| Hello and welcome to Bloomberg’s weekly design digest. Sign up to keep up: Subscribe to get the Design Edition newsletter every Sunday. With Kriston Capps away this week, we’re bringing you a guest essay from MIT scholar Carlo Ratti, who is curator of the 2025 Venice Biennale. Every two years, the architecture world descends on Venice. Some call it the Olympics of architecture. Others, the Oscars. In Italy, it has been compared to Sanremo, the theatrical pop festival. In all cases, the Venice Biennale has long been a mirror of the profession: reflecting its dreams, anxieties, and, increasingly, its contradictions. This year, we tried a different format: Could a biennale shift from being a mirror to a tool? Could it become not a polished celebration of current architecture, but a place where we confront the urgency of adaptation to a planet in flux? When Venice launched its Biennale in 1895, it was a platform to showcase the best of what was already known; think World’s Fair meets professional guild. But that model has aged. Today, when Instagram can stream a building launch before the concrete sets, the old idea of biennales feels redundant. This has been clear for a while, and several curators have confronted the issues in recent years: We need a space for generating new knowledge, not just displaying existing ones. As curator of this year's edition, I proposed the theme of adaptation by leveraging different forms of intelligence: natural, artificial, collective. Across California, severe droughts have become the norm. In Bangladesh, neighborhoods face rising tides. Some Australian towns live a near-permanent fire season. Now, even the market agrees: an uninsurable future is already here. It is no longer enough to “mitigate” climate change, i.e. reducing emissions: we must focus on adaptation. Architecture must reorient itself in this direction not as resignation, but as an act of creative resistance. Ahead of the Biennale, more than 400 architects, scientists, policymakers, and cultural leaders - including Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, climate scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky - signed a manifesto. Its message is simple: adaptation must become the central project of architectural practice: “The igloos of the Inuit, the wind towers of Iran, the canal systems of Mesopotamia, the ancient artificial lakes of Sri Lanka — these are all examples of adaptation. We’ve long drawn on local materials, forms, and knowledge to adapt. Today’s challenge is to do the same — only faster, and at a scale never before attempted. Mitigation slows the crisis; adaptation ensures we can withstand it. Both are essential, and neither can wait.” Architecture, the manifesto insists, must work in equal partnership with science, public policy and civil society to reimagine our built environment in light of planetary transformation.  The unEarthed/Second Nature/ PolliNATION installation reimagines architecture as a collaborative habitat between humans and pollinators. Photographer: Simone Padovani/Getty Images Europe This year’s Biennale aims to translate that manifesto into a Lab. It involves architects, engineers, climate scientists, philosophers, chefs, coders, even farmers — all operating in a kind of intellectual fermentation. It aims to be a Petri dish for new forms of collaboration. Adaptation requires all hands – and all minds – on deck, dissolving professional echo chambers. That’s also why this year’s Biennale relied on an open call, not curated invitation lists. From Nobel laureates to local wood carvers, every voice came in through the same door. This opened up a second, quieter change: authorship. Despite its inherently collaborative nature, architecture still clings to the myth of Prometheus. Biennales love to celebrate “visionaries,” even as they showcase interdisciplinary work. We proposed a different model, inspired by academic research: co-authorship. All are credited as equals, with a description of their contribution. If adaptation is collective by necessity, then its authorship must be collective by design. This year’s Biennale didn’t stay inside the traditional sites of the Arsenale and Giardini. With the Central Pavilion closed for renovation, we embedded installations across Venice - in courtyards, gardens, waterfronts. These were working prototypes interacting with the city's real-world conditions: flooding, depopulation, over-tourism. Since Ruskin wrote about Venice’s "stones" in 1851, intellectuals have descended on Venice to save it. Perhaps it's time to flip that script. What if Venice – the most precarious city in the face of global threats, from climate to mass tourism – became the lab? A city not to be rescued, but to help rescue others. The planet has changed, and institutions must change too, especially those devoted to the built environment. A biennale can become a tool for exploration, for collaboration, for reckoning. This doesn’t mean giving up on spectacle or beauty. But it does mean rethinking what we celebrate. |
