Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: Ireland presents an elegantly complex take on a richly simple idea

Irish Times

21-06-2025

Can architecture save the world? Exploring the national pavilions in the Giardini of the
19th Venice Architecture Biennale
, you might be forgiven for wondering why the world isn't saved already. Plant trees! Recycle building materials! Reconnect with the Earth! Make aesthetic gestures in reparation for colonialism! That's us sorted, so.
In truth, a strange atmosphere hangs over the Giardini, and it is an unusual space at the best of times. The individual national pavilions speak of an era when empire still seemed (to some) like a reasonable idea, and often their architecture is a too-obvious giveaway of aspirations to certain kinds of glory.
For every elegant Nordic pavilion, designed by Sverre Fehn and completed in 1962, there's an uber-neoclassical edifice screaming the will to power, Germany, Britain and the United States being cases in point. Taken as a whole, and with a couple of notable exceptions, it's a little like being in a theme park of the ironies of nationalistic pride.
Architecture tends to last longer than governments, although the deleterious effects of the worst examples of both can linger far longer than one would like. This year Britain and the US have softened their edifices, with hanging strands of clay and beads for Britain, and a huge latticed timber porch for the US.
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There is a certain degree of uncomfortable satire in the latter, as the presentation, entitled An Architecture of Generosity, is all about a spirit of openness and welcome that doesn't exactly chime with the actions of the current leaders of that country.
One thing is for sure: the apocalypse will be Instagrammable. Germany's pavilion, Stresstest, takes on climate change with input from an extensive list of architects and artists, centring on huge wraparound digital display of hot city images, flanked by a space reflecting back your own body heat, and another shaded with cool trees.
Elsewhere, some pavilions, such as those of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, proclaim the names of countries that no longer exist. The Israeli pavilion is empty and dark, while the lights are on at the Russian one but no one is home. It is being used as a site for the biennale's education programmes in a much derided 'collaboration agreement' with the Russian Federation.
There are some high points where the presented possibilities might bear future fruit. Canada is showing Picoplanktonics, Living Room Collective's exploration of plankton-infused building blocks that absorb and store carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, Austria offers a solution to the housing crisis, although as its curators, Michael Obrist, Sabine Pollak and Lorenzo Romito, demonstrate, the solution lies in the political will to care for people through social and structural change, rather than through nifty apartment design.
Picoplanktonics at the Canadian pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale 2025
Hungary is fun, as Márton Pintér, its curator, takes a look at all the other things trained architects end up doing instead of architecture, while also sharing narratives of the steady attrition through compromise that ultimately demolishes their utopian dreams.
The main pavilion in the Giardini is closed for renovation, so the Arsenale houses the bulk of this year's curated exhibition, and bulky it is. From an arch of elephant-dung bricks to bioengineered trees, and from jaunty robots to exhaling rocks, the halls of the vast venue are abuzz, and overstuffed. It is as if Carlo Ratti, the biennale's curator, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just couldn't say no. Or perhaps he was high on saying yes. In either case, it just doesn't work, and the overall effect is irritating rather than enlightening.
Visitors interact with the Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective exhibit. Photograph: Andrea Avezzù
Installation view of the Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective exhibit. Photograph: Andrea Avezzù, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
'To face a burning world, architecture must harness all the intelligence around us,' Ratti, who is an engineer as well as an architect, says. Instead we are surrounded by an impossible cacophony. Entitled 'Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective' it features odes to AI and robots everywhere. One mimics the actions of visitors banging a drum. Another carves at wood alongside a pair of artists from Bhutan in national dress. AI also helpfully summarises the frequently verbose wall texts alongside each installation; it is amusing to see where even AI chokes on the jargon.
Some of the most interesting and most moving pavilions, including Ireland's, are in the adjacent spaces at the Arsenale. A team from Peru explores the man-made reed islands on Lake Titicaca, where human ingenuity thrives only because it has evolved in harmony with nature.
The Lebanese pavilion, The Land Remembers, is quietly devastating, as Edouard Souhaid, Shereen Doummar, Elias Tamer and Lynn Chamoun of
Collective for Architecture Lebanon
look at the impacts of ecocide, following the bombing of their country with white phosphorus by Israeli forces. They also explore the resilience of plants, and their capacity for healing and regrowth.
Then there are the flashy projects that underline so much that is wrong with the world of architecture and design. A space-age gateway to a row of Porsche-designed water bikes by the star architect
Norman Foster
is all aesthetics over old ideas; similarly, the New York practice
Diller Scofidio + Renfro
bizarrely won a Golden Lion for its Canal Cafe. The 'cafe' is part water-purification plant, part espresso bar at a quieter end of the Arsenale; the jury's citation praised it for its 'demonstration of how the city of Venice can be a laboratory to speculate how to live on the water, while offering a contribution to the public space of Venice'.
Again, the only new thing it seems to present is the aestheticisation of something that has been going on in many parts of the world for years. Admittedly, there is a slightly twisted delight in the sight of well-heeled biennale visitors lining up for the delicious frisson of drinking formerly filthy water.
