The title of the 2025 Architecture Biennale is Intelligentgens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.
Carlo Ratti explains it like this:
«The titles of International Architecture Exhibitions are usually announced in both English and Italian. In 2025, the title will instead be condensed into a single word for both languages, invoking the common Latin origin: Intelligens. The modern “intelligence” derives from intelligens; however, this choice also indicates an expansion of meaning associations. Translated separately, the final syllable, “gens”, means “people”: from here emerges an imaginary alternative root, which suggests a more multiple and inclusive future of intelligence, which escapes the excessive limits of today’s focus on ‘AI»
«The 19th International Architecture Exhibition will be dedicated to the built environment and the numerous disciplines that give it shape. Architecture is at the center of them – states the Curator – but not alone: it is part of an extended team that must integrate art, engineering, biology, data science, social and political sciences, planetary sciences and other disciplines, connecting each of them to the materiality of urban space.
The built environment is among the major contributors to air emissions. In this sense, architecture can be blamed for much of the environmental degradation of our planet. Faced with the acceleration of the climate crisis, must we resign ourselves to this role, or are we still able to offer solutions that are substantial and non-cosmetic, effective and quick to implement?
The exhibition will try to chart new routes for the future, suggesting a range of solutions to the most pressing problems of the present. It will put together a collection of experimental design proposals, inspired by a definition of “intelligence” as the ability to adapt to the environment starting from a limited set of resources, knowledge or power.
Objects, buildings and urban plans will be arranged along the axis of multiple and widespread intelligence – natural, artificial, collective. Some ideas are destined to fail. But others will be able to show us promising paths.
The exhibition imagines architects as “mutagenic agents”, capable of triggering evolutionary processes and directing them in new directions. By learning from multiple scientific disciplines and advancing through trial and error, this exhibition aims to accelerate the transformation of the present, in search of better futures.”
