As the Venice Biennale opens for its 19th Architecture Exhibition, curated by Carlo Ratti, FAD’s correspondent Marta Bogna-Drew selects her top national pavilion exhibitions from the vernissage week:
Bahrain
The National Pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain presents Heatwave, an architectural prototype addressing the intensifying challenge of rising global temperatures through a passive cooling installation designed for public urban environments. As heatwaves become more frequent and severe, and sharing the learnings from traditional Bahraini cooling techniques, the pavilion explores architecture’s role in advancing thermally resilient and socially responsive urban infrastructure.
Wind towers and subterranean airflow systems are employed in the installation to create a passive ventilation cycle. A thermo-hygrometric axis establishes a connection between the subsoil and exterior conditions, enabling a continuous exchange of air and humidity. Due to site constraints at the Arsenale, the Venice installation replaces the geothermal system with mechanical ventilation, drawing air from a canal-facing opening and redistributing it through a network of ducts and nozzles to generate a regulated microclimate within the pavilion, which feels fresh and aerated.
The structure comprises a square footprint defined by a floor and ceiling of identical dimensions, suspended from a single central column. The configuration functions as a scalable unit, adaptable to varying climatic and urban contexts. Structural engineering is led by Mario Monotti, with thermomechanical design by Alexander Puzrin.
The project proposes a structural solution for thermally controlled rest areas, particularly relevant to construction sites and other outdoor workspaces in the Gulf region, where extreme heat poses both physiological and socio-economic challenges. In Venice, an abstracted construction landscape of soil and sandbags grounds the installation and offers a powerful and inviting resting place, underscoring the intersections of climate, labour, and architectural responsibility.
Lebanon
In a year where the urgency of climate and conflict loom large, ‘The Land Remembers’, the Pavilion of Lebanon presentation, stands out as a deeply charged, politically conscious pavilion that reframes architecture as activism.
Curated by Collective for Architecture Lebanon (CAL) – a cross-disciplinary non-profit founded in 2019 by Edouard Souhaid, Shereen Doummar, Elias Tamer, and Lynn Chamoun – the pavilion imagines a fictional “Ministry of Land Intelligence,” a fictional agency devoted to healing ecologically devastated terrain.
Set against the backdrop of Lebanon’s catastrophic environmental catastrophe, driven by decades of war, rampant urbanisation, and political neglect, the pavilion is more than an exhibition: it is a call to action. Through archival materials, speculative design, and immersive storytelling, CAL exposes the scale and intentionality of ecocide in Lebanon, from the destruction of agricultural land to the use of incendiary weapons like white phosphorus, which in 2024 alone left entire regions toxified and uninhabitable.
But The Land Remembers is not only about loss, it is about responsibility and agency. It asserts that “before architecture, there is land,” calling on architects to play a proactive role in environmental justice. The pavilion’s structure as an activist ministry becomes a provocative tool, asking visitors to envision new futures where architecture is inseparable from ecological repair. From a seed bank of indigenous plants, to earth bricks germinating with wild wheat, there is a message of hope against the bleak backdrop of war in the pavilion.
CAL’s curatorial vision is bold and urgent, blending speculative fiction with real-world data to galvanise a professional and cultural audience. It highlights architecture as a political act, and leverages the power of creativity to confront even the most irreversible destruction.
collectiveforarchitecture-lb.com
Morocco
The Moroccan Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale presents Materiae Palimpsest, a project conceived by architects Khalil Morad El Ghilali and El Mehdi Belyasmine. The exhibition explores the architectural potential of earth construction by integrating ancestral building practices with contemporary constructions methodologies.
Drawing from Morocco’s long-standing traditions of earth architecture, featuring rammed earth and other vernacular techniques – the project highlights the resilience and sustainability inherent in these methods. The pavilion proposes a material legacy passed from local artisans, who act as custodians of tacit knowledge, to architects and engineers employing advanced design and fabrication technologies.
