Venice Architecture Biennale

La Biennale di Venezia's International Architecture Exhibition — the architecture sibling of the art Biennale, founded 1980 under Paolo Portoghesi with the legendary Strada Novissima, programmed biennially across the Giardini and the Arsenale, and the principal continuing platform for architectural discourse on the international stage.

Established1980 — 202519 editions
The Arsenale di Venezia — principal venue of the Venice Architecture Biennale's main exhibition since 1980.
Above The Corderie dell'Arsenale, Venice — the former Venetian rope-factory at which Paolo Portoghesi staged the inaugural International Architecture Exhibition in 1980, and which remains the principal indoor venue of every Venice Architecture Biennale alongside the Giardini.

The Lead Essay The 19th Edition

Ratti's Intelligens

The 19th International Architecture Exhibition, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., curated by the Italian architect-engineer Carlo Ratti, ran from 10 May to 23 November 2025 — the largest Venice Architecture Biennale in the institution's history.

By the Biennale Editorial Team

The Venice Architecture Biennale — formally the International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, in Italian the Mostra Internazionale di Architettura or Biennale Architettura — is the institutional sibling of the Venice art Biennale and the principal continuing platform for architectural discourse on the international stage. It was founded in 1980 under the presidency of Giuseppe Galasso, who appointed the Italian architect, historian and theorist Paolo Portoghesi (1931–2023) as the architecture department's first director. Its inaugural edition, The Presence of the Past, opened at the Corderie dell'Arsenale on 27 July 1980. That first edition's defining feature — the Strada Novissima, a hypothetical postmodern street of twenty stage-set façades commissioned from twenty architects including Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Arata Isozaki, Robert Venturi, Ricardo Bofill and Christian de Portzamparc — has since been treated as the founding institutional moment of architectural postmodernism. The exhibition subsequently toured to Paris and San Francisco, effectively exporting the postmodern argument from Venice to the international architectural discourse.

It is important to mark, at the outset, what the Architecture Biennale is not: it is not the architecture component of the Art Biennale, and it is not the descendant of the architectural sections that had appeared inside the Art Biennale since 1968 (when architectural projects were first formally included in the art exhibition's programme). It is, instead, a separately constituted exhibition with its own director, its own catalogue, its own cycle of national participations, and — since the early 2000s — its own alternating biennial slot that runs in odd-numbered years while the art exhibition runs in even. The architectural pre-history at La Biennale runs through Carlo Ripa di Meana's 1975 initiative A proposito del Mulino Stucky, curated by Vittorio Gregotti — an exhibition focused on the future of the disused Stucky flour-mill on the Giudecca that is now read as the institutional dry-run for the standalone architecture department five years later.

Ratti's Intelligens — climate, AI and the displacement of the architect-author

The 19th edition, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., was curated by Carlo Ratti — Italian architect, engineer and Director of the MIT Senseable City Lab — and ran from 10 May to 23 November 2025 (with a pre-opening on 8 and 9 May). The exhibition featured 758 invited architects across 303 projects, alongside 66 national participations and 11 collateral events, making it the largest Architecture Biennale in the institution's history. It closed on 23 November 2025 with 298,000 paying visitors — a five-per-cent increase over the 2023 edition — plus 17,584 pre-opening visitors, an average of roughly 1,530 visitors per day across the six-month run.

Ratti's curatorial argument — that "to face a burning world, architecture must harness all the intelligence around us" — explicitly displaced the figure of the architect-as-sole-author with what he framed as an inclusive authorship model drawn from scientific research, gathering architects and engineers alongside mathematicians, climate scientists, philosophers, artists, chefs, coders, writers, woodcarvers, farmers and fashion designers. The exhibition's working programme centred on climate adaptation and the entanglement of natural, artificial and collective forms of intelligence — the three sub-titles of the exhibition's three-part argument. The Corderie's principal sequence opened, characteristically, with an extended treatment of heat as an architectural question and worked through bio-materials, computational design, and the so-called "GENS" public programme — a series of 111 workshops and 9 conferences held at a dedicated Speakers' Corner at the Corderie across the run of the show.

