Beyond the Biennale

Officially, the Venice Architecture Biennale is made up of the International Architecture Exhibition, the National Participations, Special Projects, and Collateral Events. For 2025, we had already covered Carlo Ratti's Intelligens exhibition, a half dozen of the national pavilions, and one of the few Special Projects in the Biennale, among other things. Here we highlight four more events: two Collateral Events and two of the many other events in Venice hosted by institutions outside of La Biennale di Venezia.
 

Last year, when The Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain celebrated its 40th anniversary, the Parisian institution announced it would be moving from its historic Jean Nouvel-designed building on Boulevard Raspail into a Haussmannian building next to the Louvre. That move will be taking place later this year—the grand opening at 2 Place du Palais-Royal will be on October 25, to be precise—but in the meantime visitors to Venice can learn more about Nouvel's design of Fondation Cartier's future home in The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain by Jean Nouvel at Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore (May 9 – September 13, 2025). Although split into three rooms, the bulk and focus of the exhibition is in the first gallery, where angled walls, mirrored surfaces and projections, a large model, and numerous booklets with drawings and photographs reveal how an institution focused on contemporary art will occupy the lower floors of a large, 150-meter-long building from 1855.

In the opening of the exhibition at Fondazione Giorgio Cini on May 8, Jean Nouvel spoke about the key element of his design for the new Fondation Cartier: five movable platforms that can be adjusted to any height, intended to create a completely new environment to attract artists and foster their creativity. Nouvel's inspiration was Cedric Price's famous Fun Palace—that unbuilt project was also the inspiration for DS+R's The Shed, another piece of movable architecture—as well as Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers' unrealized proposal to incorporate moving floors in their design of the Pompidou. How moving levels will work inside a 170-year-old building is revealed in the exhibition in a large model that is pulled apart into two halves; visitors walk down the gap to virtually peer inside the building. In addition to grasping how some of the movable floors are sensibly located beneath the courtyards, the model also accentuates how people inside 2 Place du Palais-Royal will be able to see out and, per Nouvel's wishes, “be aware of their surroundings.”

Progress on the construction of Fondation Cartier's future home can be seen in this photograph, taken in March, showing one of the movable levels relative to the adjacent spaces:

Visitors lining up to see Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective. may notice something curious at Campo della Tana, directly across from the entrance to the Arsenale: bamboo poles poke ever so slightly above the front wall of number 2126, signaling that something of interest lies beyond. There, in the trapezoidal courtyard, sits an amphitheater fashioned from bamboo—a framework for events but also a reference to the scaffolding that has covered construction sites in Hong Kong for centuries but is now at risk of disappearing in favor of metal, per government dictates. The construction lining the edges of the small space foregrounds the idea that, in Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive (May 10 – November 23, 2025), curators Fai Au, Ying Zhou, and Sunnie S. Y. Lau find much to appreciate in things that are overlooked.

Stepping further inside, the majority of the exhibition consists of flat-file storage, but immeidately drawing attention is an egg-shaped object, designed by Lau, in which one or two visitors can literally step inside and virtually immerse themselves within Hong Kong's famous network of elevated walkways. Made in part through AI technology, the 360-degree, audio-visual experience is fun but also far removed from the traditional bamboo construction in the courtyard. Occupying the wide gulf in between these two realms is the archive: drawers with drawings and models documenting postwar buildings in Hong Kong that are “remarkable,” in the curators' words, but also “ordinary,” “overlooked,” and at risk of being demolished or dramatically altered. These include public housing and housing estates, but also the municipal services buildings that combine numerous public functions in large-scale structures; the curators appreciate the MSBs so much they call them “social condensers extraordinaire.” With dozens of flat files and dozens more drawers, there is plenty to look at and absorb in this Hong Kong Archive.

