The Brooklyn Rail

Every time I come to Italy I mess up the coffee ordering system. In the US, cafe ordering is like an assembly line: enter, you’re already on a linear axis with the cash register (iPad) and you’re greeted, maybe you pause for a moment behind the pastry case, and eventually you make your way to a shallow, open counter where eventually your cup will land, and your name will be called.

Italian cafes operate in step with the culture of la pausa. Coffee is a sacred ritual of rest and recharge, and in Italian cafes there usually isn’t a line at all. Order at the counter, soon the little saucers are placed in front of you as an indicator that the coffee is coming. You drink it right there. There are varying methods of payment though; sometimes you pay before, sometimes you pay after. Sometimes you even turn around to pay at a separate counter.

One of the first exhibitions I saw at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale was the Nordic Pavilion, curated by trans performance artist Teo Ala-Ruona of Finland. Titled Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture, Ala-Ruona sends a clear message: architecture is a performance space. It dictates, or at best guides, our behavior. Each of his “scores” are poetic messages paired with sculptural works. And these scores invite us to go beyond the expected behavior of a gallery, of the Biennale, of being in architecture. With the continued assault on trans rights, and those of the LGBTQ+ community more broadly under Trump’s presidency, the Nordic Pavilion hits a nerve. Architecture is not passive. Architecture guides our everyday behavior, and therefore our understanding of freedom.

Industry Muscle, like so many other of the pavilions at this year’s Biennale, was curated with clarity, urgency, and concern for architecture’s relevance. However, the main act, the Arsenale curation by Ratti, defangs architecture. Politics are murky and centrist here, and there is little concern for everyday users—i.e. tenants, workers, students, families. Titled Intelligens, and purporting to study three types of “intelligences”—”Natural,” “Artificial,” and “Collective”—it is a grand platform on which Ratti places his world view that more closely resembles Silicon Valley and DOGE than a practice of balance and repair. Soon we all will be relearning new scores for architecture, but who gets to write these?

While many have written about their dislike for Intelligens’s opening act, I see how it achieves exactly the effect Ratti was going for. You first enter through a heavy black curtain into a field of darkness, punctuated by the reflection of light on water and a surge of heat on the skin. A/C units hang from the ceiling, whirring, but not cooling. You’re meant to feel the hot underbelly of the machine, emblematic of old or outdated technology. Walking in a figure eight to this soundtrack, viewers are mostly silent. But this is the world you’re in now. You’re waiting for the next act, and wondering who is on the other side of the curtain.

In the next room we begin our journey to a tech-led world order, surprisingly, in the “Natural” section. Here the message is: exploit plant and Indigenous intelligence for AI learning, urban expansion, and a new aesthetic for building. What struck me is the commonalities between so many projects: there are countless “cooling stations,” dozens of “living with non-human species” (bees, microbes, bacteria) and tons of projects that really just build familiar, low-fi forms with leaves, fibers, and organic materials, seemingly to remind us that we can? Though these forms—displayed here as primitive, reactive—are what most of the world has to work with on a daily basis. Two in particular may strike you: Interwoven depicts a woman weaving a strip of textile (not even a form, a garment, a building material) out of lab-grown grass roots. Another is titled First Steps in Architecture, a video work depicting an Indigenous Congolese community building a structure in the jungle out of leaves, branches, and other materials available at-hand.

The world has so much to learn from the Global South, from local and self-sustaining systems of building and food production to ways of socializing and collectivizing materials and labor. You’ll notice that Tosin Oshinowo, curator of the first Sharjah Architecture Triennial all about the realities of scarcity and power in pan-African solidarity, is included in the later “Collective” section. Lydia Kallipoliti is another welcome voice here, whose installation Metabolic Home envisions a way to tackle resource scarcity at home inspired me, an anxious composter always thinking “how can I do my part?” Kallipoliti takes it a thousand times further, describing and creating a 1:5 model of a home that uses every bit of waste (peanut shells, feces, compost) to create energy (biofuel) and even preserve the offsets of that (heat, solar). We are shown just how this would factor in, say, a weekend movie night by a video of a couple entranced by a film pressing their nut shells and kernels into a citrus press–like contraption. The resulting fuel is mocked up in clinically aesthetic plastic tubes. This is just one part of a research project that Kallipoliti also discusses in her new book Building Metabolism.

