Ancient Future by Bjarke Ingels Group. Photos courtesy BIG

On one side is the Bjarke Ingels Group, which paired up traditional Bhutanese wood carvers with an AI-guided robot, the idea being that the latter would learn from the former as they sculpted intricate dragon motifs into a timber beam. As the upbeat explanatory notice had it, this marriage of artisanship and robotics “redefines preservation as evolution, proving technology can empower culture rather than erode it,” since the robots are learning dying skills as well as allowing the few remaining craft workers to focus on creativity while machines do the legwork. In contrast to this positive spin on the march of technology, Jacque and his team at the Office for Political Innovation, who two years ago called out the deleterious effects of producing the titanium oxide that makes the glass at Hudson Yards so shiny, was back with Stonelife, the next episode in a series of research projects looking at fundamental building materials. The basic premise was that we’ve got stone all wrong: rather than a dead, inert material that needs bleaching and pressure washing to remove the slightest trace of moss or algae, it is in fact home to extraordinary ecosystems of countless micro-organisms, and as such is not only important for biodiversity but can also act as a carbon sink.

Stonelife by Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation. Photo by José Hevia

“Thesis, antithesis, synthesis” goes the Hegelian definition of dialectics, and some contributions attempted to embrace the paradoxes. Liam Young’s was one of them, since After the End, his utopian scenario for Australia’s First Nations, not only acknowledges there’s no going back to what has been lost but, as in much of his work, demonstrates an uneasy relationship with what Young describes as the “technical sublime.”

Lavaforming at the Iceland National Pavilion. Photo by Ugo Carmeni

Iceland—present with a national pavilion for the very first time—offered a different kind of utopia-dystopia: produced by a multi-disciplinary team, Lavaforming proposes harnessing Iceland’s lava flows to form building components, which, if feasible, would be a great way of exploiting a hugely abundant low-carbon resource. But the display also tried to imagine the pitfalls, such as the potentially calamitous outcome if the world’s magma reserves were hijacked by a private corporation. Whatever their ideological or ethical divergences, all these contributions had one point in common: they are a way of dreaming the future, which after all is the sinae qua non of architecture.

The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale is now open to the public and runs through November 23. Information on ticketing and more can be found here.

Stay tuned for further RECORD dispatches from Venice.