Gateway to Venice's Waterways by Norman Foster with Porsche. Photograph: Marco Zorzanello
Nearby, one of the most moving elements of the Italian pavilion, which explores the country's relationship to the sea, is an old film of children happily and (presumably) safely swimming in Venice's canals.
After all this, Ireland's pavilion, in its now regular space towards the quieter reaches of the Arsenale, comes as a welcome respite. It has been created by a team led by the Cork-based firm
Cotter & Naessens
, whose other projects include Dún Laoghaire's Lexicon Library, Limerick's Grainstore and some exceptionally elegant private housing that makes remarkable use of light. At Venice a timber structure encloses a circular space with a wraparound internal bench. The diameter of the space makes you want to stay, sit and talk.
Inside Assembly, at the Venice Bienalle. Photograph: Cotter & Naessens Architects
Assembly
celebrates Ireland's citizens' assemblies, whichhave come together to debate issues from marriage equality to biodiversity loss. 'Could citizens' assemblies be realised at different scales?' the architects ask, imagining villages, cities and towns with their own social chambers, where people can meet to discuss, disagree and maybe even (whisper it) come up with something new, without resorting to cancellation, rage and online abuse?
The idea is richly simple, although it is also elegantly complex in its execution. Leaning on the idea of architecture as an enabler rather than souped-up saviour, Louise Cotter points out how making civic architecture is (or, rather, should be) about making spaces to gather.
'This,' she says, 'brings it down to the level of community.'
'The need to assemble is fundamental,' Luke Naessens, who curated the pavilion with Cotter, says. 'But the right to assemble is under pressure.'
The pavilion itself was put together from beech wood by Alan Meredith, two trees having fortuitously fallen in a storm at precisely the right time. It is visually completed with a carpet designed by Liam Naessens and created by
Ceadogán Rugmakers
.
Adding a further layer, the whole thing is soundtracked by the composer David Stalling, with ambient noises, including birdsong and the sounds of the making of the pavilion itself at the exterior, and spoken word, including a poem by Michelle Delea, and voices from those who participated in citizens' assemblies inside.
'To start with, people were diffident about coming in because of the carpet,' Cotter says, 'but as it got dirty they lost their inhibitions.'
It's a seemingly throwaway remark that hits at a deeper truth about the way environment can both invite and inhibit. Through their researches, the team explored places where people gather and communicate, from church choirs to cattle marts. 'Originally we had a kind of passageway with seats on either side, but that was a more hierarchical and confrontational space,' Cotter says. 'So it had to be round.'
Size matters, too, as their researches demonstrated a sweet spot of distance that allows for connection and intimacy without intimidation.
Stalling's composition is designed as what he describes as 'an intimate form of musical dialogue'. Together they have got it entirely right, as experience proves that this is a space in which it is lovely to linger and that, in so doing, conversations with strangers ensue.
'Thinking about assembly as a process really inflected our design,' Naessens says. 'While we were working on independent parts we would come together, and something someone else was doing might shift the direction. There's a reflexive element to it.'
Architecture as Trees, Trees as Architecture at the Venice Biennale. Photograph: Marco Zorzanello
The Lebanese pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025
Their explorations continually underlined the idea of how much the human element matters. As Cotter remarks, 'buildings like cathedrals or train stations come alive when filled with people, [but] the pandemic completely inverted our sense of what a place of assembly is'. Thinking about this, and about how smartphones have added to the changes in how we meet and interact, a project such as Assembly becomes even more interesting for the quiet ideas it ignites.
Many brilliant solutions to our social woes have been previously proposed in Irish pavilions past, such as the excellent Suburban to SuperRural, curated by
FKL Architects
in 2006; and
Free Market
, put together by Jeffrey Bolhuis, Jo Anne Butler, Miriam Delaney, Tara Kennedy, Laurence Lord and Orla Murphy in 2018.
Each presented cogent and practical ideas, with some inspiring leaps of the imagination to spice things up. In the former, dull suburbs were re-created as biodiverse places in which people, and nature, could thrive; in the latter, the dying market towns of Ireland gained a new lease of life as remarkable places to live and work.
Yet what has changed? The national pavilions at successive Venice architecture biennales are, in the main, supported by their respective governments – in Ireland by funding from
Culture Ireland
and the
Arts Council
. But do governments take notice? Then time passes and things stay the same or, as is the case with the environment, declines.
What if the biennale could do something good? Imagine if we did adopt the social-housing covenants of Austria or build with carbon-dioxide-sucking bricks. 'The biennale does matter,' Naessens says. 'The process of working alongside people from Oman, Morocco – it's valuable. It's random which pavilions are next to each other in the Arsenale, but the conversations that come through are really generative, especially when we're looking at things like climate change, which are global.'
As I leave the Arsenale the crowds are thinning out. A man is tipping out a melancholy version of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on a steel drum, as opposite him the mimic robot has given up, and hangs forlornly in space. The queue to ask questions of an AI robot with a surreally smoothed-out face has vanished but, given my chance, I can't think of anything to say. 'Does any of this matter?' I try. 'Ahh, that is a big question,' replies the robot, and leaves it at that.
The
19th Venice International Architecture Exhibition
runs until November 23rd.
Assembly
will tour Ireland, including to Cork Midsummer Festival, in 2026