Two special projects framed the 2025 exhibition outside the Corderie's principal sequence. The Pavilion of Applied Arts at the Arsenale's Sale d'Armi, mounted in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, presented On Storage — a project on the architectural problem of the global warehouse and the hidden infrastructural geography of the goods-supply chain. At Forte Marghera, on the Venetian mainland, the British architect-designer Nigel Coates and collaborators (Michael Kevern, Guan Lee, John Maybury, Jan Bunge) installed Margherissima, an exhibition at the former Austrian powder magazine that read the post-industrial mainland edge of Venice as a working site for the architectural imagination. A further special-project commission, the floating climate-research platform AquaPraça, was anchored at the Arsenale through the exhibition's run and subsequently relocated to Belém, Brazil for inauguration at the UN's COP30 climate summit in November 2025 — a direct programmatic link between the Biennale's curatorial argument and the international climate-policy calendar.

The 2025 edition introduced four national participations for the first time in the institution's history: the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Sultanate of Oman, Qatar, and the Republic of Togo. The 66 national participations were distributed across 26 of the historic pavilions at the Giardini, 25 spaces at the Arsenale (including the Italian Pavilion at the Tese delle Vergini), and 15 venues around the historic city — a geographic spread of national-pavilion presence that has continued to expand as states without permanent Giardini pavilions take temporary venues across Venice's churches, palazzi and former convents. Late in the run, Ratti also introduced two AI digital companions developed by exhibition participants — Spatial Intelligens by the Berlin studio sub (Niklas Bildstein Zaar) and In Other Words by VOLUME — extending the exhibition's argument about machine intelligence into the visitor's own navigation of the show.

Critical reception read the 2025 edition along the lines its curator had set: as a working-laboratory exhibition at unprecedented scale, more explicitly research-orientated than spectacular, and more programmatically continuous with the climate-policy register than with the architectural authorship register the institution has long defaulted to. The architectural press registered the absence of marquee-architect monographic presentations — Ratti's curatorial method consistently subordinated the named-architect commission to the multi-author research collective — as both the edition's institutional argument and its principal point of critical pressure.

Lokko's Laboratory of the Future — the institution after 2023

The 18th edition, The Laboratory of the Future, opened on 20 May 2023 and ran to 26 November 2023 under the curatorship of the Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic and novelist Lesley Lokko — the first Black African curator of the architecture exhibition, and the third woman after Kazuyo Sejima (2010) and Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara (2018). The Central Pavilion at the Giardini was given over to Lokko's lead group of sixteen practices, and the exhibition's eighty-nine participants were drawn more than half from Africa or the African Diaspora — the first time in the Architecture Biennale's history that Africa stood as the curatorial centre of gravity rather than as a category among others.

Lokko's curatorial argument framed architecture as a practice continuous with decolonisation and decarbonisation, treated as paired rather than alternate questions. The Central Pavilion's "Force Majeure" room presented sixteen Africa-and-Diaspora practices working at the scale of mid-career architecture; the Corderie's lead sequence ("Dangerous Liaisons") gathered younger and more experimental practitioners; a "Guests from the Future" section turned the institutional camera onto the next generation. The Golden Lion for Best National Participation went to the Brazil Pavilion, Terra (Earth) — curated by Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares — for a project explicitly working at the indigenous-architecture and reparative-history register. Special Mentions went to the Pavilions of Bahrain (Sweating Assets, on cooling) and Britain (Dancing Before the Moon, on diasporic ritual and space).

The 2023 edition drew 285,000 paying visitors over six months — at the time the institution's largest architecture edition, since exceeded by Ratti's 2025. Lokko was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture in 2024 — the architectural profession's principal lifetime award, conferred personally by King Charles III — in significant part for the Venice exhibition's restructuring of the centre of the architectural conversation. Read against the institution's record, the 2023 edition is the one that most clearly established the post-2018 cycle's argument: that the Architecture Biennale's curatorial register is no longer the universalist-modern-Western register on which the institution had run for its first three decades.

Architect-curators and critic-curators across the post-2014 cycle

One way to read the institutional record across the post-2014 editions is along the cleavage between architect-curators and critic-curators. The architect-curator — Koolhaas (2014), Aravena (2016), Farrell and McNamara (2018), Sarkis (2021), Ratti (2025) — comes to the role from working practice and curates from the working architect's interior view of the discipline. The critic-curator — Sudjic (2002), Forster (2004), Burdett (2006), Betsky (2008), and Lokko (2023) coming from architectural education and the academic-novelist register — curates from the exterior view of the discipline's relation to its social-political moment. The Biennale's institutional record across forty-five years suggests both registers have been productive in roughly equal measure, but at different scales: the architect-curators have tended to programme the largest exhibitions (Koolhaas's fourteen-month 2014; Ratti's 758-architect 2025) while the critic-curators have tended to set the institution's social-political agenda (Burdett's 2006 Cities, Architecture and Society, with its focus on urbanisation; Lokko's 2023, with its decolonisation argument).