Following “Natural” we get “Artificial.” Yes, with a focus on artificial intelligence, and by extension, all things robotics. Okay, I played music with a robot who was designed to play music back. But… the future of architecture and a warming climate? Housing one billion more people? Reusing and conserving our world’s precious natural resources? This section offered its “solutions” to architecture’s most pressing issues largely via organically soft piles of 3D-printed goop (insert natural material + unpronounceable polymer blend) and bounteous amounts of AI applications embedded in floorplans, masterplans, and even AI-generated “nature” images, said to bridge the disconnect between humans and the natural world). Amid all this, there was even one installation all about how much water that installation itself had used. When I passed by it was a few millimeters, but constantly ticking upward, like the Union Square Climate Clock.

“Collective” is, without a doubt, the most optimistic part of the whole thing. Renovation, housing, social infrastructure, and the cheeky announcements we have come to expect from our Architecture Lobby, whose booth boldly announced “Thank you for your free labor” to all passersby. I was happy to see HouseEurope! and their familiar black and yellow posters. Their work is an architect-led initiative to change EU laws to make renovations and reuse easier. I was also surprised to see an exhibition on the rehabilitation of the infamous Vele of Scampia, Vela Celeste: Reimagining Home. Centered on the grim social housing project in Naples—a scar on the city not dissimilar to Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis or Cabrini-Green in Chicago—the Italian city has taken ownership of the mistake and has been reimagining the site for years, attempting to usher in modern, clean, safe, and green housing for the Vele residents. But the preservation of one part of the infamous tower is an interesting artifact to have in the “Collective” section, as it represents failure. This act of remembrance and reclamation, however, shines a much-needed light on the prescience of social housing in a time of war on the working-classes. How can the architecture of the working class, the middle class, the creative class, guide us toward freedom rather than mere survival? Come to think of it, affordability is not a theme, discussion, or even footnote at all in Ratti’s world. Somehow we’ll all pay for this new tech and our new robots though.

Squinting in the sunlight upon exiting through another heavy black curtain, I made my way over to Liz Diller’s Golden Lion–winning Canal Cafe. An idea that seems so simple: taking an abundant local resource and adapting it for enjoyment. It was delicious, and I relished the coffee break taken in the warm sun on the Venetian canal. I also relished the breaks offered by the Argentinian and Luxembourg pavilions. Rest is a powerful means of refusal and resilience in the face of design institutions, the Ivy League universities, and the big firms all trying to sell, develop, and influence us according to their world view. The Arsenale here in Italy nevertheless operates like the US cafe. It’s linear, and expects us to perform accordingly, leaving no room for new scores.

Another national pavilion offers an astute response to this defeatism: Estonia. A newer pavilion located further down the quai from the Arsenale vaporetto stop, Estonian curators and designers turn their eye toward renovation with an evocatively titled exhibition, Let me warm you—specifically the EU’s ambitious, yet seemingly unrealistic, goals to meet carbon neutrality—by asking us to put on a play. The small space nevertheless offers another “stage” embedded in the design, lined with stapled packets of scripts. Choose your fighter: will you act the part of the chairman, the developer, the tenant, or maybe even the building itself?

I don’t want an AI-monitored green roof. I want an allotment where I can grow food as the shelves at the grocery stores grow thinner and the prices rise ever higher. I don’t want a 3D-printed apartment, I want one equipped for climate adaptation that leaves me with enough income to live, to make art, and to travel to understand just how much of the score I don’t understand. I can learn new ones like the Italian way of la pausa and sleep better knowing there are, indeed, other ways.