The Brooklyn Rail

The Giardini: a garden, a respite, an origin, a problem. The place where the Biennale began in 1895 is a park carved out of Venice by Napoleon. As you escape the blazing sun and the cacophony of group exhibitions into this thicket of green, six pavilions want to tell you about themselves.

It’s not uncommon, over the years of the Venice Architecture Biennale, to observe participants focusing exhibitions on the history of their pavilions or framing them as architectural case studies. That at least six countries in the 2025 edition have taken this approach is striking. At a venue increasingly focused on architecture’s responsibility toward social and environmental crises, why have so many pavilions turned inward, and to what end? Against the backdrop of an edition aptly described by Phineas Harper as a “tech bro fever dream,” what do the gestures of self-investigation and exposition reveal about the current state of the Biennale?¹

Denmark, like Finland and the Holy See, takes the renovation of its pavilion as the point of departure for Build of Site. Entering into the exhibition curated by architect Søren Pihlmann, you will find exposed rebar for a floor to be reconstructed, piles of rock tucked into niches, and, centrally, a long table displaying dozens of material experiments that bear resemblance to the exhibition furniture itself. The pavilion, divided into a “paused construction site” and “open laboratory,” promises that everything on display has been made from materials generated from the deconstruction of the building during its renovation. Following the exhibition, the plinths, tables, and ramps will be broken down and once again returned to use in the building (as flooring substrate and terrazzo, for instance).

Despite the exhibition’s x-ray view into the pavilion, some of its richest substance remains out of field. Read alongside its catalogue, the Danish Pavilion offers more than a dutiful manifesto on circular construction or the technocratically-tinged biomaterials of the Arsenale. In the catalogue, Pihlmann and the writer Adam Dickinson propose an architecture that “collaborate[s] with the materials of a given site” and listens to them to reveal their “capacities,” histories, and innate qualities.² The warmth and sensitivity of Pihlmann and Dickinson’s extended dialogue rarely surfaces in an exhibition marked by ordered masses of grey-brown soil and rock composites and Do Not Touch signs for material specimens—construction: “white-cubified.” The pavilion provides a glimpse into a construction project commendable for its waste-reduction and circular principles, but an exhibition experience of limited depth; how might an exhibition actually invite visitors into a conversation with materials?

If in the world of the Danish Pavilion we are to listen to materials, at the Japanese Pavilion, building matter talks back. Through a multichannel video installation that combines scripted dialogue and media produced using generative AI, In-Between stages a conversation among humans and the building components of the pavilion. The Yew Tree next to the pavilion entrance, Wall Columns, Brick Terrace, and other elements engage in a wandering discussion around the structure’s past and future. Yew Tree relays the impact of the pavilion’s construction work on the birds of the Giardini; Pensilina (eave) waxes poetic; Brick Terrace inserts a critical conscience, reminding interlocutors of the Third Reich’s presence at the Biennale and Hans Haacke’s related Germania (1993).

The motivation behind this scenario, as explained by curator Jun Aoki’s wall text, is to trouble the division of subject and object. To disrupt the tendency to “perceive our environment as something to be manipulated,” the pavilion envisions working in the space between “extremes of control” and “helplessness,” human and non-human, nature and artifact. Through its whimsy and occasional tenderness, the script—primarily written by humans—offers memorable perspective-taking. The voices of the non-human linger, hinting at the power of fiction to shift our conception of the world. In the accompanying “Automated Dialogue,” produced by generative AI and sampled in the exhibition catalogue, the building components babble and repeat themselves; moments of meaning and insight feel scarce. The pavilion’s promise to help us imagine the agency of the nonhuman remains partly fulfilled—present in human-led storytelling, but not (yet) in the methodological experiment with AI.

Surveying these varied endeavors, why look within? One answer stems from the Giardini itself, a garden in which Federica Martini and Vittoria Martini locate the Biennale’s original sin.³ In contrast to the global, post-colonial ambitions of the contemporary Biennale, the Giardini campus remains structured according to the early twentieth-century world order in which it was formed. It is dominated by Europe and North America: of the 26 national pavilions, there is only one African nation, two from Asia, and three from South America. So too, does the Giardini reflect the fissures of current geopolitics: Carlo Scarpa’s Venezuelan Pavilion is shuttered, and the Russian Pavilion has been inactive since the start of the war in Ukraine. This year, the Israeli Pavilion announced itself through a sign rife with unintentional irony-in-translation: “the Israeli pavilion is closed due to conservative reinforcement work.”

Pavilions’ inquiries into their own spaces and histories, most directly pursued by Korea and Japan in this edition, reckon with the symbolic charge and nationalist dimensions of the Giardini inheritance. With the majority built between 1907 and 1960, most pavilions display neoclassical or high modern tendencies, embodying an architecture that is safe and consistent with projecting soft power during their respective era. Through their archaeological metaphors, casts of characters, and personification, the pavilions announce that—on top of a troubled world and a discipline redefining itself—they are part of a dysfunctional family system, and they’re trying to work through it. The life cycle of aging pavilions and climate woes in an imperiled city are also partly responsible for the inner turn. Both forces have contributed to the wave of renovations behind several of the exhibitions: a tree crushed the roof of the Finnish Pavilion during a 2011 storm and the Danish Pavilion’s floors have been perpetually flooded.

Many of this edition’s “self-interested” pavilions do engage with the pressing questions of the larger Biennale and architecture today, but their responses are often difficult to discern through a visit alone. The pavilions’ inquiries, speculations, and “proofs of concept” for experimental methods take considerable time and further research to understand. They reflect the Biennale’s evolution from a place to gather and exhibit architecture into something else, not quite named or even yet known, grounded in research and active projects. Navigating this new exhibition landscape and the sheer quantity of work on display is a perennial challenge; the Biennale brings museum fatigue to a new level. Despite the principles of relationship-building and site-specificity that abound, few Biennale participants acknowledge these conditions, (presumably short) visitor stay times, or the accessibility of content for varied audiences.

Countless commentators on the Biennale have asked when its antiquated institutional structures will ease or dissolve: can the event better support work across national “borders”? Might the art and architecture editions intertwine, as Léa-Catherine Szacka suggests, into “a more integrated series of experiments”?⁴ As participants of this edition interrogate the spaces in which they work, the institution with which they collaborate, and the role of architecture in the world, I add to these possibilities the hope that they may attend to the Biennale’s relationship with visitors. If “exhibition” remains in the Biennale’s title and affirmed as one of its core functions—in addition to symposium, workshop en-masse, school, and more—what role can we imagine for the public, on and off-site, in this collective endeavor?