The architecture sibling of the art Biennale

The Architecture Biennale's institutional history runs through six and a half decades of post-war architectural debate. After Portoghesi's 1980 founding it operated intermittently through the 1980s and 1990s — at the inconsistent cadence of an institutional experiment — before settling, in the early 2000s, into the regular biennial rhythm it now observes. The art and architecture Biennali alternate years: from 2000 to 2018 the Architecture Biennale ran in even-numbered years (the Art Biennale in odd), but the 2020 architecture edition was postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic to 2021, since when the architecture exhibition has run in odd-numbered years and the Art Biennale in even. The institutional weight has been consistently high: directors of the architecture exhibition have included Hans Hollein (1996), Massimiliano Fuksas (2000), Deyan Sudjic (2002), Kurt Forster (2004), Richard Burdett (2006), Aaron Betsky (2008), Kazuyo Sejima (2010 — the first woman in the role), David Chipperfield (2012), Rem Koolhaas (2014), Alejandro Aravena (2016), Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara (2018), Hashim Sarkis (2021), Lesley Lokko (2023), and Carlo Ratti (2025).

The post-2018 cycle has been the institution's most curatorially consequential in some decades. Farrell and McNamara's 2018 Freespace (16th edition, 26 May – 25 November 2018) reframed architecture as a generosity of public space; Sarkis's 2021 How will we live together? (17th, 22 May – 21 November 2021, postponed from 2020 by the pandemic) gathered 112 participants from 46 countries around the social-cohesion question; Lokko's 2023 The Laboratory of the Future (18th, 20 May – 26 November 2023) centred Africa and the diaspora and engaged the themes of decolonisation and decarbonisation with eighty-nine participants. Ratti's Intelligens extends those threads into a curatorial register the architectural press has read as the institution's most explicitly climate-positioned to date. The institutional sequence continues: in November 2025 La Biennale announced that the 20th edition, scheduled for 8 May to 21 November 2027, will be curated by the Chinese Pritzker laureates Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu (Amateur Architecture Studio, Hangzhou, founded 1997) — a return to the architect-curator register, and the first time a curatorial pair drawn entirely from East Asia has been appointed to the role.

The national-pavilion architecture commission as institutional form

One of the institution's most architecturally specific features — and one with limited equivalent in the art Biennale's institutional history — is the use of the national pavilion as a working architectural commission rather than as a venue for an architect's monographic exhibition. Each national pavilion at the Giardini is itself an architectural object, and a non-trivial number of the Giardini pavilions were either designed or significantly remodelled by major figures in the modern architectural canon: Carlo Scarpa (Venezuela, 1954; the Sculpture Garden of the Central Pavilion, 1952; the Book Pavilion, 1950); Gerrit Rietveld (the Netherlands, 1954); Bruno Giacometti (Switzerland, 1952); Alvar Aalto (Finland's Nordic-Finnish pavilion of 1956); Sverre Fehn (the Nordic Pavilion for Norway-Sweden-Finland, 1962 — Fehn's first commission of international note, won by competition); James Stirling (the Book Pavilion's 1991 rebuild as the Electa Bookshop). For the architecture department's editions, the national pavilions are repurposed every two years by curators commissioned by the participating countries' arts councils or culture ministries; the resulting national-pavilion sequence at the Architecture Biennale is the only continuing international forum at which national architectural cultures put their working position into dialogue at the same site, on a two-year cycle, against a common curatorial brief.

Across the post-2014 cycle, the national-pavilion commissions have generated a remarkable density of architectural argument. The 2014 edition's Absorbing Modernity 1914–2014, in which Koolhaas asked each country to read one hundred years of modernity through its own architectural history, produced a sequence that has subsequently been read as the most ambitious comparative-modernity exhibition in the discipline's institutional record. The 2018 British Pavilion (Island, by Caruso St John with Marcus Taylor) emptied the pavilion of exhibits and installed a scaffold roof-deck above — a commentary on Brexit's island metaphor that became one of the most photographed pavilions of the post-Freespace cycle. The 2023 Brazil Pavilion's Golden Lion turned the international architectural conversation toward indigenous architecture and reparative urbanism in a way that no subsequent national-pavilion edition has had occasion to set aside.

