ACT at the Venice Biennale Architettura 2025

As global temperatures reach alarming new highs and extreme heat emerges as the deadliest climate risk of our time, Urban Heat Chronicles offers a community-based response to the growing urgency of urban heat adaptation. Selected for exhibition at the 2025 Venice Biennale Architettura, the project is a collaboration between MIT Future Heritage Lab and Italian partners T12 Lab, QuasiQuasi, and Project for People, exploring how cities—and the people who inhabit them—can survive and thrive in the face of escalating heat.

In alignment with Biennale curator Carlo Ratti’s call for architecture to embrace adaptation and draw on diverse forms of intelligence, Urban Heat Chronicles unfolds across three interconnected elements: a Static Installation, a Mobile Pavilion, and a series of Participatory Workshops. The project invites visitors to experience how natural, artificial, and collective intelligence can converge to address one of the most pressing climate challenges.

At its heart is a Static Installation by MIT Future Heritage Lab inspired by Venice’s traditional laundry lines. Suspended between buildings in narrow alleys, this installation uses upcycled, block-printed textiles that showcase plant species’ adaptive strategies to heat and changing environments. It turns overlooked urban space into shaded, connective tissue—echoing the passive cooling principles embedded in Venice’s dense architectural fabric. 

Drawing from scientific research on plant behaviors—such as underground root communication, heat resilience, and water retention—intricate paper-cut designs were developed that reflect diverse survival strategies. The patterns have been screen-printed onto upcycled fabrics dyed with indigo, forming a growing textile herbarium that visualizes ecological knowledge in both artistic and accessible forms. Two workshops were held at the MIT Museum and MIT List Visual Arts Center as part of the process of creating these patterns. 

The Mobile Pavilion, designed by T12 Lab, extends this sensibility into the city’s campi, acting as a nomadic shade structure that follows the sun’s path. Like a plant turning toward light, it adapts in real time, offering comfort, gathering space, and a physical metaphor for resilience. Adorned with the same adaptive botanical patterns, it becomes a living classroom for spontaneous discussion, performance, and connection.

Finally, Participatory Workshops led by QuasiQuasi and Project for People engage Venetians and visitors in cyanotype printing using plant motifs and solar exposure. These workshops invite participants to create, reflect, and share their own heat adaptation stories—bridging traditional craft, ecological knowledge, and personal climate narratives.

“Urban Heat Chronicles responds to the Biennale’s call to action,” says the project team. “It is a demonstration of how intelligence rooted in nature, shared through communities, and supported by simple technologies can form the backbone of a more heat-resilient future. In the time of adaptation, architecture must not only shelter but also connect, empower, and learn.”

Set against the backdrop of the hottest years on record and rising urban vulnerability, Urban Heat Chronicles reimagines how design can help communities navigate the climate crisis—not just through innovation, but through memory, participation, and care.

Above images: Azra Aksamija and the MIT Future Heritage Lab, Urban Heat Chronicles. Photo: Sebastian Gonzalez. Courtesy of the Future Heritage Lab.

The MIT Future Heritage Lab presents Weft of Waste–Ikat Reimagined, an installation at the intersection of environmental responsibility and heritage preservation, featured in The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology exhibition. This collaborative project brings together Antikythera’s Planetary Sapience and MIT Architecture’s Climate Work: Un/Worlding the Planet to examine the future of our planet in an era of ecological crisis and cultural homogenization.

The installation transforms shredded cotton T-shirts–remnants of the global fast-fashion industry—into a loom whose patterns echo the blurred motifs characteristic of traditional Uzbek ikat weaving. Embodying the environmental costs of cotton monoculture and textile overproduction, each discarded garment represents 2,700 liters of water, the average amount needed to produce a single cotton shirt. Through this material transformation, waste becomes the beginning of new cultural narratives rather than an endpoint.

This act of weaving functions as both artifact and argument, critiquing unsustainable fashion cycles while honoring the depth of artisanal practices that predate industrial manufacturing. Within the Biennale’s overarching theme, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective, the installation draws on natural intelligence embedded in ancestral techniques, collective memory encoded in material culture, and human creativity that challenges disposability.

“Weft of Waste is a call to slow down, remember, and repair,” says the project team. “Future Heritage Lab asks: What if the future of design is not extraction, but reconfiguration? Not in novelty, but in repair?”

By repurposing textile waste into a woven archive of ecological and cultural memory, the project positions craft as a form of resistance to cultural erasure, environmental degradation, and the disconnect between consumption and consequence. Weaving together waste and tradition, it offers a vision for regenerative practice at the confluence of past knowledge and future care.

