The 19th year of the Venice Architecture Biennale opened this May, with thousands from the international architecture community descending on the city for the opening of 66 national pavilions, dozens of collateral events, and hundreds of participants in the central exhibition in Venice’s Arsenale.

The biennale was curated by Italian architect and engineer Carlo Ratti, a long-term advocate for the integration of tech and design, and as such my expectations for how this would approach the climate emergency ahead of the opening were somewhat muted. Although Ratti thankfully showed an awareness of the dangerous state of the world, his supporting text worryingly pointed towards the prioritisation of adaptation-first methods over other considerations of mitigation and degrowth.

Alarm bells continued to ring around the vagueness of the title: Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective — and Venetian colleagues calling Ratti the ‘Thomas Heatherwick of Italy’, a British starchitect famed for his viral if superficial designs.  But I couldn’t have prepared myself for how dangerous and sinister the curated section of Ratti’s Biennale ultimately was. It was little more than accelerated greenwashing to appease tech profiteers and the oligarchs financing them.

The clues were there from the first room in the Arsenale, a dark space filled with pools of water kept purposefully warm with ventilation. It was supposed to be an immersive experience, allegedly reflecting on a boiling world and water scarcity, but it really said one thing: Carlo Ratti was just blowing hot air.

More alarm bells were set off by Ratti’s use of AI. Generated summaries were included next to the more conventional descriptive text of each installation. Whether welcomed by the exhibitors or not, it immediately said to visitors that the original text was not worth their time and that tech innovation supplanted any authentic human voice.

This normalisation of AI permeated Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. as screens showing generated visuals of fake landscapes and imagined built environments were presented in AI’s uneasy blurry motion. It felt like Carlo Ratti’s approach had a lot in common with that of the Tony Blair Institute and its much criticised report released at the end of April that wrongly presents AI as a future tool for efficiency. This is a claim that is hard to take seriously given that AI is already overburdening energy intensive data centres from its current usage as a ‘homework cheating machine’ and thief of creativity.

A particularly egregious example of this tech-advocacy could be seen in Bjarke Ingels Group’s exhibition ‘Ancient Future’, which concerned their work on Bhutan Airport — an action of aviation expansion that seemed impossible to justify. Although the practice championed their support for Bhutanese artisans, its decision to include two joiners working side by side with a robotic arm carving on timber beams while visitors watched, suggested that the technological approach was as valid, inspiring, or valuable as the human skill. This for me was too much, and this installation, positioned next to a trio of robots taking inputs from passersby, felt like a soulless mockery of human creativity and a real low point.

Ratti’s exhibition continued with a sea of useless tech-installations: overwhelming data-visualisations, expensive 3D printed works and uncanny images. They all felt divorced from the reality of what architecture should be delivering for communities. Towards the end of the exhibition there was hope, with the inclusion of collective-led campaigning groups who blasted out ironic and angry statements such as The Architecture Lobby’s ‘THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNPAID LABOUR’ and House Europe’s ‘WE ARE FUCKED – YOU CAN CHANGE IT’.

We desperately need answers for today – not promises for tomorrow. When we have no time to waste, this uncritical faith in tech feels like a distraction, and a dangerous one given the very real extremes people are facing in the world. You find yourself asking: who is this biennale actually for? Will any of this robotics and AI actually help anyone's lives? Or is this just a show to appeal to wealthy elites who will profit off this technology? The inclusion of a Boston Dynamics dog – a technology that will only be used to police and terrorise people – is a clear indication this exhibition was not about helping communities but about preserving those in power.

Ratti’s exhibition may have been a write off, but fortunately there was real optimism to be seen elsewhere in the national pavilions. The Spanish pavilion was a standout and an antidote to empty promises with its very straightforward ‘show don’t tell’ approach. Internalities featured a wealth of low carbon built projects and research from Spain, captured with beautiful photography that centered natural materials, workers and communities. 

Architect Søren Pihlmann’s Build of Site addressed the flood damage experienced by the Danish pavilion by presenting the materials (rubble and all) of the building while the process of renovation continued during the biennale. Though at first this felt like a fetishisation of demolition, the circular economy-led mindset of ‘What You See Is What Was There to Begin With’ was a welcome challenge to the other pavilions and the profession more broadly, showing how much can be done with existing materials.

This low-carbon focus was also seen in the Cyprus pavilion’s (to the stones) we lent you our breath and you whispered it back to the earth. Theirs was a series of installations built using local stone and ancient Cypriot practices of communal construction, revealing how much can be done together without costing the earth.

Even the pavilion of the Holy See chose the path of ‘restore rather than replace’ for their exhibition Opera Aperta. Described as ‘a living practice of restoration and collective care’ , visitors were invited to watch and learn about the restoration of the Santa Maria Ausiliatrice complex, which dates back to 1171.

Again, these pavilions were effective as they showed actualised ideas, like how to live together and decarbonise the way we construct, maintain and manage our buildings. An idea unfortunately lost on the German pavilion, Stresstest, which opted for a comically unsubtle large screen installation showing the sun heating the earth and an unsuspecting public soundtracked with intense music.

The German installation posed big, scary questions, but the question of what to actually do in a burning world was answered most effectively by BIPOC architects such as Yasmeen Lari who designed Qatar’s first permanent pavilion at the Giardini. It consisted of a bamboo structure built off the back of decades of Lari’s experience creating temporary relief shelters. That this pavilion, with its airy structure and natural ventilation was the coolest and most tranquil place at the biennale, barely above 20°C, revealed what designs are most needed going forward.

In Imre Szemans book Futures of the Sun he says ‘climate change is the most significant crisis faced by modern governments, regardless of whether they choose to do anything about it’ and the same is true for industry. This naive tech optimism may want us all in VR headsets buried in the sand but between practitioners, exhibitors, collectives and campaign groups there’s enough real action, replicable projects, buildings to retrofit and communities to support to keep all our heads above ground.