Too Many Ingredients: Cooking Up a Future at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition

This is the flavor of this year’s Venice Biennale, particularly the main exhibition at the Arsenale: it assembles the ingredients (earth, masonry, and robots) of something that would taste good(combating climate change) but for which we don’t have a precise recipe, resulting in hidden trials and errors. Who wants to display the failed chickpea yucca fettuccini that ended up on the kitchen floor?

Curated by Turin-based architect Carlo Ratti, MIT’s Senseable City Lab director and a special professor at Milan Polytechnic, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. is on display through November 23. The energetic and charismatic architect, whose firm’s projects range from industrial design and architecture to city data analysis, attempts to weave together many disparate aspects of the field coalescing around the term sustainable design. Focusing on goals for circular economies, decarbonization, ethical labor, building reuse, repair, and recycling, along with the impact of data technologies and robotics, he has cross-fertilized the many projects. More than 750 architects, designers, scientists, and craftspeople were culled from an even larger group who responded to an open call last spring, focusing on issues around the extreme impact of building in the universe (the final section is called “Out,” as in outer space).

Within the Corderie, a 316-meter-longspace of the Arsenale where fiber cords were once twisted together to make ropes, the so-called central “nave” is filled with large on-site constructions divided by the historic building’s round brick columns, which form two flanking parallel “aisles.” The aisles are interspersed with custom made vertical posts designed by Sub, the exhibition designers, to hold posterboards at 90-degree angles and adjacent models. The installation’s density makes it difficult to discern the projects at a decent vantage point as one weaves between the tightly clustered material that goes on for what seems to be miles. At the press event Ratti said with pride that the exhibition could be viewed at many speeds—that of a drone in five minutes (they tried it), a strolling visitor in five hours, or in a leisurely pace of five days. I entered wishing I had five days, but in retrospect was glad I did not.

Many have already written about the exhibition, making points that are critical and perceptive. In reflecting on the overall organization, one thing to be mindful of — and this goes for most architectural exhibitions — is the difference between an architect-visitor and the general public. Yet both audiences have similar difficulties here: the large texts are hard to read and the AI summary texts are too short to have any meaning. The labels are often low on the panels; one visitor took a photo with his phone and then enlarged the texts to read them. Two exhibiting architects said that they couldn’t find their own projects, and another didn’t see an architect’s project panel when standing beside it. The large corner installations work better because they create their own little exhibition spaces. For example, Alternative Skies (Wesam Al Asali, Sigrid Adriaenssens, Romina Canna, and Robin Oval) is designed with cabinet drawers and panels in a compact moveable system to expose traditional crafts. The lacy paper project Circularity Handbook (Pills, Jin Arts, Typo_d, Archi-Neering Design Office, Róng Design Library, Valeria Tatano, Massimiliano Condotta, Xiaoqing Cui, and Zhengwei Tang) shows the flow of materials in and out of the exhibition so as to move toward zero waste.

Biennales offer an opportunity to bring contemporary ideas together and present new ones to an international audience, so it is tempting to overshare. Often the challenges relate to time, money, or delivery logistics to Venice, but here the issue was selecting, editing—and curating! The term curation is used for everything now—one can curate a menu, a vacation, a wardrobe, or a playlist. However, as Ratti and his team traveled the world seeking projects and discussing works with potential exhibitors (seen in the installation in front of the Italian Pavilion in the Giardini organized by the Polytechnic University of Turin and Northeastern University), they were perhaps overly enthusiastic.

The result is an exhibition that many have compared to a science fair. I would agree and add that it also recalled a materials trade show concept. There were multifarious things laid out flat or stacked into a form— from natural materials like mud, mushrooms, seaweed, moss, bio-concrete, reeds, hemp, elephant dung, oyster reefs, biochar, and stone to more normative construction materials such as glass, wood, metals, and new concrete. These low-tech materials are displayed with high-tech AI-generated projects and software programs that show the extractive economy’s negative impacts on the planet. Embedded software in buildings can now monitor water pollution and climate change; sensors can be used to heat and cool urban landscapes; metabolism studies can expose urban material flow; robots can build houses and cook. Overlooked, however, are the energy-heavy data centers essential for running it all, and little of this infrastructure is designed by architects. The theme “collective intelligence” is perhaps the most compelling of the categories, focusing on repurposing structures and revitalizing spaces for communities. Heavily researched Indigenous local techniques are combined with robotics, AI, and audiovisual sequences.

The good news is that, due to the exhibition’s density, we see many people— architects, historians, scientists, landscape architects, builders, technologists—working on climate and sustainability issues in a transdisciplinary way. Often exhibitions are manifestos for ideas. Here the idea is one of optimism for future technology-mediated solutions to the climate crisis, seemingly arguing that paths forward will emerge naturally and architects don’t need to worry so much. However, no matter how much technology advances, we can’t do anything without policy changes and solutions to reduce the use of coal and fossil fuels, among other harmful emissions, to arrest climate change and resource depletion. Is this just another curated menu to appease an ethical stance and make us feel good? Is there a danger of it all blowing away in the wind, as it did in the late 1970s? We know the ingredients. We now need to cook them up beyond the test kitchen and focus on the future.

— Nina Rappaport is an editor, critic, and educator. She is director of publications at YSoA, coordinator of history and theory at the School of Public Architecture at Kean University, and founder of Vertical Urban Factory.