Above images: Azra Aksamija and the MIT Future Heritage Lab, Weft of Waste–Ikat Reimagined. Courtesy of the Future Heritage Lab.

Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas’s Wetland Games is presented as part of the main curated exhibition at the Arsenale (La Biennale Architettura 2025).

An agent-based platform, Wetland Games that aims to foster multi-species perspectives among users in environmental planning and support multi-natural intelligence. It is a collaborative effort between the Urbonases and the LUMA curatorial team of Martin Guinard and Salma Mochtari, scientist Raphaël Mathevet (CNRS EPHE CEFE, France), and programmers Terry Kang and Thomas Lee Harriett (USA), with design in collaboration with NODE Berlin. A two day performative workshop was held at LUMA Arles in October 2024.

The game simulates the impacts of diverse factors: sea level and salinity dynamics, volatile climate and economy informing decisions made by various “stakeholders” of the wetland, i.e. farmers, fishers, livestock breeders, reed harvesters, hunters, tourists or conservationists but also birds and plants, enabling people to understand the complex systems that impact climate and their environment. Developed as an educational tool that could be enacted as performance (and as immersive installation) the game emphasizes entanglement of landscape and humans and their inseparability in maintaining an equilibrium in between autochthonous and invasive, preservation and economy. By creating a continuum of learning from other species that crosses the traditional boundaries between disciplines (geography, ecology, economy, anthropology) the game allows participants to conduct multipurpose experiments that contribute to their understanding of socio-ecosystems and sustainability respecting the plurality of wetland beings’ perspectives.

Above images: Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, wetland.games, LUMA Arles, 2024. Courtesy of the artists.

Presented in the collateral exhibition The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology curated by Benjamin Bratton, Nicholas de Monchaux, and Ana Miljacki at Palazzo Diedo, May 10 – November 23, 2025.

The exploratory Swamp Game: Eat Me invites the public to experience the changes in perspective unfolding in a trembling swamp. Originally commissioned by ZKM for Critical Zones –  Observatories for Earthly Politics, an exhibition curated by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour with Martin Guinard, it was exhibited as an online exploratory experience and later as LED screen installation. The installation is a result of ongoing collaboration with a group of MIT’s Climate Visions that includes contribution from ACT graduate students Vinzenz Aubry (SMACT ’25) and Haozheng Feng (SMACT ’25).

The Swamp Game: Eat Me is inspired by the research of German botanist Carl Albert Weber, who in 1902 published the first ever treatise on swamps based on his scientific study of the Aukštumala raised bog, then colonized by German Empire, which had belonged to the former province of East Prussia. Based on his drawings and the data collected by a group of contemporary biologists who recently studied the Aukštumala bog (nowadays in Lithuania), the game proposes the swamp as a sentient entity, and what biologists term the “sympoietic relation”s that unfold in it—that is, the collective creation or organization of the fragile interdependencies of an ecosystem.

Above images: Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas with MIT Climate Visions, Swamp Game: Eat Me, 2020-23. Screen capture, 2020. Image courtesy of the artists.

● Time: May 11, 2025 at 6pm
● Location: Campo della Tana → surrounding route along Fondamenta de l’Arsenal & Campo San Biasio
● Duration: ~25 minutes

The performance channels Hong Kong’s industrial and textile heritage through wearable architecture. It transforms fencing masks, opera headpieces, and urban scaffolding into a processional architecture of collective identity. It is a reimagining of monumentality as motion, resilience, and civic memory.

Through Transversal Lab, Yvette Kong transforms Hong Kong’s textile past into a celebration of “future heritage.” In the mid-20th century, Hong Kong’s mills drove economic growth, shaping its urban fabric. The JadeWalkers reimagines this legacy through wearable sculptures crafted by Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata and Taiwanese textile innovator Tsai-Chun Huang. More than just costumes, these living monuments fuse Hong Kong’s architectural motifs—like bamboo scaffolding and breeze-block ventilation—with futuristic pleats and bold fabrics.

The performance features stilt-walking Moko Jumbies, rooted in Caribbean Carnival traditions and reimagined to evoke Hong Kong’s skyline and the Yang Warriors of Chinese folklore, alongside Yvette as the Female Warrior. Their movements, set to live music, echo the city’s fluidity and strength, transforming public streets into stages for cultural pride. As Yvette shares, “I wanted Hong Kong to walk tall—our stories, strength, and aspirations moving with grace and defiance across the globe.” This is Hong Kong’s past, present, and future interwoven and set in motion, poised to shine at the National Games.