The exhibition frames earth not only as a material but as a cultural medium, shaped by Morocco’s diverse geography, climate, and craft heritage. Through tactile installations and digital projections, visitors encounter the layered processes of making and the rich materiality of earthen construction. The pavilion is vibrant with earth colours and smells; at its heart, holographic projections housed in a glass vitrine document the tools and gestures of two artisans, making visible their gestures and tools, preserving their knowledge.
Textile and woven works by Moroccan artist Soumiya Jalal further animate the space, weaving together traditions of architecture, craft, and memory.
Materiae Palimpsest positions Moroccan earthen architecture as a living archive—adaptive, performative, and culturally grounded. It offers a compelling case for locally rooted, low-impact building strategies that speak to both environmental imperatives and social continuity.
Nordic Countries
The Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki presents ‘Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture’ at the Nordic Pavilion. Conceived by performance artist Teo Ala-Ruona and curated by architect Kaisa Karvinen, the exhibition fuses performance, architecture, and installation to question modernist design legacies through the lens of trans embodiment.
Set within Sverre Fehn’s iconic 1962 pavilion, a symbol of Nordic modernism, Industry Muscle interrogates the foundational assumptions of modern architecture, particularly its reliance on standardised bodies (such as Le Corbusier’s Modulor Man). These once-radical tools helped streamline design as it leaped towards ‘modernity’, but ignored diversity and entrenched canons that continue to shape our built environments half a century later.
In response, Ala-Ruona and his team present five speculative performance “scores” that explore how architecture might evolve when viewed through fluid, embodied perspectives. Performed live during the opening days of the Biennale, and once daily throughout the duration of the Biennale, these choreographed interventions offer poetic, physical alternatives to the rigid frameworks of modernism. They invite audiences to reconsider the relationship between the built world and the multiplicity of bodies it serves—or excludes.
In a time of climate breakdown and shifting cultural norms, Industry Muscle challenges visitors to think beyond architecture as a fixed system. Instead, it proposes a more inclusive and responsive practice, where design starts not from idealised measurements, but from the lived experience of diverse bodies. In doing so, the exhibition not only critiques the past but opens speculative space for architectural futures rooted in care, fluidity, and ecological consciousness.
designmuseum.fi/fi/exhibitions/industry-muscle-five-scores-for-architecture
Poland
Blending anthropology, art, architecture, and history, the Polish Pavilion, “Lares and Penates – On Building a Sense of Security in Architecture”, explores how architecture expresses our fundamental need for security – both physical and emotional. Curated by historian Aleksandra K?dziorek, architect Maciej Siuda, and artists Krzysztof Maniak and Katarzyna Przezwa?ska, this exhibition uncovers the quiet rituals and protective gestures that continue to shape how we inhabit space.
Rooted in research across Poland, the project highlights everyday superstitious rituals – candles in windows to ward off storms, garlands hung at building sites for luck, a horse shoe at the thresholds marking entry to the home for good luck – that blur the line between myth and habit. These are placed alongside contemporary safety features like fire alarms, peepholes and surveillance systems, which are reframed with flair and sometimes unexpected tenderness: a security camera’s radius is traced in teddy bear fur; a fire extinguisher is enshrined in an elaborated niche of shells and stones.
The curators succeed in crafting a distinct narrative that is full of humour, invention and architectural delight. Their witty curation draws a continuous thread between the mystical and the prosaic, finding poetry in fire doors and joy in alarm bells. It’s an exhibition that doesn’t just present architecture – it animates it, showing how homes are shaped not just by regulations, but by hopes, fears, and small acts of care.
labiennale.art.pl/en/lares-and-penates-are-open-for-the-public
Spain
The Spanish pavilion, entitled “Internalities – Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium”, explores how architecture can reduce environmental impacts and support Spain’s decarbonisation by rethinking the use of local, regenerative, and low-carbon materials. The word Internalities is a play on the term ‘Externality’ coined by the economist Arthur Pigot in 1920 to describe the ‘indirect cost affecting people and territories that are unrelated to the production of a product.
Curated by Roi Salgueiro and Manuel Bouzas, the exhibition highlights how reconnecting materials with their geographic origins can offer a solution in reshaping construction practices.