Just steps from Gallerie dell'Accademia sits Palazzo Contarini-Polignac and, on its ground floor, the Magazzino Gallery. For the duration of the Biennale, the gallery is hosting No Doubt About It: Projects from Armenia, China, Georgia, Germany, Latvia, and Poland (May 8 – November 23, 2025), curated by Vladimir Belogolovsky, the founder of Intercontinental Curatorial Project and a frequent contributor to the World-Architects Magazine. The six countries in the exhibition's subtitle are aligned with six architecture studios, each one presenting a single project: Ashot and Armine Snkhchyan of SNKH, from Yerevan, Armenia; Yingfan Zhang and Xiaojun Bu from Beijing's Atelier Alter Architects; Nikoloz Lekveishvili of TIMM Architecture, based in Tbilisi, Georgia; Sergei Tchoban from Germany's Tchoban Voss Architekten; Latvian architect Zaiga Gaile; and Robert Konieczny of KWK Promes in Katowice, Poland.

Architects who see the Biennale as heavy proselytizing over environmental and social issues will find a welcome relief in No Doubt About It's focus on ideas and creativity in a variety of architectural projects: three theaters, two museums, and a residential block. The projects are explained in the usual models, drawings, and photos or renderings (depending on the stage of the project), but also in video interviews that Belogolovsky conducted with each of the architects on Zoom; the last are mounted to studs on the back wall, alternating with some of the filmic posters designed by Peter Bankov for the exhibition. Standing out to this visitor among the half dozen projects were Zaiga Gaile's reimagining of the Richard Wagner Theatre in Riga, which is explained in a huge cutaway model, and Nikoloz Lekveishvili's project for Metra Hills in Tblisi, a residential development that is wrapped in a continuous balconies: a reinterpretation of the traditional “gossip balcony” in Georgia.

On the morning Friday, May 9, six foundations that give out architecture awards every one, two, or three years assembled a panel discussion at Ocean Space called “Beyond the Prize: How Architecture Awards Can Catalyse Meaningful Change.” The event included representatives from the Aga Khan, Ammodo, EUmies, Holcim Foundation, MCHAP, and OBEL awards, alongside architects who had won the awards and/or served as members of their juries: Anupama Kundoo, Rozana Montiel, Mohsen Mostafavi, Marina Tabassum, Kjetil Trædal Thorsen (Snøhetta), and Xu Tiantian. 

The two panels, with three awards organizers and three architects on each, were moderated by critic and curator James Taylor-Foster, who also asked questions of some of the more distinguished members of the packed audience in the ten-minute gap between the panels. These relatively spontaneous questions, like the event itself, took advantage of the great number of architects converging on Venice for the Biennale's vernissage—and offered some of the planned event's most intriguing ideas. For instance, one audience member urged the awards to maintain archives and make them accessible, even including the conversations between jurors—conversations that are often whittled down to just a few sentences in press releases announcing winners of awards.

While the literature proclaimed that the aim of “Beyond the Prize” was to “critically reflect on the evolving role of architectural recognition,” for the most part the participants spoke positively about the awards—about how they benefit society, culture, the profession, and so forth. The awards do this, in the words of their organizers, by recognizing architectural excellence, clearly, but also by being proactive rather than reactive to relevant social issues, being independent and transparent, and, where applicable, making sure the juries actually visit the projects under consideration, so the works themselves are understood and appreciated beyond photographs, drawings, and other documentation.

The architects on the panels spoke of the value of awards from a professional perspective, such as how awards draw attention to an architect and lead to work, how they can help in carving a career path, and how they spur clients to build better buildings. An additional benefit was expressed by architect Anna Heringer between the panels (below photo), when she explained that she uses the money garnered from prizes to pay for the buildings she designs in Bangladesh and other places where budgets are close to nonexistent. Although Heringer's case is extreme, it points to the need for the foundations and backers behind the awards to direct funds toward the architects producing high-quality and influential architecture, especially as public money is drying up. Even if architects don't put that money directly toward a commission, they can use it to set up a studio in a new location, for instance, or focus their efforts on projects that are important socially but not financially lucrative. Recognition is important, in other words, but so is the money awards offer.