The Triennale di Milano and the institutional ecology of Italian architecture exhibitions

The Architecture Biennale's institutional context inside Italy has been shaped, since the late 1950s, by a continuing institutional triangle with the Triennale di Milano (founded 1923; from 1933 hosted at the Palazzo dell'Arte in Milan's Sempione park, designed by Giovanni Muzio) and the architectural sections of the post-war Italian magazine and academic culture (Domus, Casabella, the IUAV in Venice, the Politecnico di Milano). The Triennale is the older institution and the one with the longer record in design and applied-arts exhibitions; the Architecture Biennale is the newer institution and the one with the international-architecture-discourse mandate. The cross-traffic between the two has been continuous — Vittorio Gregotti directed both institutions at different points; the Triennale's recurring Triennale di Milano exhibitions (resumed in 2016 after a long interruption) operate at the slower three-year cadence the Venice exhibition does not — but the two institutions occupy distinct roles in the Italian architectural-cultural infrastructure, with Venice as the international-discourse venue and Milan as the design-and-applied-arts venue.

Critical Perspective The architecture sibling of La Biennale

The Architecture Biennale — where architecture argues with its own moment

From Portoghesi's postmodernism (1980) through Koolhaas's Fundamentals (2014) to Ratti's climate-positioned Intelligens (2025), the Architecture Biennale has been the principal institutional site at which architecture rehearses its relationship to the contemporary social-political moment.

By the Biennale Editorial Team

The architecture exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia operates at a register the international architecture press has continued to engage as the most consequential exhibition format in the discipline. The reason is structural. Architecture is a long-cycle institutional practice: a building takes five to fifteen years from commission to opening, and the architect's working timeline of substantive output across a career spans three to four decades. The Architecture Biennale's two-year cadence (since the early 2000s) is, against that long cycle, an unusually quick-fire institutional venue at which the discipline's current arguments are continually rehearsed at international scale.

What the Biennale's curatorial record reads as, across forty-five years of editions, is the institutional history of architectural argument made explicit. Portoghesi's 1980 The Presence of the Past staged architectural postmodernism — its Strada Novissima of twenty postmodern façades has been treated as the founding moment of postmodernism as institutional category. Koolhaas's 2014 Fundamentals, a fourteen-month rather than six-month edition that included the parallel national-pavilion exhibition Absorbing Modernity 1914–2014, structured the architecture exhibition around the elemental — the door, the window, the floor, the corridor — as a critical reading of architecture's relationship to one hundred years of modernity. Farrell and McNamara's 2018 Freespace recentred the social register; Sarkis's 2021 How will we live together? took social cohesion under pandemic conditions as the curatorial question; Lokko's 2023 The Laboratory of the Future centred Africa and the diaspora; Ratti's 2025 Intelligens programmed architecture as climate-adaptation discipline at the largest scale in the institution's history.

The continuing institutional argument — the one that distinguishes the Architecture Biennale from the art Biennale's longer institutional inheritance — is that architecture is a working discipline whose continuing institutional pressure to engage the contemporary moment is more explicit than the contemporary art field's. The Art Biennale carries 130 years of institutional history that has, in significant measure, made the international art conversation. The Architecture Biennale, at forty-five years, has not made the international architecture conversation in the same way; rather, it has been the venue at which the conversation rehearses its working arguments at sustained institutional weight, every two years, at scale.

The 19th edition under Ratti — 758 invited architects, 303 projects, 66 national participations, 11 collateral events, 298,000 paying visitors over six months, the institution's largest exhibition to date — is the institutional record's most explicit climate-positioned reading. What the next decade of architecture programming will continue to address is the relationship between the discipline's continuing institutional commitment to large-scale exhibition and the increasingly urgent climate-adaptation, decolonisation and post-fossil-fuel arguments that the contemporary moment continues to set. The institutional record so far suggests the architecture exhibition will continue to operate at the editorial register Ratti's edition has worked at.

Architectural discourse, or architectural spectacle?

The continuing critical pressure on the Architecture Biennale — pressed in earnest by the architectural press from at least the 2008 Aaron Betsky edition (Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, criticised as a turn from buildings to atmospheres) forward — is the question of whether the Biennale's institutional format is actually doing architectural discourse, or whether it has slipped into the international biennial-art-and-design circuit's prevailing register of spectacle. The argument cuts two ways. On one reading the Biennale's two-year cycle, its scale, its national-pavilion format and its concentration in the Giardini and Arsenale together constitute the discipline's only continuing international forum at which working architectural argument is rehearsed at sustained institutional weight. On the other reading the exhibition format is structurally a misfit for architecture's working medium — buildings, sites, cities — and what the Biennale necessarily produces is the model, the drawing, the photograph and the installation, which is to say not architecture at all but architectural representation. The institutional pressure to programme each edition against the contemporary social-political moment further skews the exhibition toward agenda-led participation, in which national pavilions become national declarations rather than working-architectural propositions.

