Three Messages from the 2025 Venice Biennale
by Elena Batunova
The Venice Architecture Biennale has long transcended its role as a professional event within the architectural profession. It has evolved into a platform for collective reflection on the challenges that humanity faces and how architecture can serve as a response, a language, a tool, and a way of showing care. The Biennale is not merely about buildings; it is about the meanings we invest in space and the future that we can collectively envision.
I admit that sometimes visiting the Biennale leaves me feeling disappointed from overload, superficiality, and aestheticized emptiness. But this time everything was different. The 2025 Biennale became a real inspiration for me. Because we live in a particularly dark time, marked by wars, the aggravation of political and climate crises, and accumulated fatigue from uncertainty. In this context, the exhibition did not offer ready-made solutions but gave something more critical: a feeling that the future can not only be feared but also be designed.
The curator of the Biennale 2025 is Carlo Ratti, and the theme, "Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective", refers to different forms of intelligence with which we learn to interact. More than 300 projects reveal architecture as an adaptive system capable of responding to changes, from AI and biophilic architecture to local knowledge, collective practices, and rethought memory.
I would like to dedicate this text to the national pavilions of Armenia, Latvia, and Estonia, where our city case studies are located (Gyumri, Daugavpils, and Narva). It was essential for me to examine the topics these countries selected for their national representation and to determine the extent to which these topics align with the questions we raise in our research.
Armenia. Scanned, Fragmented, Forgotten? On AI and Armenian Memory
Modern technologies were the focus of the Armenian pavilion. Ironically, they didn't help much in locating it in Venice. With limited signage, we were led there by local guidance just before closing.
Titled Microarchitecture through AI: Making New Memories with Ancient Monuments, the exhibition was led by Commissioner Svetlana Sahakyan and curated by Marianna Karapetyan, with contributions from Electric Architects, TUMO Centre for Creative Technologies, Ari Melenciano, CALFA, and Monumed.
The pavilion tackled the pressing issue of safeguarding cultural heritage under threat. Its creators proposed a groundbreaking experiment: employing AI and robotic carving to generate new architectural forms inspired by hundreds of scanned Armenian monuments. These 'fragments of memory' aspire to serve as a bridge between past and future — a tangible manifestation of collective imagination.
My impressions of the experiment were an internal protest. The dark space, with its cold, lifeless light, was more reminiscent of a storage facility or a cabinet of curiosities. Armenian architecture, situated in such a context in contrast to the mountainous landscapes of Armenia, in which it was born and into which it was organically woven, would have looked out of place in any case. But fragments that never existed in the Armenian landscapes were exhibited here. These were not memories, but their synthetic projection. An interpretation made by artificial intelligence and embodied in stone by a robot. The result is repulsive, like Frankenstein's creation. However, this feeling may help to indicate the primary message of the exhibition. Its strength is not in the answer, but in the anxiety it evokes.
The exhibition delves into the making new memories. We typically view heritage as a means of preserving our memories. However, the very concept of memory can be challenged, given the human brain's ability to edit memories in response to new experiences. What happens to memory when artificial intelligence is involved in its interpretation and editing, and robots in its reproduction? This raises a fundamental question: if technology cannot only preserve but also replace the past, what are we ultimately preserving and transmitting? And what standards should we set for such an intangible form of preserving and utilizing our material heritage?
Latvia. Between Fear and Belonging: Living on the Borderline
The Latvian pavilion, titled 'Landscape of Defence', presented a topic that is particularly pertinent to our project: geopolitical security. All three cases that we study within the subproject Integrated Action Approaches - Daugavpils, Narva and Gyumri - are border cities. Their location, in the context of modern geopolitical instability and wars, has a direct impact on the future development strategies.
The curators Liene Jākobsone and Ilka Ruby describe the pavilion as an attempt to visualise the invisible but tangible landscape of defence in which people live. In the pavilion, the real elements of the defence infrastructure, painted bright yellow, capture the visitor's attention. The massive barriers dominate the exhibition space, overshadowing everything else. And perhaps this is precisely their meaning: how can we talk about a sustainable future for cities when there is a threat in the immediate vicinity that can destroy the very concept of "future"?
Behind these elements are screens reproducing video recordings of people living in an atmosphere of geopolitical tension. People talk about fear, anxiety, and internal stress. These voices are vital for us. They call for reflection - to what extent do people's fears influence real decisions: to stay or to leave, to invest in the future or to retreat from it.
A large map on the opposite wall shows the territories of Latvia adjacent to the borders of Belarus and Russia. This map focuses on the infrastructure of military defence against the potential threat posed by neighbours. The accompanying text invites reflection on the living conditions in the border region of a geopolitical conflict zone, as well as the quality of such a defensive space.
In the context of our research, the Latvian pavilion sends a crucial message: the resilience of cities is not just about façades or technology, but about a sense of security and belonging. When these feelings are undermined, any discussion of residential heritage and its adaptation loses its meaning. Conversely, caring for the living environment in border cities is not only about architecture, but also about trust, vulnerability, and political imagination.
Estonia. Let Me Warm You: Standard Solutions, Human Realities
In the Estonian pavilion, called "Let Me Warm You", curators Keiti Lige, Elina Liiva, and Helena Männa address a topic familiar to many residents of post-Soviet countries: the renovation and insulation of Soviet-era apartment buildings. In line with its climate commitments to the EU, Estonia has set a goal to modernise 14,000 buildings built before 2000 by 2050 and bring them up to an energy efficiency class of C. In practice, this means a large-scale campaign to insulate buildings, often without the involvement of architects, residents, or consideration for the quality of the urban environment.
The pavilion serves as a visual representation of the results, with panels partially covering the façade of a Venetian building that replicates the insulation implemented in the Soviet-era housing undergoing renovation. This gesture declares that mass housing from the Soviet era is also a heritage that merits consideration. The curators also point out a concerning recurrence: the same standardised, top-down methods in housing programs are being used once more. These energy-efficiency-focused renovations frequently overlook architectural and aesthetic values, which can result in the ongoing deterioration of residential environments under the guise of modernisation rather than their revitalisation.
The authors have presented several tragicomedies inside the pavilion that address social issues surrounding flat building renovations. They reveal that behind the technical solutions lie far more complex problems and procedures. How do people live? How do they interact? Who makes the decisions and how? Which different goals and interests do residents of the same building have? What conflicts arise? As a result, the Estonian pavilion serves as an example of how urban space is shaped by the political and social process of upgrading the energy efficiency of outdated Soviet housing.
The exhibition is significant because it challenges us to consider how we treat our everyday, ordinary heritage. It persuades us that using standardised solutions for mass housing would only lead to a recurrence of previous errors. It is better to abandon the mechanical approach and begin to view each home as a living, breathing piece of the urban fabric to revitalise the urban environment genuinely.
Conclusion
Although the pavilions of Armenia, Latvia, and Estonia at the 2025 Biennial addressed vastly different topics, each of them proved essential to our project in its way. Instead of a linear conversation about built heritage, we received three perspectives through which to view how the perception of the residential environment is evolving in the context of political pressure, climate commitments, and technological advancements. These exhibitions emphasised that residential heritage is not only an architectural form, but also a field of tensions, discussions, and transformations. They helped us better understand the context of our cases - Daugavpils, Narva, and Gyumri - and ask new questions about what it means to "live" in inherited spaces today. Three pavilions, three approaches. Each of them opens a part of a larger conversation in which we participate as researchers.