Biennale Architettura 2025, Corderie ph Irene Fanizza

Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: The City as a Lab, Water as a Manifesto

The 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Carlo Ratti, opens its doors to the public, unveiling the winners of this year’s Golden Lions and special mentions. With themes ranging from ecological urgency to urban experimentation, the Biennale once again affirms itself as a global stage for rethinking how we inhabit the world.

Golden Lion for Best Exhibition
Taking home the top prize is Canal Café by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a deceptively simple bar that unfolds into a sophisticated civic device, inviting reflection on water, ecology, and collective responsibility. The coffee served is made using water from Venice’s canals, filtered on-site through a hybrid system of phytodepuration and advanced technology, developed in collaboration with Natural Systems Utilities and Sodai.
Gastronomy meets environmental engineering thanks to Michelin-starred chef Davide Oldani, who tailored the blend to match the unique mineral profile of the purified water.
In the words of the jury: “Canal Café is a demonstration of how Venice can serve as a laboratory for reimagining life on water, while also offering a tangible contribution to the city’s public realm.” The project also stands as a testament to long-term vision: it began nearly two decades ago and now finds its moment at the Biennale.

Golden Lion for Best National Participation: Bahrain’s Heatwave
The Kingdom of Bahrain wins the Golden Lion among national pavilions with Heatwave, an urgent exploration of the architectural, social, and environmental impacts of extreme heat.
Curated by Andrea Faraguna with a multidisciplinary team led by Commissioner Shaikh Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, the installation transforms a section of the Arsenale into a climate lab, featuring passive cooling strategies rooted in both tradition and innovation.
From badgir (traditional wind towers) to reflective materials and vegetation-as-infrastructure, the pavilion confronts a global condition through regional intelligence.
The jury praised it as “a concrete proposition for dealing with extreme heat in public spaces, applying vernacular techniques such as shaded courtyards and wind towers to contemporary challenges.”

Special Mentions: Lagos and Thailand, Between Waste and Biomaterials
Two projects were awarded special mentions.
Alternative Urbanism: The Self-Organized Markets of Lagos by Tosin Oshinowo investigates informal waste economies within industrial systems, recasting them as resilient, community-driven engines of innovation and circularity in African cities.
Boonserm Premthada’s Elephant Chapel earned recognition for its radical use of biomaterials: a brick structure built using elephant dung, creating an open-air sanctuary in a rural Thai province where elephants and humans have coexisted for centuries. The work celebrates this deep-rooted harmony while minimizing environmental impact.

Silver Lion and Additional National Mentions: Genealogies and Repair
The Silver Lion for a promising emerging practice went to Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500, an immersive installation by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler at the Corderie dell’Arsenale.
The jury, chaired by Hans Ulrich Obrist and including Paola Antonelli and Mpho Matsipa, also awarded two additional national mentions:
– GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair, a UK–Kenya collaboration curated by Owen Hopkins, Kathryn Yusoff, and Nairobi-based studio Cave_bureau, critically reframes the Great Rift Valley as both a site of extractive colonialism and a terrain for regenerative architecture rooted in the land.
– Opera Aperta, the pavilion of the Holy See, proposes architecture as a form of collective care and repair. Hosted at the former Santa Maria Ausiliatrice complex, the project, curated by Marina Otero Verzier and Giovanna Zabotti, with architectural contributions from Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO and MAIO Architects, unfolds as a participatory restoration process throughout the Biennale’s duration. Echoing Laudato si’, it reclaims a disused historical space and gives it new life through a shared, sustainable vision.

Lifetime Achievement Awards
Two special Golden Lions round out this year’s honors:
Donna Haraway, pioneering scholar of posthuman theory and ecofeminism, received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
A posthumous Golden Lion was awarded to architect and designer Italo Rota (October 2, 1953 – April 6, 2024).
Both recognitions were proposed by curator Carlo Ratti and endorsed by the Biennale’s board, chaired by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco.

A Biennale That Looks Beyond the Present
With over 750 projects reviewed, five times more than in past editions, the 2025 Biennale asserts itself as a critical apparatus for confronting fragility, imagining new paradigms of inhabitation, and extending the life of architectural ideas beyond the exhibition walls.