The central room, titled Balance, operates like a gateway, showcasing 16 architectural projects via 32 models, illustrating diverse strategies of material internalisation- using stone, wood, earth, natural fibres, and recycled materials. Each project is presented at two scales: construction and territorial. The models delicately balanced as if mid-air offer a delightful commentary on the project. Five side rooms expand on key research areas, including Materials, Energy, Trades, Waste, and Emissions, offering an expanded narrative of sustainable architectural innovation in Spain. This is a meticulously researched pavilion, with a clear narrative and sustainable agenda at its core. Despite its density, it is admirably curated and offers insightful information and moments of beauty throughout.
Britain
The British Pavilion presents GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair, an emotionally resonant exhibition that rethinks architecture through the legacy of trauma of British colonial legacies, ecological devastation, and reparative justice. Curated by Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Nairobi’s Cave_bureau, UK curator Owen Hopkins, and geographer Professor Kathryn Yusoff, the project forms part of the British Council’s UK/Kenya Season 2025, spotlighting a creative collaboration between two nations bound by a difficult and unequal past.
The exhibition begins on the Pavilion’s façade, which is beautifully adorned by Double Vision, a symbolic ‘curtain’ composed of agricultural waste briquettes and clay and glass beads. Produced in Kenya and India, the clay beads nod to Maasai traditions, while the glass beads echo those of Murano, once used as imperial currency in the trade of metals, minerals, and enslaved people. This beaded veil cloaks the Pavilion’s neoclassical front in earthy hues of black, red, and brown, evoking “other earths” displaced by the British Empire.
Inside, six gallery spaces unravel an intricate geography of rupture and repair across the MENASA region, using the Great Rift Valley as its central motif, a geological scar running through Africa and the Middle East, symbolising both ancestral time and enduring trauma.
Works include celestial mappings linking London and Nairobi on the night of Kenyan independence, a cast of a Rift Valley cave (a site traditionally known as the Baboon parliament) reimagined as a healing space, and Objects of Repair by the Palestine Regeneration Team, using salvaged materials to address devastation and scarcity, and as a gesture of hope, in preserving materials for the future rebuilding of Palestine. From Thandi Loewenson’s speculative ‘technofossils’ to Lokko and Crembil’s critique of botanical imperialism (Vena Cava), the exhibition confronts planetary crisis with radical imagination – inviting architecture to reckon with its role in shaping futures of justice. Commissioned by the British Council, and with supporting partner The Dalmore.
venicebiennale.britishcouncil.org
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan presents ‘A Matter of Radiance’, an atmospheric exploration of a USSR relic, the Sun Institute of Material Science near Tashkent. Curated by GRACE studio (Ekaterina Golovatyuk and Giacomo Cantoni), the pavilion reflects on this monumental solar furnace complex from 1987, one of only two of its kind in the world (the second one being in France), built during the final years of the USSR to study material behaviour under extreme solar heat.
Although the facility served its original purpose for less than five years, it has since taken on new life as a site of cultural and scientific reinvention. It is now also included in Tashkent Modernist XX/XXI, large scale research project aiming to preserve the modernist architectural sites of the city.
The pavilion displays original fragments of the Sun Heliocomplex to Venice: heliostat parts, a control room table, enormous façade elements, and two monumental Soviet-era original chandeliers reassembled in the vast spaces of the pavilion to spectacular effect.
Photographer Armin Linke offers a powerful anthropological interpretation of the site through large-scale images that reflect on the entanglement of science, landscape, and ideology. Artist Ester Sheynfeld contributes installations evoking the human traces of scientific labour, while Azamat Abbasov’s film Palace of the Sun uses point cloud technology to render the Institute as a shimmering, almost spectral presence in the Uzbek landscape.
Presented in the year Uzbekistan has designated as one of Environmental Protection and the Green Economy, A Matter of Radiance imagines how relics of a modernist, technocratic past might be redirected towards an ecologically conscious future, while celebrating the architectural heritage of the nation.
instagram.com/uzbekistan_national_pavilion
