A Personal Take on the Venice Biennale 2025: Architecture, Climate, and Circularity. Hear from our Sustainability Designer & Coordinator Iva Stanisheva as she shares her experience and key takeaways from a recent visit to the Venice Biennale. 

Curated by Carlo Ratti under the theme “Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective” the Biennale goes far beyond a traditional exhibition - offering a deeply immersive exploration of architecture’s evolving role in a world shaped by climate urgency, technological transformation, and collective responsibility.

With over 750 participants - around ten times the typical number - many of them leading academics and practitioners, the Biennale offered a dense, multifaceted dialogue. More than 300 installations span themes such as regenerative systems, material innovation, AI, climate resilience, and urban metabolism. It’s a bold statement about where our discipline is headed, and a timely provocation for us all to reflect on how we design not just buildings, but futures - particularly as we operate from offices in cities that are themselves grappling with the challenges on display in Venice.

Stepping Into the Storm: Arsenale’s Powerful Opening

The Arsenale's opening section in the Corderie is something you should absolutely set aside a full day for - no exaggeration. From the moment you step in, you're submerged in crisis: rising humidity, evaporating water, and a disorienting reflection pool confront you in both literal and metaphorical terms. You’re not just observing the climate crisis - you’re inside it, feeling its weight on your skin.

This powerful first act, curated by Carlo Ratti, sets the tone by forcing us to confront a fundamental contradiction: our innovations are both the cause and potential cure of our planetary crisis. Terms and Conditions, the entry installation by Daniel Barber and others, immerses visitors in the hidden realities of thermal regulation and climate inequality. In place of refreshing coolness, the space delivers heat, darkness, and mirrored surfaces that reflect not just our image, but our complicity. The environmental and social costs of artificial comfort are made tangible, confronting visitors with the invisible systems that sustain our everyday lives - and their consequences.

In this unsettling, sweltering corridor, the reflections of fans, mist, and dim light ripple across the water like a haunting presence. It felt as if the architecture is watching you back, posing questions we are purposefully ignoring. This is where the Biennale excels - not just presenting ideas, but making you feel their urgency.

Innovation, Circularity, and Radical Hope

After that jolt of climate realism, the journey continues into rooms full of ideas - technological, biological, social, and material. These were some of the most striking projects for me:

●      Bahrain Pavilion - “Heatwave”: This one earned the Golden Lion for good reason. It proposes a passive cooling system using vernacular techniques for today’s urban spaces. You stand under its shade, and it clicks: this is what architecture can do - grounded, poetic, and absolutely urgent. The secret of its execution is some detailed calculations to make the air flow work.

●      Danish Pavilion - “Build of Site”: Possibly the most hands-on pavilion. The team is literally rebuilding the pavilion using only what’s already there. No new materials. Watching it evolve in real time was an oddly calming act of resistance against our fast, disposable culture.

●      Don’t miss out - grab a coffee from the award-winning Canal Cafe, where innovation meets necessity. This striking installation by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, crowned with the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, turns polluted canal water into perfectly brewed espresso right before your eyes. As drinkable water becomes increasingly scarce - a concern echoed throughout this year’s exhibitions - Canal Cafe offers a powerful, tangible solution: a hybrid natural-artificial filtration system that reimagines urban water reuse. It’s not just a cup of coffee - it’s a call to rethink how we live with water.

●      The Metabolic Home by IAAC is a groundbreaking zero-waste housing prototype that treats the home as a living, self-sustaining organism. Developed by Areti Markopoulou, Lydia Kallipoliti, and the Post-Spectacular Office, it showcases how architecture, biology, and technology can merge to create circular urban living. Every room is part of a metabolic system where waste is repurposed - greywater feeds plants, decomposing food becomes biofuel, and furniture is grown from mycelium. Presented at the Venice Biennale’s Central Pavilion, the project redefines regenerative architecture and cohabitation by turning homes into micro-ecologies, where both humans and non-humans engage in sustainable resource cycles.