The 2025 Ratti edition has been read both ways. Its argument for "inclusive authorship" and its multi-disciplinary participant list (758 architects, plus scientists, philosophers, chefs, coders, farmers, woodcarvers, fashion designers) was read by sympathetic critics as the necessary methodological adjustment for an architecture that no longer reads its own commissions as solo-authored objects; it was read by sceptical critics as the dispersal of architectural authorship into a research-laboratory format in which the discipline's working contribution is no longer separately legible. The 2023 Lokko edition — eighty-nine participants, the Africa-and-Diaspora centre of gravity, the Brazil Pavilion's Golden Lion for indigenous-architecture argument — was read on the sympathetic side as the institution's most important curatorial restructuring in decades; on the sceptical side as the substitution of social-political programming for working-architectural content. Both readings are continuing institutional positions in the architectural press, and neither has been resolved.

What the Biennale's institutional record does establish — across forty-five years, nineteen editions, the founding 1980 Strada Novissima through the 2025 Intelligens — is that the architectural conversation has, in fact, continually rehearsed at Venice. Whether that conversation is the discipline's most consequential register, or merely its most visible one, is a question the next decade of editions will continue to test. The 2027 edition under Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu — the first East-Asian architect-curatorial pair appointed to the role, working from an architectural practice whose institutional reputation is precisely for the slow, site-grounded, regionally-specific building that the international biennial circuit's argumentative format does not easily accommodate — is the next test the institution has set for itself.

The Institutional Spine

Defining moments

Five episodes from forty-five years of La Biennale's architecture exhibition.

19801st edition

Portoghesi's Presence of the Past

The inaugural International Architecture Exhibition opened at the Corderie dell'Arsenale on 27 July 1980 and ran to 20 October 1980 under curator Paolo Portoghesi. Titled The Presence of the Past, the edition was organised around the Strada Novissima — a hypothetical postmodern street of twenty roughly-three-storey façades commissioned from twenty architects (including Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Arata Isozaki, Robert Venturi, Ricardo Bofill, Christian de Portzamparc, Léon Krier, Franco Purini, Hans Hollein and Allan Greenberg), each with gallery spaces behind staged with the architect's drawings and models. The Corderie's tense and narrow rope-factory volume, run in parallel with one wall as the street's "façade-side" and the other as exhibition rooms behind, made the institutional argument legible at first sight. The exhibition subsequently travelled to Paris (Chaillot) and San Francisco (Fort Mason) and has been treated as the founding moment of architectural postmodernism — the moment at which the Modern Movement's ban on quotation, ornament and historical reference was formally rescinded by an institutional exhibition at international scale.

Sources: La Biennale di Venezia; Domus archive; The Presence of the Past catalogue, 1980

201414th edition

Koolhaas's Fundamentals

The 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, Fundamentals, opened on 7 June 2014 and ran through 23 November 2014 under curator Rem Koolhaas. The edition was extended from the standard six-month exhibition to fourteen months of preparation and ran with three concurrent components — the central exhibition Elements of Architecture at the Central Pavilion, decomposing the building into floor, wall, ceiling, roof, door, window, façade, balcony, corridor, fireplace, toilet, stair, escalator, elevator and ramp; the parallel national-pavilion exhibition Absorbing Modernity 1914–2014, in which every participating nation produced its own reading of one hundred years of architectural modernity; and the Monditalia exhibition in the Arsenale, examining Italy as a national-architectural condition. Koolhaas's curatorial argument was that the Biennale should be about architecture rather than about architects — a structural reframing that has continued to inform the institution's subsequent curatorial registers.

Sources: La Biennale di Venezia; Fundamentals catalogue, 2014; Rem Koolhaas / OMA

201816th edition

Farrell and McNamara's Freespace

The 16th Venice Architecture Biennale opened on 26 May 2018 and ran to 25 November 2018, curated by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects — the first all-female curatorial team for the architecture exhibition. Titled Freespace, the edition framed architecture as a generosity of public space and a desire for exchange, inviting national pavilions and individual participants to bring to Venice their working definition of "freespace." The exhibition was widely read as a recentring of the institution's social register.

