by sub, the transdisciplinary architecture and design studio led by Niklas Bildstein Zaar, also behind the Exhibition’s spatial design; In Other Words is designed by VOLUME, one of the featured participants. The new tools extend this year’s curatorial theme into infrastructure, inviting visitors to inhabit architectural ideas presented by the partecipants, while also raising broader questions about how knowledge is organized, circulated, and contested within cultural institutions.  

Artificial Intelligence at Work
Throughout the preparation of this year’s Biennale Architettura, AI has been used to summarize texts, generate captions, and assist with wayfinding. What began as logistical support now shifts into a more public and experimental space. These new tools mark a move from static presentation to active engagement, positioning the Exhibition itself as a responsive system.   

“The Biennale becomes a living lab,” says curator Carlo Ratti, “a place not for displaying answers, but for asking new questions”.

To complement the physical installations in the Corderie at the Arsenale, sub has developed Spatial Intelligens, an AI–powered digital twin that unlocks another layer of the Exhibition shaped by visitors’ movements, interests, and interactions. Using computer vision, the system can localize itself by simply taking a picture of the Exhibition, enabling visitors to instantly receive personalized information and engage with a conversational AI trained on the full breadth of the exhibition. 

Spatial Intelligens is accessible through a web-based interface on visitors’ mobile devices during their visit. At the end of the experience, each visitor receives a personalized record of their journey, mapping their unique behavioral profile and allowing them to reflect on and share how they engaged with the exhibition. The guide transforms individual experiences into a collective understanding of how we navigate and respond to architecture.

Niklas Bildstein Zaar, sub: “This is a project that redefines how exhibitions can think, feel, and respond. It is incredibly exciting to design a space that showcases architecture and actively participates in a living dialogue with it. We are grateful that our studio has been appointed by Carlo Ratti for this year’s Biennale Architettura. Spatial Intelligens encapsulates the spirit of the Biennale: architecture as a living, evolving system of intelligence, consciousness of materials, and collective experience”.

VOLUME’s intervention begins with a familiar tension: while the Biennale continues to convene the international architecture and design community, its exhibitions often feel remote from wider publics. As part of the group’s Bursting Bubbles initiative, the Ultimate Biennale Companion uses large language models to mediate between expert discourse and broader cultural engagement. In Other Words experiments with offering visitors an AI generated audio guide to the Arsenale Exhibition using 36 editorially instigated prompts applied to catalogue description using Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4, the system reanimates the Exhibition text through multiple voices and vantage points. Some are imagined, others drawn from history or popular culture: a MAGA-era pundit, a 20th-century Italian architect, a critical theorist. The result is a polyphonic reading of the Biennale Architettura 2025—one that invites visitors to encounter architecture not just through expert discourse, but through the refracted lenses of ideology, fiction, and memory. Bursting Bubbles also includes a series of reimagined Venetian souvenirs—less consumer artifact than critical device—intended to question how symbols circulate and whose values they carry available in different Venetian souvenir shops and on bursting-bubbles.eu.  In Other words is available as a podcast on Spotify.  

“This experiment is a simultaneously playful and serious attempt at understanding how AI is and will be radically reshaping our words and stories. It confronts us with both AI’s and our own tropes and conventions. It bursts some of the bubbles of archetypal writing in design exhibitions by condensing, simplifying, but also intellectually overtaking an initial premise, or adding more vantage points. It explores the sensitivities of what it means to publicly share often complicated or complex ideas with a multitude of audiences”, says VOLUME editor Stephan Petermann.

Both tools are now active at the Arsenale. They form part of a broader ecology of experimentation running through the Biennale Architettura 2025—from the Construction Futures Research Lab to The Song of the Crickets, from fieldwork-based practices to participatory installations. These projects extend the curatorial agenda beyond form or image, foregrounding systems of knowledge production and infrastructural imagination.  

“The Biennale Architettura has long been a mirror of the profession: reflecting its dreams, anxieties, and, increasingly, its contradictions. This year, we tried a different format: Could a biennale shift from being a mirror to a tool?” Ratti notes. “The use of AI is an invitation to rethink authorship, collaboration, and how meaning is constructed. It deals with the future of architecture and its relevance in an age of algorithmic mediation”.