Utopia Déjà Vu — Notes from the 2025 Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale opens not with an anticipatory flourish, but with a palpable shock. The entrance to the Arsenale is claimed by the installation Terms and Conditions, which greets you immediately: air-conditioning units suspended overhead, inverting the invisible machinery of comfort and channeling waste heat into the very space it is meant to cool. What is usually hidden becomes oppressively present. The installation is both poetic and accusatory, a spatial allegory for thermal inequality and deferred responsibility. It establishes a tone of urgency and unease, setting the bar high for what follows, and, in its dystopian clarity, subtly contradicts the exhibition’s broader posture of techno-utopianism, a posture encapsulated by Intelligens, curator Carlo Ratti’s overarching theme for this year’s Biennale.

Walking into the Arsenale beyond that first encounter, I felt an immediate sense of compression, not only in the architecture of the long brick halls, but in the density of the exhibitions themselves. Each room was filled with work, often without the space or pause needed to appreciate a project fully. Pieces that might have invited slow looking and reflection instead screamed for attention, their crowding flattening the impact of individual voices. A little less could have been much more.

The curatorial emphasis on technology was equally inescapable: screens, sensors, AI-generated environments, everywhere the hum of the “future” as imagined decades past. I don’t object to technology as a subject; architecture has always been in dialogue with the tools of its time. But much of what I saw in Venice this year had the familiar scent of prototypes promising to “change the world,” yet untethered from the messy realities where architecture is actually made. Decades of such promises have not altered the fact that most of the world still builds with brick, concrete, or wood – if it builds at all. The distance between these visions and the conditions that govern architecture’s reality was left untouched, as if the actual terms and conditions had been quietly set aside, leaving only a kind of utopian déjà vu.

This disconnect fed into a broader question: for an architecture Biennale, how much architecture was really on display? I can appreciate a talking robot as much as the next person, but some installations felt more suited to a speculative technology fair than a forum for architectural thought. At times, the definition of architecture seemed to stretch until it lost its shape, spilling outward into adjacent disciplines without the anchor of a built or spatial proposition.

The Giardini offered a slightly different atmosphere. National pavilions, with their more focused curatorial autonomy, had more room to breathe. Belgium, for instance, continued its tradition of conceptual clarity and precision in Building Biospheres, an exhibition conceived by Bas Smets and Stefano Mancuso that transformed the pavilion into a self-regulating microclimate. Subtropical trees, sensors, and AI systems worked in concert to cool the air and regulate humidity. It stood out not because it chased novelty for novelty’s sake, but because it demonstrated how plants could sustain comfortable indoor environments, reducing the need for artificial systems. Other “usual suspects” maintained their high standards, reinforcing the sense
that certain countries have quietly mastered the art of the Biennale pavilion. For newer or less consistently strong participants, it might be worth studying what makes these presentations work, not to imitate, but to learn how to balance ambition with legibility.

Leaving Venice, I carried mixed feelings. The Biennale remains one of the few places where architecture can present itself to the world on its own terms. Yet this year, the discourse seemed to circle around the same visions of technological salvation I have been hearing for as long as I can recall. If I have to see one more Mars project, I might just volunteer for the launch - not out of enthusiasm, but sheer exhaustion. And yet, amid that vast archive of promise, it was the rare moments of quiet when a single project stood apart, speaking only to itself and to whoever cared to listen, that remained with me.