Curated by Anneke Abhelakh, the Albania Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, titled "Building Architecture Culture", explores how the country's architecture embodies its political, cultural, and social transformations. Albania's built environment reflects a layered history, from Ottoman and Italian rule to communist isolation and post-socialist transformation, each leaving visible marks on its cities and public spaces. The pavilion examines how architecture both responds to and shapes collective memory, public space, and civic engagement, framing these questions through past, present, and future perspectives.
Nestled amongst the plethora of grandiose and carefully crafted national pavilions in the Giardini della Biennale in the Italian city of Venice is one pavilion by the city's perhaps most well-known modern architect. Sited between the pavilions of Russia and Switzerland is the VenezuelaPavilion, by architect Carlo Scarpa. In many ways, the structure typifies the design approach of its architect but has its idiosyncrasies. Built for Europe's most important biennial art exhibition, it is a member of a cohort of Modernist pavilions that came after the earlier, more classicist pavilions. This is its story.
The Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 presents a prototype that integrates landscape architecture into architectural interiors. Designed by Bas Smets in collaboration with Stefano Mancuso, the exhibition transforms the pavilion into a microclimate modeled after the understory of a subtropical forest, creating an indoor jungle that actively regulates temperature and humidity. The curatorial concept, supported by the Flanders Architecture Institute and its director, Dennis Pohl, promotes landscape thinking as an active design force rather than exterior decoration. In this video interview from Venice, Bas Smets and Dennis Pohl explain to ArchDaily editors how the project positions architecture as a platform for climate resilience and proposes a shift in design paradigms, from static images to evolving, living processes.
The Ukrainian pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia explores the intersection of traditional building methods and improvised construction during wartime crises. Under the title "DAKH (ДАХ): Vernacular Hardcore", the exhibition refers to the concept of the roof ("dakh" in Ukrainian) as a primary shelter in architecture, examining the roofs of an "architecture without architects" both in the country's constructive tradition and in the contemporary reality of aerial vigilance over its national territory. Curated by Bögdana Kosmina, Michał Murawski, and Kateryna Rusetska, the Ukrainian display consists of a six-element exhibition at the Arsenale's Sale d'Armi and an accompanying nomadic program titled Planetary Hardcore.
The 2025 edition of the European Cultural Centre's (ECC) Time Space Existenceexhibition in Venice is guided by the mandate to "Repair, Regenerate, and Reuse." Aiming to move beyond surface-level solutions and overused terminology, the exhibition showcases a cohort of practitioners who interpret architecture as an active agent of repair. The most compelling works presented in Venice demonstrate that "repair" is a multifaceted practice, operating across material, social, and historical registers. The varied approaches showcase a shift in the role of the architect, from a master builder and designer of physical objects, to that of a mender, able to combine technology, community, and material intelligence to restore narratives and build stronger cultural systems.
As part of the collateral events of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the Institut Ramon Llull presents the project "Water Parliaments: Projective Ecosocial Architectures", bringing together the waters of Lleida, Girona, Tarragona, Barcelona, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and beyond to address the water crisis as an interconnected ecosocial, cultural, and political issue. Framing architecture as a tool for critical speculation and collective action, the project advocates for the imagining of future scenarios grounded in coexistence—interweaving the human and non-human, the natural and artificial, the technological and vernacular, the global and the local.
The Polish Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale presents Lares and Penates: On Building a Sense of Security in Architecture, an exhibition that explores how architecture continues to function as a form of protection in an age marked by uncertainty. Framed as an anthropological investigation, the project examines the emotional and rational dimensions of building practices. The exhibition is developed by a multidisciplinary team including curator and art historian Aleksandra Kędziorek, architect Maciej Siuda, and artists Krzysztof Maniak and Katarzyna Przezwańska. Rather than focusing on architecture from the designer's perspective, the team investigates how individuals inhabit space and construct a sense of safety, responding to deep-seated fears, desires, and needs.
Cities today are being reimagined as living, evolving organisms, combining digital intelligence, ecological systems, and new materials to shape radical futures. At Carlo Ratti's "Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective." biennial, over 750 participants challenge established boundaries between architecture, landscape, and technology. Several conceptual projects showcased in the main exhibition challenge conventional boundaries between architecture, landscape, and technology. From bio-adaptive urban systems and Martian water-based settlements to immersive symphonies of satellite data, these works collectively envision new models for cohabitation, resilience, and planetary awareness.
This month's Unbuilt selection presents six speculative projects, presented as part of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale exhibition, as provocations for rethinking the future of cities and human settlement. While some proposals transform architecture into self-sustaining, living infrastructures, others explore how data and sensory interfaces can redefine our relationship with natural and urban environments. Together, they offer a cross-section of how architects and designers are using unbuilt work to imagine new possibilities for life on Earth and beyond.
Teatro del Mondo, Venice 1979. Image by Antonio Martinelli
The first edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale took place in 1980, immediately revealing its role as a platform for images and ideas that would become essential references in contemporary architectural theory and practice. This disruptive character was embodied from the very beginning by the strangely familiar floating structure designed by Aldo Rossi, titled Teatro del Mondo. At once temporary and archetypal, the project introduced central themes that would shape Italian architectural discourse in the years that followed. To this day, it continues to inspire reflections on timelessness, imagination, and the memory embedded in cities.
Lighthouses have stood along the margins of continents and islands for centuries as points of light in vast maritime territories. Rising in solitude from rocky cliffs, reefs, and headlands, these towers were tools for navigation and instruments of spatial clarity, shaping coastlines and marking the boundary between land and sea. Built to guide, warn, and locate, they constituted a global network of visibility long before the advent of digital mapping. Yet as maritime technologies evolved, many of these structures lost their original purpose. The typology, once essential, now stands at the edge of obsolescence. What remains is not merely an architectural relic, but a powerful spatial form — resilient, symbolic, and increasingly open to reinterpretation.
Brave New Axis by Spyridon Loukidis, Markos Georgios Sakellion, Georgios Thalassinos from National Technical University of Athens, Greece. EUmies Awards Young Talent winner. Image Courtesy of Fundació Mies van der Rohe
The Republic of Togo presents its first pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2025 with a project titled Considering Togo's Architectural Heritage. The inaugural pavilion is curated by Studio NEiDA, an architecture and research practice co-founded by architect Jeanne Autran-Edorh and curator Fabiola Büchele. Based in Lomé and Berlin, the studio is dedicated to equitable design processes, applying an Afrocentric lens to contemporary architectural discourse. The exhibition, located at Venice's Squero Castello, explores Togo's architectural narratives from the early 20th century, focusing on themes of conservation and transformation.
Tucked discreetly beneath the colonnade of Saint Mark's Square in Venice, Carlo Scarpa's Olivetti Showroom exerts a quiet yet unmistakable presence. Though often overshadowed by the grandeur of nearby landmarks—St. Mark's Basilica, the Clocktower, the Loggetta, and the Procuratie Vecchie—it attracts a particular kind of visitor: those who seek out one of Scarpa's architectural gems hidden in plain sight. Modest in scale but rich in detail, the showroom is meticulously maintained by FAI (Fondo Ambiente Italiano), the National Trust for Italy.
The Croatian Pavilion presents "Intelligence of Errors" at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, an artistic and research-driven project that repositions spatial and policy-related errors as generative tools for design. Commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, the exhibition is curated by Ida Križaj Leko, a practicing architect and head of the interdisciplinary university specialist program Urban Studies at the University of Rijeka. In dialogue with the central Biennale theme,Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., the pavilion investigates how recognizing and analyzing errors can contribute to the development of collective intelligence under non-ideal conditions.
