This is the precipice of disaster. In the antechamber of Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective, the central exhibition of the 19th Venice Biennale of Architecture, curator Carlo Ratti’s wall text unfolds a foreboding vision of the future: “The Exhibition begins in the Corderie with a stark confrontation: global temperatures rise while global populations fall.”
These dual realities set the stage for the sprawling exhibition, which stretches across the ancient Venetian armoury. First comes the heat. In the opening room, a dark chamber pairs an ominous cluster of suspended air conditioning exhaust units with waist-height pools of water. It is stiflingly hot. While the fans themselves sit idle (air is separately pumped in from the rest of the building), the point is awfully clear. The “externalities” of cooling are turned inward and we pay the price for our own comfort.
PHOTO: Marco Zorzanello
It gets worse. A blast of cooler air marks the passage into the main exhibit hall, but it hardly comes as a reprieve: The beads of perspiration on my forehead transform into a cold sweat. I am standing before The Other Side of The Hill, a large-scale installation designed by Patricia Urquiola (with scientists Geoffrey West and Roberto Kolter and architecture theorists Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley), comprising 1,500 bricks stacked to represent human population growth over the last 5,000 years. From a gradual upward slope, the pace accelerates into an almost linear ascent. But just as it all hurtles towards the ceiling, the bricks abruptly stop, presaging a population decline widely predicted to begin within the next century. Is this how humanity ends?
PHOTO: Marco Zorzanello
Not exactly. While the prelude portends the nearing apocalypse, there are also plenty of Gods in the machine. Through a synthesis of biology, community and — most of all — technology, Ratti’s sprawling biennale is awash in the optimism of design solutions. Even the path to population collapse is paved in innovation; Urquiola’s ingenious bio-cement bricks are inspired by microbial adaptation and incorporate fishing nets, reeds, shells and algae recovered from the Venice lagoon. An accompanying caption imagines a “trans-scalar, trans-species, collaborative plasticity.”
PHOTO: Marco Zorzanello
It sounds pretty cool, but I don’t actually know what it means. Past the air conditioners and bio-bricks, the Corderie is packed with a dizzying collection comprising 280 projects and 762 participants — a stark contrast to , which featured just 89 participants – loosely divided between Ratti’s three themes (natural, artificial, and collective). In the opening rooms, natural materials and vernacular traditions inspire a swathe of installations, including Boonsem Prethada’s Elephant Chapel, a striking archway made from elephant dung, and Necto, an elegant computational prototype for lightweight temporary architecture by SO-IL, Mariana Popescu, TheGreenEyl and Riley Watts. During the opening weekend, dancers transform the spaces underneath into a stage.
PHOTO: Marco Zorzanello
A tangle of tree trunks, branches and 3D-printed joints, Kengo Kuma’s Domino 3.0 epitomizes the synthesis of nature and technology that permeates the exhibition. The remains of a tree felled by a 2018 storm in northern Italy are Frankensteined into a charmingly graceless amalgam. After the salvaged timber was digitally scanned, new 3D-printed members were strategically inserted to ensure optimal structural strength. The result is a damn sight more durable than a backyard treehouse, but arguably not much more useful. It’s innovation, sure, but to what end?
Never mind, there’s much more to see. Throughout, the sheer wealth of programming and the accompanying curatorial logic feel designed to ease any lingering anxieties about engaging deeply with the material. From compact poster displays and scale models to sprawling installations, each featured project is accompanied by a long text as well as a concise “A.I. Summary” that distills the gist of it into a couple of sentences. It encourages you to move fast. Framed by the dystopian omni-crises of a burning planet and an imminently collapsing human population, the palpable sense of urgency is amplified by an unsettling, gloomy soundscape that adds to the sensory overload. It all coalesces into a blaring mental siren, compelling me not to overthink it: This is a time for big ideas — and lots of them.
PHOTO: Andrea Avezzù
How about robots? Though humanity is poised to wither, the Corderie is inundated with humanoid forms, from a drummer and dancer which clumsily mimic the movements of passerby in Philip Yuan and Bin He’s Co-Poeisis to a “dreaming” robot suspended from the ceiling by Mesh, Gramazio Kohler Research and ETH Zurich. Takashi Ikegami and Luc Steels’ Am I a Strange Loop? pushes the envelope further, using Alter3 and ChatGPT to create a responsive humanoid form designed to tease cloying signs of self-awareness. There’s even one of those robot dogs — Boston Dynamics’ “Spot” — outfitted with an arm used to build data centres on the moon.
PHOTO: Luca Capuano
For all the techno-optimism, little of it inspires even fleeting confidence. The humanoids are clumsy and naive, while the dog is unmoving and vaguely menacing. Of all the robots, however, Bjarke Ingels Group’s (BIG) mechanical sculpting arm dominates the show. Ancient Future: Bridging Bhutan’s Tradition and Innovation pairs two expert Bhutanese wood carvers — Sangay Thsering and Yeshi Gyeltshen, who are not acknowledged by name in either the human or AI-generated wall text — with a robotic arm. And while the AI robot is programmed to learn and replicate the same intricate carving techniques, safety restrictions reduce it to an over-engineered broom; all it does in Venice is wield a brush that clears excess sawdust.