The JadeWalkers is a cross-cultural masterpiece, bridging Hong Kong’s East-West identity with Mexican textile traditions. Laura Anderson Barbata, whose work has graced the Met and MoMA, brings her expertise in socially engaged performance, drawing from projects like Transcommunality. She describes the collaboration as a process of mutual learning, explaining: “JadeWalking extends the ideas behind Transcommunality by creating shared spaces for cultural dialogue. Rather than blending Hong Kong and Mexican traditions, we honor their distinct histories while highlighting shared values like resilience, adaptation, and community strength.” This approach invites audiences into a universal conversation by creating sculptures that honor both cultures’ resilience.

Former CAVS Fellow and current Research Affiliate Rus Gant did the pre-visualization for Argentine architect Gui Trotti’s installation at the Venice Biennale using generative AI imaging.

The title Intelligens is linked to the modern term “intelligence,” but it also evokes a wider set of associated meanings. In fact, the final syllable, “gens” is Latin for “people”. A new, fictional root emerges, suggesting a future of intelligence that is inclusive, multiple, and imaginative beyond today’s limiting focus on AI.

We propose an exhibition and event to celebrate and promote the collaboration of the artificial and natural environment in helping heal the Earth and beyond where humans explore.

The exhibition will emphasize the importance of this collaboration to heal and restore the planet in our Anthropocene era. The theme will focus on our relationship with plants, plants were the first living beings on Earth, without plants no animals or humans could have ever developed in the oceans and land. A vision of the future will be shown at the center piece of the exhibition as an orange tree in bloom is wired with sensors to measure the energy generated by the tree at different times and affected by the environmental changes such as, light, sound, temperature, and interaction with humans. The sensed waves will be assigned notes to create a sound or ‘song’ generated by the tree. That song will be played live to the public, and the wavelengths will be displayed in monitors around the tree, or on an artificial ‘tree’ or structure created be speakers and small screens.

Surrounding the tree(s) will be a graphic exhibition depicting in an abstract and powerful way (in long scrolls coming down from the ceiling and draping over the floor) the importance of plants on the evolution of animals, humans, and life itself. The scrolls will tell the story of life’s evolution from its inception to the Anthropocene Era including the present and future human exploration of Space where plants, again, will play an important role in generating the atmosphere, food, and emotional support.

Why the orange tree? Citrus trees played an important role in the survival of early explorers by producing fruits with a high content of vitamin C without which humans can’t survive. It is probably the most powerful symbol of the vegetable world on the importance it plays in our survival. We hope that this small exhibit sends a strong message to all visitors on the importance of listening, respecting, and nurturing every specie of our living companions to be able to survive our future……

Above images: Rus Gant, Generative AI Renderings. Courtesy of the artist.

“VAMO turns waste wool, Murano glass, leather discards, and pineapple peels into one immersive installation. It proves that circular materials can already meet high-end aesthetics and performance, opening fresh opportunities across fashion, interiors, and product design.”
— Giuliano Picchi (ACT Research Affiliate), VAMO materials co‑curator, MITdesignX

The VAMO canopy brings together material and construction research from ETH Zurich and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to propose a circular vision for architecture. Conceived as an ultra-lightweight and transportable structure, it expands the architectural potential of reclaimed resources through a diverse palette of vegetal, animal, and mineral waste materials. Constructed with timber salvaged from a Swiss demolition site by ETH Zurich’s Circular Engineering for Architecture (CEA) group, the upcycled wooden hoops extend the conversation on reuse toward broader architectural applications. The canopy’s structural support, developed by MIT’s Digital Structures group, uses computational form-finding to explore new possibilities for these materials. Inspired by natural forms and efficient historical structures, the design interlaces a hemp-rope cable net with a tilted compression hoop, spanning 6.5 meters in pure tension and compression. Most cladding elements are circular material innovations supported by MITdesignX, a program for design innovation and entrepreneurship at the MIT Morningside Academy for Design. Panels are made from used coffee grounds, pineapple peels, waste wool with beeswax, coconut husks, leather scraps, and biopolymers. Fabricated in Zurich and Cambridge, then brought to Venice for the Biennale, VAMO will be relocated to Switzerland for biodegradation research. By embracing disassembly, reuse, and transformation, it challenges traditional construction and envisions architecture as adaptable, regenerative, and circular.

VAMO, Venice Biennale. Lloyd Lee. Courtesy of Morningside Academy for Design.