At the Venice Biennale, techno-utopianism takes centre stage | Canada Voices

Inside a 400-year-old Venetian arsenal, a Bhutanese carver chisels a six-metre log while a robotic arm mimics his every move. Wood chips fly from freshly sculpted dragon wings.

This duet of human and machine – courtesy of Bjarke Ingels Group – captures the tone of this year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture. Under the theme “Intelligens,” head curator Carlo Ratti has assembled a show about architecture, AI and “collective intelligence,” and how they might solve the climate crisis. It’s a sprawling, sometimes chaotic fair of ideas, as ever.

But, you might ask: How does a robot carving replica dragons help save the world? An air of techno-utopianism spills through the main show and throughout the 65 national exhibitions, including Canada’s.

The exhibitions fill the Corderie, a 300-metre-long rope factory within Venice’s historic Arsenale, with nearly 300 projects and 750 contributors. (A handful of Canadian practices make appearances, including Atelier Pierre Thibault and Reza Nik of SHEEEP.) Models, robots and vague promises of sustainability crowd the centuries-old hall, illuminated by brief AI-generated blurbs.

Ratti, who runs the MIT Senseable City Lab, believes deeply in technological progress. Canadians may remember his contribution to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto: LED paving tiles that could reroute traffic at the tap of an iPad. (What could go wrong?)

In one powerful moment, an installation led by architectural historian Daniel A. Barber, literally cranks up the heat: A battery of droning air conditioners pumps waste heat into the gallery, confronting visitors with the hidden costs of thermal comfort. Think about the future and you will begin to sweat.

Over in the leafy Giardini, the heart of the exhibition, the Biennale’s national pavilions offer other kinds of clarity. Belgium, led by landscape architect Bas Smets, uses an indoor garden to regulate temperature and interface with its climate-control system. The Danish team catalogues and disassembles the pieces of their 1950s modernist building in a circular design strategy. Germany reflects on the cooling potential of landscape.

Meanwhile, Canada’s building, in a corner of the Giardini, presents Picoplanktonics from Living Room Collective. Here, a series of structures, including swooping 3-D printed constructions, all carry a bacterium that can absorb carbon dioxide from the air.

“As an industry, we need to insist on establishing new norms,” explained the collective’s leader, Andrea Shin Ling, who is a researcher at ETH Zurich. “I hope we can prioritize a system that’s less resource-intensive and prioritize ecological resilience.” (The collective also includes artist and curator Clayton Lee, and architects and academics Nicholas Hoban and Vincent Hui.)

So how does this system perform its ecological work? The showpieces are three sinuous structures of 3-D-printed sand infused with Synechococcus PCC 7002, a species of picoplankton.

“It draws down carbon dioxide from the air, makes it react with calcium, magnesium and other ions in the salt water, and creates minerals that bind the sand more tightly together,” Ms. Shin Ling said.

Those structures were created through parametric design software, a standard design tool that defines 3-D geometries based on specific constraints. Here the blobs are “optimized” to expose as much surface area as possible for maximum air contact.

There’s art here as well as science. The blobs fall in a tradition of parametric design that goes back to the 1980s work of architects such as Zaha Hadid. As with much in Ratti’s show, this reeks of tech for tech’s sake.

Give the blobs this much: They are elegant. Floating in a shallow pool of brown water, the forms stand at ease in the eccentric Canadian pavilion. The Italian architects BBPR designed the structure in the sixties with a tipi-like form; its semicircular shape and irregularly slanted roof have bedevilled curators ever since.

“What we’re finding most interesting is how the exhibition is adapting around the architecture of the pavilion itself,” artist and team member Clayton Lee said. “Where the light is hitting is where the bacteria are happiest.”

The material’s utility is another question. This goop grows very slowly; Shin Ling estimates 0.3 millimetres per year. To serve as a meaningful climate mitigation strategy, it would need to expand to a massive scale – imagine something as dull and replicable as solar panels.

“I’m not pretending this will replace concrete,” Shin Ling said. “But it is something you can put on a building to draw down carbon dioxide continuously. Because it’s photosynthetic, you don’t have to feed it sugar or use energy-intensive systems.”

And yet the installation is being maintained by five full-time staff and 21 student fellows. During the opening event, a staffer in a blue lab coat was spraying the mesh with a nutrient solution, tending it as one would a delicate flower.

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To be fair, architecture exhibitions always include research that veers toward art and others that flirt with technical and scientific research. Canada’s theatrical science experiment fits well enough.

It’s not necessarily a wise choice, though. At the pavilion opening, Canada Council head Michelle Chawla said that “architecture and design play a crucial role in introducing Canada to the world.”

Indeed. But the Canada Council for the Arts has essentially abandoned architecture and landscape architecture in recent years. At the same time, Canadian architecture and the related fields are stagnant. For a generation now the country has smothered young design talent and fattened up a herd of corporate design firms.

Canada needs a policy to create better places and incubate talent. Instead, its Biennale pavilion is incubating bacteria.