Sources: La Biennale di Venezia; Freespace catalogue, 2018

202318th edition

Lokko's Laboratory of the Future

The 18th Venice Architecture Biennale opened on 20 May 2023 and ran to 26 November 2023 under the curatorship of the Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic and novelist Lesley Lokko — the first Black African curator of the exhibition, the third woman after Kazuyo Sejima (2010) and Farrell and McNamara (2018). Titled The Laboratory of the Future, the edition centred Africa and the African diaspora for the first time in the institution's history, with the Central Pavilion presenting sixteen practices and a total of eighty-nine participants, more than half from Africa or the African Diaspora, engaging the themes of decolonisation and decarbonisation. The Golden Lion for Best National Participation went to Brazil's Terra (Earth), curated by Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares; Special Mentions went to the Pavilions of Bahrain and Britain. Lokko was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture in 2024 — the architectural profession's principal lifetime award — substantially on the strength of the Venice exhibition. The edition drew 285,000 paying visitors over six months.

Sources: La Biennale di Venezia; The Laboratory of the Future catalogue, 2023; RIBA, Royal Gold Medal 2024 citation

202519th edition

Ratti's Intelligens

The 19th Venice Architecture Biennale opened on 10 May 2025 (pre-opening 8–9 May) and ran to 23 November 2025 under curator Carlo Ratti, the Italian architect-engineer who directs the MIT Senseable City Lab and is a founding partner of CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati. Titled Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., the edition featured 758 invited architects working across 303 projects, 66 national participations (with four debutant countries — Azerbaijan, Oman, Qatar and Togo) and 11 collateral events — the largest Architecture Biennale in the institution's history. The exhibition closed on 23 November 2025 with 298,000 paying visitors (+5% on 2023), plus 17,584 at pre-opening. Ratti's argument for an "inclusive authorship" model gathered architects alongside scientists, philosophers, chefs, coders, farmers and fashion designers, organised around climate adaptation and the entanglement of natural, artificial and collective intelligences. Two special projects — the V&A-collaboration On Storage at the Sale d'Armi and Nigel Coates's Margherissima at Forte Marghera — extended the curatorial argument beyond the Corderie's principal sequence; the floating climate-research platform AquaPraça at the Arsenale was relocated to Belém, Brazil for COP30 in November 2025.

Sources: La Biennale di Venezia; La Biennale, "Biennale Architettura 2025 in figures", 23 November 2025; ArchDaily interview with Carlo Ratti, May 2025

People in the Biennial

The figures behind the Architecture Biennale

Curator · 19th edition (2025)

Carlo Ratti

Italian architect, engineer, inventor and author (b. 1971, Turin). Graduated from Politecnico di Torino and the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris; MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge. Professor of the Practice at MIT, where he directs the Senseable City Lab. Founding partner of CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, with offices in Turin, New York and London. Named among the "50 most influential designers in America" by Fast Company. Curator of the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., 2025.

Source: Wikipedia; MIT Senseable City Lab

Curator · 18th edition (2023)

Lesley Lokko

Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic, educator and novelist. Founder of the African Futures Institute in Accra. Curator of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, The Laboratory of the Future, 2023 — the first Black African curator of the architecture exhibition. Recipient of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture 2024.

Source: La Biennale di Venezia

Curator · 17th edition (2021)

Hashim Sarkis

Lebanese architect and academic. Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Curator of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, How will we live together?, 22 May – 21 November 2021 (postponed from 2020 by the pandemic). The 17th gathered 112 participants from 46 countries around five scales of human cohabitation.

Source: La Biennale di Venezia

Curators · 16th edition (2018)

Yvonne Farrell & Shelley McNamara

Irish architects, co-founders of Grafton Architects (Dublin). Joint curators of the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, Freespace, 26 May – 25 November 2018 — the first all-female curatorial team for the architecture exhibition. Recipients of the 2020 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Source: La Biennale di Venezia

Founding curator · 1st edition (1980)

Paolo Portoghesi

Italian architect, theorist, historian and professor of architecture at the Sapienza University of Rome (1931–2023). One of the foremost proponents of architectural postmodernism. Curator of the 1st Venice Architecture Biennale, The Presence of the Past, 1980 — and architect of the Strada Novissima. Co-founded an architectural practice in Rome with Vittorio Gigliotti in 1964 and designed the Mosque of Rome (1984–95) and the Church of the Holy Family in Salerno (1968–74). Died on 30 May 2023 at his home in Calcata, north of Rome, aged 92.