PHOTO: Andrea Avezzù
Still, Thsering and Gyeltshen’s craft is so impressive that it draws a crowd (and plenty of cameras) every time I pass by. But don’t chalk it up as a victory for the human spirit. In the middle of the Corderie, Bhutanese material traditions are shorn of the cultural, economic and geographic context that shapes them; the men themselves are reduced to a museum piece. As Charlotte Malterre-Barthes put it on Instagram, the whole spectacle is reminiscent of a “1920s colonial exhibition.” For BIG and co. — who plan to use the wood carvings in Bhutan’s planned Gelephu International Airport — the region’s material culture is foremost a commodity to be mined. Wood carving traditions are expanded to a heroic scale yet reduced to fetish objects in the process.
PHOTO: Andrea Avezzù
The lack of engagement with culture, community and economy is emblematic of broader curatorial shortcomings. Intelligens is a show of ideas at the expense of politics. Towards the end, it even abandons the planet altogether, embracing moonshots like Heatherwick Studio’s Space Garden — a proposal to grow crops in orbit. Closer to home, I’m surprised to find a display about a very familiar project: Sidewalk Toronto.
Alphabet’s well-publicized but long-abandoned pitch to create a Canadian techno-utopia (a project that Ratti was involved in) is revived as a Corderie poster board. The AI summary proclaims the same aspirations of “reimagining urban planning through adaptable buildings, modular streets, and sustainable infrastructure” that were first promised to Canadians almost a decade ago. But dreaming up a sustainable nirvana was always easy enough; the crux of the project was privatization of public policy. At the biennale, however, it’s instead presented as a stack of half-baked — albeit more or less well-intentioned — design concepts represented in renderings. Removed from its messy political and regulatory context, it leaves .
PHOTO: Marco Zorzanello
Sidewalk’s sustainable city forms a negligible part of Ratti’s massive exhibition. But it points up the latter’s lack of coherence, which undermines the prevailing affect of the entire production. There’s too much of Intelligens for anyone to read or understand. Yet, its sheer breadth and optimism amounts to a promise in itself. Somewhere amidst the cacophony, there must be seeds of a better future, though one that requires someone (or, better yet, something) smarter than ourselves to coalesce. We don’t need to think about it too much; all we have to do is embrace it. If you squint, you can almost make it out. But if you open your eyes? It’s Sidewalk Toronto all the way down.
Even the two central crises that initially anchor the show are only superficially addressed. While much of the work on display showcases genuinely interesting low-carbon design and adaptive strategies for a heating planet, the theme of depopulation is merely a narrative conceit: an empty planet could justify a world of robots. Walking the Corderie, I keep expecting more. How will global populations shift as birth rates fall? Will countries like Canada and the United States continue to grow? What should we do about it? How about making cities more family-friendly? How about paid parental leave or universal child care programs?
PHOTO: Andrea Avezzù
It never comes up. Intelligens does too little to distinguish its posture from the right-wing alarmism that dominates the discourse and the dog whistles against women’s bodily autonomy by birth-rate doomers like Elon Musk and JD Vance. Ironically, the closest thing to a meaningful engagement on the topic comes indirectly, via the Architecture Lobby. The advocacy group’s installation focuses on its efforts to fight the exploitation of architectural labour. It’s not about depopulation at all, though it offers a stirring reminder of the real world beyond the Arsenale’s rarefied walls, and a meditation on the political realities of work, which — if nothing else — is something that actually shapes family planning and demographic change.
Nearby, HouseEurope! offers another rare jolt of realism. The display chronicles an For the Berlin firm Bplus.xyz, it’s not enough to just design or imagine a better world — we actually have to fight for it. But the Architecture Lobby and HouseEurope! are outliers. I can understand why: This politics stuff isn’t much fun.
I wish I could believe in Ratti’s vision instead. Throughout the Corderie, the promises of space agriculture and robot assistants evoke the future presented in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, a recently published book that instantly captured the zeitgeist of North American liberalism. Similarly to Ratti, Klein and Thompson imagine a sustainable and prosperous technological utopia in 2050. “Thanks to high productivity from AI, most people can complete what used to be a full week of work in a few days,” they write, with all the extra holiday time used for vacations on airplanes that “routinely reach Mach 2 — twice the speed of sound — using a mix of traditional and green synthetic fuels that release far less carbon into the air.”
Like Ratti’s optimism, it is a scintillating and compelling vision. And it is not without merit. The frayed coalition for open, immigrant-friendly societies is contingent upon a paradigm of inclusive prosperity. For Klein and Thompson and countless North American progressives, this vision is predicated on radically expanding the supply of housing — on swinging for the fences and dreaming bigger. But the challenge is at least as political as it is technological.
Building a better world and a more sustainable planet will take more than artificial intelligence and space lettuce. While every new revolution — from the factory floor to deep learning — has promised salvation, it somehow always results in more work. Nearly a century ago, John Maynard Keynes predicted a three-hour work day by 2030. It hasn’t panned out, and based on the awkward, clumsy robots at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, I don’t expect it to anytime soon.
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