●      VAMO Canopy (ETH Zurich & MIT): A canopy that feels alive, made for disassembly and built with waste wool, pineapple peels, reclaimed wood, and mycelium. It's architecture as biology. The team shares a list of material libraries that hides untapped potential for the future of the construction industry. The list with the selected materials is in the link attached under Material Teams. I strongly encourage you to have a look!

To follow on the material and product side here are a few more highlights from my visit:

●      Water-Filled Glass: Fluid Architecture and Liquid Engineering - Water-Filled Glass was an intriguing presentation of a new glazing system - basically glass panels that circulate water to regulate heat. It keeps buildings cooler in summer and warmer in winter, almost like mimicking how Earth’s climate system works. Super smart, very passive, and ideal for retrofits because it can be added without big changes. It’s a great example of moving beyond insulation and thinking about buildings as active systems.

●      FRICKS: CDW Bricks Foamed Geopolymer - The construction sector is a major source of global waste, with construction and demolition debris making up nearly one-third of all waste in the EU. In Spain, more than half of this comes from brick and ceramic materials - resources that continue to be heavily produced and consumed. This prompts a critical question: how can we stop generating waste from the very materials we extract and use at scale? FRICKS addresses this challenge by reimagining brick waste as a resource, transforming it into a new building material. Developed through innovative manufacturing protocols, CDW-Brick is a geopolymer system with tailored porosity and density. The result is FRICKS: a lightweight, non-toxic insulation and façade solution built entirely from repurposed construction waste.

●      Concrete Reinvented - An interesting presentation of an innovative material by Concrete Graphene. Graphene-enhanced concrete, known as "Concretene," represents a groundbreaking innovation in construction, offering significantly increased strength, durability, and corrosion resistance - potentially enabling infrastructure to last centuries instead of decades. This advancement not only improves performance but also supports sustainability by reducing material usage and environmental impact. However, concerns remain about the environmental risks posed by graphene-based nanomaterials (GFNs), as their release into air, soil, and water throughout the product’s life cycle could harm ecosystems and organisms, highlighting the need for responsible development and regulation.

And of course, the Circular Economy Manifesto, developed in collaboration with Arup and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, serves as both a provocation and a practical roadmap.

●      MycoMuseum responds to the urgent challenge of climate change by reimagining how we design our built environments in closer harmony with nature. Centered on mycelium as a circular, regenerative building material, the project envisions a future where ecology, design, and technology are seamlessly integrated. It investigates mycelium’s biological capabilities, material performance, and architectural potential, while promoting decentralised, sustainable production models that question the logic of conventional mass manufacturing. More than just a material exploration, MycoMuseum serves as a collaborative platform - bringing together architects, biotechnologists, and local communities to cultivate a new design ethos rooted in ecological partnership and resilience.

From Humidity to Mars: The Biennale’s Arc

What’s brilliant - and exhausting - is the scale. You’ll need three to four days to do it justice. Just walking the Arsenale alone took the better part of one full day. And the emotional range of the experience is wild: from visceral climate dread to the cautious hope offered by microbial concrete, upcycled building skins, and yes - Martian habitats.

Yes, the final stretch of the Arsenale culminates in speculative design on Mars. And surprisingly, it doesn’t feel out of place. If the entrance grounded us in Earth’s decay, the ending asks how far we can stretch our intelligence - not to escape, but to better understand how we live now. The red planet is a mirror, not an escape hatch.

Final Reflections

This Biennale is a challenge, a wake-up call, and a deep pool of inspiration. As someone focused on sustainability and the circular economy at our firm, I walked away with the sense that our discipline is not only evolving - but being rewritten.

It made me reflect on our responsibility not just to design with lower impact, but to design in cycles, in time, and in community. There’s a rising tide - literally and metaphorically - and this Biennale asks whether we will float or keep building walls.

Iva Stanisheva

Sustainability Designer & Coordinator