IntelliGENS: Natural. Artificial. Collective.

Venice Architecture Biennale 2025

Curated by MIT professor and architect Carlo Ratti, the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale embraces the theme: "Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective." It’s a play on words, merging “intelligence” with gens, the Latin word for people, designed to spotlight the systems shaping our built environment. As Ratti puts it, architecture must now operate not just as a formal or functional endeavor, but as a synthesis of intelligences, from the cellular to the societal, from code to culture.

One of the core principles of this Biennale is its fractal design. “The Biennale is structured like a fractal,” Ratti explains in an interview. “It’s built to be enjoyed at different levels of resolution. Whether you have a full week or just an afternoon, you can dive in and out of it, picking up coherent narratives from the micro to the macro scale.” This approach reflects the exhibition’s ambition to blur boundaries between systems, natural ecosystems, neural networks, and collective decision-making processes, while creating space for layered, recursive meaning-making. Natural. Artificial. Collective.

Each layer of the exhibition reinforces this concept. Visitors are invited not just to view installations, but to engage, test, and evolve their understanding, like navigating a living organism. The Arsenale has been transformed into an experimental lab where human intelligence interplays with machine learning models and natural interventions. The key to this biennale is adaptation. Adaption to the changing world, changing technologies, changing everything. And maybe just maybe the core is based on nature to find these rooted principles that don't change, or at least, not so fast.

Carlo Ratti’s curatorial framework for the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. invites us to explore intelligence as a multidimensional force shaping the built world, the conversation between Marco Casagrande and Menno Cramer offers a grounding counterpoint. If Ratti’s fractal Biennale is a living lab for experimenting with intelligence across scales, from neural to environmental to synthetic, then Cramer and Casagrande zoom in on the subconscious, wounded, and innately human edges of that same intelligence.

Where Ratti’s vision embraces technology, circularity, and systems thinking, Cramer and Casagrande speak of environmental trauma, and the quiet force of local knowledge. Their talk becomes an example of collective intelligence at the margins, a kind of street-level counterpart to the Biennale’s architectural high theory by bridging Nonna’s with AI.

Both, however, are united by a call to redefine architecture’s agency. Whether through Ratti’s fractal narrative structures or Casagrande’s idea of urban acupuncture, we are asked to consider design not as imposition, but as interface, a mediator between intelligence and matter, climate and behaviour, ruin and rebirth.

Together, they sketch a new cartography of design:

One that blends algorithm and instinct,
That sees ruin as resolution,
That treats intelligence not as a product of optimization, but as a process of reconnection.

In this shared landscape, architecture is no longer a monument to human control, but a soft, intelligent skin learning to listen, adapt, and heal.

BioUrban Acupuncture Kharkiv, by Marco Casagrande and Menno Cramer.

The Venice Biennale 2025 opened on 10th of may and on the 12th of may Marco Casagrande and Menno Cramer were at the Speakers corner discussing: Biourbanism, Urban Acupuncture, and the Intelligence of Place in the context of Kharkiv, Ukraine.

This conversation between Menno Cramer and Marco Casagrande explored architecture not as an object-based practice, but as a living interface between environment, local knowledge, and collective behaviour. The dialogue on biourban acupuncture unfolded across three themes: biourbanism, (environmental) psychology, and ruin, with underlying reflections on how design must respond to conflict, trauma, and ecological uncertainty. They do this in collaboration with the O.M. Beketov National University of Urban Economy in Kharkiv.

1. Biourbanism and Urban Acupuncture

Casagrande, known for his raw, context-sensitive design philosophy, emphasized that cities must be treated as living organisms, not machines. He described “urban acupuncture” as a way to intervene delicately yet powerfully, introducing small architectural stimuli that reactivate local ecologies, behaviours, and social flows. These interventions respect the site’s subconscious memory, tapping into forgotten or repressed knowledge embedded in the urban skin.

Cramer added that true biourbanism isn't about building more, but about revealing what's already there, allowing local knowledge, cultural practices, and ecological rhythms to resurface. In this way, architecture becomes less of a master plan and more of a therapeutic practice, a form of listening, translating, and co-evolving.

2. The Agency of Ruin

Casagrande’s concept of ruin and Ruin Academy was framed not as collapse, but as transformation. “Ruin is when architecture becomes part of nature again,” he said, a moment when design sheds its artificiality and enters into dialogue with the world around it. In a world facing both climate and psychological crisis, this return to the ruinous, the soft, and the grounded may be the most intelligent form of architecture we have.

Cramer built on this by highlighting the civic resilience embedded in ruins. Post-conflict or post-industrial spaces, rather than being erased or rebuilt, should be allowed to speak, to become sites of learning, ritual, and reconfiguration. “We tend to think of construction and deconstruction as polar opposites, yet perhaps they are simply inflections of the same motion”, subtle shifts left or right of a shared center, closer than we think.

3. Skin-to-skin Architecture and Cognitive Sanctuaries

A part of their discussion was about the idea of the “cognitive sanctuary” introduced by BAITT. In this particular case a space designed to optimise decision making. They discussed this as to where the limits of architecture are and the importance of recognizing overstimulated, algorithmically optimized spaces that strip us of emotional and psychological depth. Here, the conversation touched on constructivist biology, suggesting that our perception of architecture is always filtered through mental models shaped by memory, evolution, and culture, which would later become core ingredients of The Code.

They introduced the concept of Skin-to-skin architecture explained with examples like Zaatari and Warm Nest, where the deepest connection of the space with the human is as if the architecture has become the last epidermal layer of the skin itself. A deep connection, soft, gentle and profound. They highlighted the need for architecture as a tool to access these deeper layers, citing examples where material, time, and decay comes to form something emotionally resonant and cognitively grounding. Maybe decay is an intricate and inevitable part of nature, of being human.

Closing Reflections

The conversation closed not per se with answers, but with an orientation, a sense that intelligence, in its most meaningful form, is not something we possess, but something we participate in. For Cramer and Casagrande, architecture is not a tool for control, but a medium through which we can learn to read the deeper codes of life: the silent logic of ecosystems, the collective intuition of communities, the subconscious of the human mind, and the predictive, accelerating edge of artificial systems.

In resonance with the Intelligens theme, they challenge us not to master the environment, but to listen more closely, to design with nature, through culture, and alongside machines, as co-authors of a world that adapts, heals, and evolves. A new kind of literacy that could help us move from reactive design to anticipatory architecture. One that understands the body, the brain, and the biosphere not as separate domains, but as parts of a shared, intelligent whole.