It’s certainly crunch time for you folks. How is the process going on a day-to-day basis?

It depends on the day! It’s going fine. The difficult thing is you need to create a machine for producing this very large thing, starting from zero and then going up to 200 percent. People work around the clock until the opening, then it goes back to zero a few months later. To do this you need a team, and to build a whole structure, creating the hardware and software at the same time—It’s nothing new. I was mentored by several prior curators who said they had to do the same thing; I talked to Rem Koolhaas, Deyan Sudjic, Aaron Betsky, and many others, so I knew what to expect. It’s a common phenomenon. But we’re now definitely in the 200 percent phase.

Having spoken to those former curators, was there anything you decided to do differently in organizing the show? 

One of the things methodologically that’s a bit different is that, normally, this is a top-down process: the curator is appointed, then they select the people, and then they do an exhibition. We tried to make this more bottom-up, beginning with a call for ideas. It was both daunting and extremely revealing. Daunting because we went to thousands of people, and revealing because we discovered voices that we otherwise would not have been able to find: universities, mayors, and communities on the other side of the world. It was a series of salons really—we had a bonfire dinner in Dubai, and a breakfast in Switzerland at 7 a.m. I found it really rewarding. 

Circularity Handbook by particpants PILLS, JIN ARTS, typo_d, Archi-Neering -Design/AND Office, Róng Design Library, Valeria Tatano, Massimiliano Condotta, Xiaoqing Cui, Zhengwei Tang. Image courtesy the participants  

And what is it that you heard from these voices, how have they shaped the show?

Many ideas emerged, but a common theme was that architects would like to have more impact on the communities they serve—they feel they’re not so relevant today. And now everyone’s talking about AI, mostly thinking of it as a shortcut, something that disempowers designers; instead, what we should be thinking about is leveraging AI as an asset, the same way architecture has always assimilated other new technologies. Climate change, and the way different communities are responding to it, were also very big topics that emerged in different places, and that’s what led us to this theme in which nature as well culture could be seen as two additional, essential sources of intelligence. We decided on the word intellgens because we wanted to use one word that would make sense in both English and Italian, so we went with a version of the common Latin root; there’s a bit of a linguistic pun there too, since gens also means people. And what these differing forms of intelligens are meant to inform is not merely how to build new buildings and new cities, but how to improve the resilience of the built environment we already have. We want to achieve a balance. 

How does all this unfold in the main show? 

At the beginning, two projects in the Arsenale space set the context. The first one is inspired by Marc-Antoine Laugier, the 18th-century theorist who advanced an idea of architecture as originating in the primitive hut; it’s a vision of climate, of nature, as being against us. The second room is entirely flooded—a scary thing!—and visitors will be basically walking through water. In the following section, there are a series of projects from transdisciplinary teams including biologists and physicists, as well as architectural thinkers like Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina, all looking at population dynamics and the way that declining global birth rates are setting the boundary conditions for architecture in the future. From there, we look at how today’s architecture is responding, in particular how it’s learning from nature, with different forms of biomimicry and the use of organic materials, as well as how AI is really intertwined with biology. And then we examine collective intelligence, how old, vernacular architecture is still very relevant. Lastly there’s the final section, called “Out,” about architects designing for outer space, creating everything from satellites to colonies.

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Conceptual renderings of The Other Side of the Hill by participants Beatriz Colomina, Roberto Kolter, Patricia Urquiola, Geoffrey West, and Mark Wigley (1); Canal Café by participants Aaron Betsky, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Natural Systems Utilities, and SODAI (2). Images courtesy the participants

Obviously, this year’s show is taking place against a backdrop of remarkable turbulence on the global scene, with AI, climate change, even space exploration being particularly divisive issues. Navigating this topical terrain must have been tricky.

With regards to climate change, we’re effectively making a case for adaptation, which is difficult because the environmental movement has usually considered adaptation as equal to capitulation. But a strategy of mitigation is important—the climate is changing already, and in a world where you have people shouting “Drill, baby, drill,” it only becomes more urgent to find a way to adapt if you want to take a different stance. On space, we have a great essay in the catalogue from Martin Rees, a top astronomer at Cambridge University: he talks about how much he disagrees with Elon Musk, who believes all of humanity can simply live on some other planet; Rees’s argument is that there is no “Planet B” and that Earth is the most conducive place for life. In general, the same bottom-up approach that helped guide us is really the common thread in the exhibition. Whatever you want to do on these pressing issues, if you want to rebuild Los Angeles, for example, you have to engage with the local community. I think you’ll see a similar approach resonating among the national pavilions, with whom we also had conversations where everyone could present their ideas, and who also really started getting inspired by each other. That’s just what happens when you bring everyone together.