Reviews: Artificial Intelligence Takes Center Stage at the 2025 Architecture Biennale

Artificial Intelligence is the focus of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. – curated by Carlo Ratti and organized by La Biennale di Venezia chaired by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, open until November 23, 2025, at the Giardini, Arsenale, and Forte Marghera. The rich calendar of events of the Exhibition's GENS Public Program – aimed at engaging the public and creating connections between various disciplines in an experiential investigation of the Exhibition's themes (the program is available at www.labiennale.org) – now includes two new digital media. Spatial Intelligens is developed by sub, the transdisciplinary architecture and design studio led by Niklas Bildstein Zaar, also responsible for the exhibition's spatial design; In Other Words is designed by VOLUME, a competitor in the competition. The new tools expand this year's curatorial theme into an infrastructure that invites visitors to inhabit the architectural ideas presented by the participants, while raising questions about how knowledge is organized, disseminated, and questioned within cultural institutions.

Artificial Intelligence at work During the preparation of this year's Architecture Biennale, AI was used to summarize texts, generate captions, and assist with visitor orientation. What began as logistical support is now moving into a more public and experimental space. These new tools mark the shift from static presentation to active engagement, transforming the Exhibition itself into a reactive system.

“The Biennale becomes a living laboratory,” says curator Carlo Ratti, “not a place to display answers, but to ask new questions.”

SUB's Spatial Intelligence To complement the physical installations at the Corderie dell'Arsenale, sub developed Spatial Intelligens, an AI-powered digital twin that unlocks a further layer of the Exhibition, shaped by visitors' movements, interests, and interactions. Using computer vision, the system can locate itself simply by taking a photo of the Exhibition, allowing visitors to receive personalized information and interact with an AI trained to converse with the entire Exhibition.

Spatial Intelligens is accessible via a web interface on visitors' mobile devices during their visit. At the end of the experience, each visitor receives a personalized account of their journey, mapping their unique behavioral profile and allowing them to reflect on and share their experience of the Exhibition. The guide transforms individual experiences into a collective understanding of how we navigate and respond to architecture.

Niklas Bildstein Zaar, sub, said: “This is a project that redefines the way exhibitions can think, feel, and respond. It is incredibly inspiring to design a space that not only exhibits architecture, but actively participates in a living dialogue with it. We are grateful that our studio was chosen by Carlo Ratti for this Architecture Biennale. Spatial Intelligens embodies the spirit of the Biennale: architecture as a living, evolving system of intelligence, material consciousness, and collective experience.”

VOLUME – Ultimate Architecture Biennale 2025 Companion: In Other Words… VOLUME's intervention begins with a consideration: while the Biennale Architettura continues to bring together the international design community, its exhibitions often feel distant to the general public. As part of the Bursting Bubbles initiative, the Ultimate Biennale Companion uses large-scale linguistic models to mediate between expert discourse and broader cultural engagement. In Other Words experiments with offering visitors an AI-generated audio guide for the Exhibition at the Arsenale, using 36 editorial prompts applied to the catalogue descriptions via Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4. The system reanimates the Exhibition's texts through multiple voices and points of view. 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 2025 Architecture Biennale—inviting visitors to discover architecture not only through expert discourse, but also through the reflected lenses of ideology, fiction, and memory.

Bursting Bubbles also includes a series of reimagined Venetian souvenirs—more critical devices than consumer objects—designed to question how symbols circulate and what values they convey. These are available in various Venetian souvenir shops and at bursting-bubbles.eu. In Other Words is available as a podcast on Spotify.

“This experiment is both a playful and serious attempt to understand how AI is radically transforming our words and stories, and how it will do so in the future. It confronts us with both AI clichés and our own clichés and conventions. It bursts some of the bubbles of archetypal writing in architecture exhibitions by condensing, simplifying, but also intellectually transcending an initial assumption or adding additional perspectives. It explores the sensitivities of what it means to publicly share often complex ideas with a multitude of audiences,” says Stephan Petermann, editor of VOLUME.

The Biennale as a Living Laboratory Both tools are now active at the Arsenale. They are part of a broader ecology of experimentation that spans the 2025 Architecture Biennale—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 Architecture Biennale has always been a mirror of the profession: it reflects its dreams, anxieties, and, increasingly, its contradictions. This year, we tried a different format: can a Biennale go from being a mirror to becoming a tool?” observes Ratti. “The use of AI is an invitation to rethink authorship, collaboration, and the way meaning is constructed. It concerns the future of architecture and its relevance in an age of algorithmic mediation.”