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.
Drawing on research conducted across Poland, the exhibition highlights rituals and practices still in use today. Examples include placing a candle in the window to protect against storms, hanging garlands at construction sites to prevent accidents, using an ancient threshold to mark the passage between outside and inside, and employing a rod to locate underground water veins before building. Alongside these traditions, the exhibition turns attention to contemporary safety features. Elements such as emergency exits, fire alarms, peepholes, alarm systems, and padlocks, already part of the pavilion's architecture, are reframed within the display. These components, often overlooked, are presented as tools through which safety is observed, managed, and maintained.
Rather than relying on digital representation, the exhibition emphasizes physicality and tactility. Full-scale objects are presented in minimal scenography, highlighting their material presence and cultural resonance. Utilitarian safety features are recontextualized, such as a fire extinguisher set into a niche resembling a fresco or framed in a mosaic, inviting reflection on their symbolic and emotional roles.
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Lares and Penates were Roman deities charged with protecting the household hearth. In many languages today, they still evoke the idea of guardianship and domestic safety. In tune with Carlo Ratti, curator of the 2025 Architecture Biennale, who includes the word 'intelligens' in this year's exhibition title, we look to lares and penates as a universal code, rooted in ancient tradition and deeply embedded in our collective human intelligence. - Aleksandra Kędziorek
As part of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale's overarching theme Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective., the Polish Pavilion joins a wider field of national contributions examining how architecture responds to today's complex conditions. The Croatian Pavilion presents Intelligence of Errors, a research-driven project that reframes spatial and policy-related mistakes as generative tools for design. The Romanian Pavilion's HUMAN SCALE investigates architectural drawing as a medium that encapsulates multiple forms of intelligence, conceptual, technological, artistic, historical, and emotional. Meanwhile, the Lebanese Pavilion explores ecocide and environmental healing through the exhibition The Land Remembers.
We invite you to check out ArchDaily's comprehensive coverage of the 2025 Venice Biennale.