Source: Wikipedia; Architectural Record, 2023 obituary

Curator · 14th edition (2014)

Rem Koolhaas

Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at Harvard's Graduate School of Design (b. 1944, Rotterdam). Founder of OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture, 1975) and AMO. Recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize (2000), the RIBA Royal Gold Medal (2004) and the Praemium Imperiale (2003). Curator of the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, Fundamentals, 2014 — the edition extended from six to fourteen months that decomposed architecture into its elements and gathered every national pavilion's reading of one hundred years of modernity.

Source: Wikipedia; OMA

Curators · 20th edition (2027, announced)

Wang Shu & Lu Wenyu

Chinese architects and educators, co-founders of Amateur Architecture Studio (Hangzhou, 1997). Wang Shu (b. 1963) received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2012 — the first laureate from mainland China — for a body of work centred on site-grounded, regionally-specific construction with recycled materials, particularly the Ningbo History Museum (2008) and the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou (2007). Appointed in November 2025 as joint curators of the 20th Venice Architecture Biennale (8 May – 21 November 2027) — the first East-Asian curatorial pair to direct the architecture exhibition.

Source: La Biennale di Venezia, 26 November 2025; Pritzker Prize 2012 citation

National Pavilions The Giardini as architectural object

The Giardini pavilions — an architecture exhibition in itself

The thirty national pavilions at the Giardini della Biennale are themselves a collection of modern-architectural commissions — and the Architecture Biennale's national-participation cycle reads them every two years as both venues and exhibits.

By the Biennale Editorial Team

The Giardini's national pavilions were built between 1907 (Belgium, the oldest) and 1995 (the Republic of Korea), with a further pavilion — the Australian Pavilion designed by Denton Corker Marshall — completed in 2015 as a replacement for Philip Cox's 1988 building. Together they constitute one of the most concentrated collections of twentieth-century architectural commissions in Europe, distributed across roughly nine hectares of public garden at the eastern end of the Castello sestiere. Carlo Scarpa is the pavilions' most consistently-cited modern author: he designed the Venezuela Pavilion (1954, the only Latin-American pavilion in the Giardini), the Sculpture Garden of the Central Pavilion (1952), and the small Book Pavilion (1950, since replaced by the 1991 Electa Bookshop on the same site by James Stirling and Michael Wilford). Gerrit Rietveld designed the Dutch Pavilion (1954); Bruno Giacometti the Swiss Pavilion (1952); Alvar Aalto the Finnish-Nordic Pavilion (1956, since reassigned principally to Finland). Sverre Fehn won the 1958 competition for the Nordic Pavilion that opened in 1962 — the building widely treated as Fehn's first international commission and a landmark of post-war Nordic modernism for its concrete-grid roof admitting indirect light.

The architecture exhibition's national-participation cycle reads these pavilions every two years as both venues and architectural exhibits in their own right. For the 2014 Koolhaas edition's Absorbing Modernity 1914–2014, every participating country was asked to read one hundred years of architectural modernity through its own national architectural history; the resulting sequence of sixty-plus national reports remains the most comprehensive comparative-modernity exhibition in the discipline's institutional record. For the 2018 Farrell-and-McNamara Freespace, the British Pavilion (Caruso St John with the artist Marcus Taylor) emptied the building of exhibits and installed a scaffold viewing-deck above its roof — a commentary on Brexit's island metaphor that became one of the most photographed pavilions of the post-Freespace cycle. For the 2023 Lokko edition, the Brazil Pavilion's Terra (Earth), curated by Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares, won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation on a project working at the indigenous-architecture and reparative-history register. For the 2025 Ratti edition, four new countries — Azerbaijan, Oman, Qatar and Togo — took national participations for the first time, in venues outside the historic Giardini (the Sale d'Armi at the Arsenale and locations in the city's churches, palazzi and former convents).

The pavilion-as-architectural-object reading has its limits. The Giardini's collection is European-dominated, with significant absences (no permanent pavilion for any African nation, none for India or for most of Southeast Asia, none for any of the Pacific states) that the institution's continuing curatorial restructuring after 2018 has only partially addressed. The post-2014 expansion into the Arsenale's Sale d'Armi (the former armory) and into Venice's churches and former convents has been the institutional accommodation for a national-participation cycle that has continued to expand without the addition of permanent Giardini infrastructure.

