{"id":39953,"date":"2025-08-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/architectural-biennale-confronts-brutality-of-climate-change\/"},"modified":"2025-09-05T15:26:54","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T13:26:54","slug":"architectural-biennale-confronts-brutality-of-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/architectural-biennale-confronts-brutality-of-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Architectural Biennale Confronts Brutality of Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Venetian Version of Waterboarding: Air Con, Architecture, and Climate Change at the 2025 Architecture Biennale<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Architects mimicking Nature must first divest their practices of unsustainable materials and energy inefficiency. As planet temperatures rise, architects in the Middle East eschew western fixes and revitalize local solutions. The Bahrain pavilion and a traditional wind-cooling system won the biennale\u2019s Golden Lion Award for Best National Participation.\u00a0<\/span><\/h5>\n

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Iason Athanasiadis\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

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Visitors to this year\u2019s Venice architectural biennale must pass through a stifling, dark room hung with a\/c external ventilation units, choked in smoggy heat and stagnant pools of water to access the main exhibit. This sweaty, oppressive preview is the biennale organizers\u2019 vision of what a hotter, unequal future will feel like to those on the wrong side of energy poverty who, unable to afford artificial cooling, are condemned to the searing outdoors heat.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dunking the biennale\u2019s typically privileged visitors into the waste heat emitted by the organization\u2019s cooling needs is a Venetian version of waterboarding. It evokes the sacrifice zone produced by our fossil fuel era while making for a powerful introduction into an unusually packed 45<\/span>th<\/span> edition.<\/span><\/p>\n

Suffocated by the stagnant narthex, the visitor pushes through a black curtain to emerge into a deliciously cool, white exhibition hall. Reveling in the taut relief, a glance back at the separating wall reveals two air conditioning trees (twelve a\/c units stacked in two rows) pumping out a reprieve from rising temperatures. Though initially received as a godsend, the implication is that rather than a\/c solving the problem it seeks to address, it only compounds it.<\/span><\/p>\n

The introductory text reminds us that the biennale\u2019s brutal welcome is a spatial allegory <\/span>for our thermal future\u2019s glaring, daily-expanding global inequities. Rather than viewing architecture as an act of purely material addition, the biennale explores the processes of entropy and a future of partnering with Nature rather than dominating it. Instead of greenery being treated as decorative, or uprooting it to make space for further profit-making buildings, it can be adapted into biological infrastructure that cools cities, purifies their air and restores a semblance of balance.<\/span><\/p>\n

The biennale’s echoing main hall is crammed with exhibits demonstrating how biomimicry \u2014 the idea that architects can emulate nature \u2014 can reduce construction\u2019s high energy imprints, insulate buildings and recreate the charitable, population-sustaining effects of wetlands. However, just as biomimicry has been criticized as being little more than a superficial way of emulating Nature that fails to reduce unsustainable materials or energy-intensive processes, the biennale dangles the prospect of a plethora of solutions without ever addressing the elephant in the room: Without a massive change in how global elites continue conducting their energy-intensive lifestyles and militarized squabbles, we are all merely sleepwalking towards doom.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n