Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: Designing for an Altered World

Romania’s Pavilion reframes design by examining the concept of Human Scale through 20th-century architectural drawings. The human form morphs to suit each designer’s creative vision, with the core user bending at the architect’s hand. But this raises a question: what do users actually want? Not to contort themselves to space, but complementary environments that bend in turn to their needs. By examining architecture through the lens of our physical form, we can recognise the spatial politics, power dynamics and accessibility we impose through the built environment. With this in mind, the Nordic Countries Pavilion suggests acts of defiance against designed standards and expectations. It places the trans body in dialogue with architecture, staging investigations that challenge proposed norms around body and space. In doing so, it recognises how space reinforces social norms whilst proposing the possibility to redefine them, suggesting architecture for future inclusivity.

Together these pavilions illuminate the reciprocal relationship between body and space, emphasising the need for human-centricity so design can better serve its users.

While social engagement can enliven communities and relieve the pressures of modern life, The Next Earth exhibit proposes smaller scale solutions in contrast to larger spatial programming. The projects NYC Walks and Sidewalk Ballet work together to map and analyse social life in New York City, assessing where, why and how impromptu social interactions occur at street level. The research unravels the sociological drivers behind human behaviour to better facilitate and influence social activity. Focusing on action over analysis, projects like Cooking Together Vol. II and Someparts x outdoor media kit proactively engage with communities through mobile means of activity programming. One elevates the ubiquitous mobile street cart into a model for new forms of community engagement and placemaking. The other provides a machine for outdoor leisure that blurs the divide between interior and exterior activities, delivering sensorial delights to public spaces. These projects allow for temporal spatial occupation that enriches the social fabric of an environment, activating the energy and vibrancy of the spaces they enter. These scaled down solutions offer a more immediate perception shift, transforming spatial composition through spontaneous community engagement and restoring the vitality of modern everyday life.

Despite efforts, public space is still failing to truly engage the communities it should be sustaining. MIT’s Senseable City Lab exhibited Eyes on the Street, concerning findings from a comparison study of human behaviour in public space which revealed that people walk 15% faster through public space and that lingering has reduced by half. Against this social decline, new forms of community engagement are emerging.

The Holy See Pavilion establishes a community hub out of a site under renovation, elevating conservation work into a spectacle that people are invited to view and participate in. Architecture is framed as a living practice of repair and collective care, expanding beyond the bounds of the building to nurture communities and ecosystems. The exhibit curates diverse opportunities for engagement: craftsmanship in action, musical performances, workshops in restoration, and an open kitchen serving locally sourced food, ultimately fostering an open platform for collaborative participation. The building counters the notion that construction sites should be taped off and closed, instead proposing an open and transparent site of activity, championing the concept of the ‘meanwhile space’ that utilises its transitional stage as something to be celebrated. By opening processes to public discourse and insight, it establishes a collective creativity, turning the space into a civic centre where public engagement creates value from transience.

Similar spectacle has been made of the transformative stages of construction with the Denmark Pavilion making an exhibition out of the necessary renovation work on its building in the Giardini. Instead of hiding their process from view, they circumvent omission by making a show of their efforts, celebrating their site and the materiality of design.