Founded
1980
Frequency
Biennial · odd years
Format
Two-site · Giardini + Arsenale
Host city
Venice, Italy
Founding curator
Paolo Portoghesi

Geography

The Biennale across Venice

Principal venues

Corderie dell'Arsenale

Former Venetian rope-factory; principal indoor venue since 1980

Castello, 2169/F
30122 Venice, Italy

Giardini della Biennale

Central Pavilion + 29 national pavilions

Sestiere Castello
30122 Venice, Italy

Collateral events

Pavilions and projects across Venice

Various locations — see each edition's official venue guide.

Awards Golden Lions and the international architectural prize

The Golden Lion at the Architecture Biennale

The Biennale's Golden Lion (Leone d'Oro) for Architecture is one of the discipline's principal international awards — conferred in three categories at each edition since the early 2000s — and one of the architectural press's most consistent year-on-year reading-frames for the institution.

By the Biennale Editorial Team

The Architecture Biennale's Golden Lion award structure broadly mirrors the art Biennale's: a Golden Lion for Best National Participation; a Golden Lion for Best Participant in the central international exhibition; and a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement conferred by the curator's nomination. Silver Lions and Special Mentions are awarded by the international jury at each edition. The architecture-specific Golden Lion sequence has consistently turned the international architectural conversation: at the 2014 Koolhaas edition the Golden Lion for Best National Participation went to South Korea (Crow's Eye View: The Korean Peninsula, by Minsuk Cho), which subsequently became one of the most-cited national-pavilion projects of the post-2014 cycle; at the 2018 Farrell-and-McNamara edition the Golden Lion for Best National Participation went to Switzerland (Svizzera 240: House Tour, by Alessandro Bosshard, Li Tavor, Matthew van der Ploeg and Ani Vihervaara), a project on residential interior scale that was widely cited as the edition's most institutionally surprising selection; at the 2023 Lokko edition the Golden Lion went to Brazil's Terra (Earth), with Special Mentions to Bahrain's Sweating Assets and Britain's Dancing Before the Moon. The Architecture Biennale's Lifetime Achievement Golden Lions form a parallel institutional record: Frei Otto (2006, awarded posthumously in 2015 after his death the day before he learned of the prize); Álvaro Siza (2002, 2012); Paulo Mendes da Rocha (2016); Phyllis Lambert (2014); Rafael Moneo (2018); Ralph Erskine; Massimiliano Fuksas; Kazuyo Sejima.

The Architecture Biennale's institutional position in the international architecture awards landscape sits alongside, rather than against, the Pritzker Architecture Prize (the discipline's principal annual lifetime award, established 1979) and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal (the British architectural profession's continuing lifetime prize, established 1848 by Queen Victoria). The continuing institutional pattern is that Pritzker laureates have regularly been appointed as Venice Biennale curators (Koolhaas, Aravena, Farrell and McNamara, Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu are all Pritzker recipients before or after their Venice appointment) and that Venice curators have regularly subsequently received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal (Lokko in 2024). The three institutional awards thus form a continuing professional cycle in which the Venice exhibition is one of the principal accelerator-venues.

From the Directory

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Venice, Italy
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La Biennale di Venezia's art exhibition — the parent institution, founded 1895.
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Chicago Architecture Biennial
North America's principal architecture biennial, founded 2015.
Milan, Italy
Milan Triennale
Italy's continuing international exposition of design and architecture, founded 1923.
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London Design Biennale
London's nation-pavilion design biennial at Somerset House.

Essential Reading

For further work

The Presence of the Past — 1st International Architecture Exhibition

Paolo Portoghesi, ed.  ·  La Biennale di Venezia  ·  1980

Catalogue of the founding Architecture Biennale, organised around the Strada Novissima.

Freespace

Yvonne Farrell & Shelley McNamara, eds.  ·  La Biennale di Venezia  ·  2018

Catalogue of the 16th edition.

How will we live together?

Hashim Sarkis, ed.  ·  La Biennale di Venezia  ·  2021

Catalogue of the 17th edition, postponed from 2020 by the pandemic.

The Laboratory of the Future

Lesley Lokko, ed.  ·  La Biennale di Venezia  ·  2023

Catalogue of the 18th edition, the first to centre Africa and the African diaspora.

Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.

Carlo Ratti, ed.  ·  La Biennale di Venezia  ·  2025

Catalogue of the 19th edition, the institution's largest to date.

From the news desk

Institutional record

Editorial content on biennale.com is published by the Biennale Editorial Team. Image credits as captioned. External links are provided for reference and verification.