Royal College of Art at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia 2025

This year’s event, Intelligence. Natural. Artificial. Collective, explores how different types of intelligence can collaborate to reimagine the built environment. A host of RCA faculty members will be participating including:

As part of the exhibition, Dima Srouji is presenting her work on the ground as a site of cultural heritage, together with Piero Tomassoni’s (Artvisor, Founder) concept of time reclaiming structures, while continuing their common work on spaces of decompression. Time Reclaiming Structures is an ongoing project whose first iteration, ‘Gaza Shelters’, will be presented in the form of a panel in the Intelligens Canon section of the Biennale.

Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri have collaborated with curator and designer Matteo Binci, and independent researcher Maria Eugenia Frizzele to create Observatory Sant’Anna (OSA): a new space for research, action and urban participation in the historical centre of Venice.

OSA is an independent research and action project dedicated to collective experimentation and participatory urban design for the reactivation of the abandoned spaces of the Sant'Anna complex, in the Castello district.

The complex, which holds significant historical and symbolic value for the city, includes a church of 13th-century origin that is currently unusable, a former convent later converted into a hospital for the Navy, a public courtyard with flowerbeds, a cloister, and several public residential buildings.

OSA was born with the aim of demonstrating that Venice can and must be rethought, starting from the real needs of the resident communities, with an approach that centres on care, proximity, and the shared construction of urban futures.

Lumumba’s Grave - an installation made by architectural designer, researcher and MA Architecture Senior Tutor Dr Thandi Loewenson - explores ‘technofossils’: the remnants of man made objects sent into space. A series of graphite drawings line the walls and ceiling, showing the scenes of exploitation and extraction, while models of African space programme projects hang in the room, suspended in celestial geology. In these objects, the violence of rocketry is overwritten with a story of liberation; workers, dreamers, rocket scientists and combatants become the architects of our possible future.

Lumumba’s Grave will be included in the Geology of Britannic Repair exhibition presented by the British Council as a part of The British Pavilion.

Dr Jon Goodbun leads on a project exploring a near future Athens facing existential environmental threats from heat and pollution. Collaborating with MA Fashion tutor Flora McLean and team partners, Aran Chadwick (Director, Atelier One), Dr Roas Schiano-Phan (Architecture and Environmental Design Reader, University of Westminster) and Juan Vallejo (Architecture and Environmental Design Visiting Lecturer, University of Westminster), the team explore the potential for zero energy, water-based downdraft evaporative cooling installations that engage with these changes via experimental urban air conditioning.

Taking inspiration from global cultural contexts the team has constructed a temporary seven meter high fabric evaporating cooling structure, tested in the urban gardens of Athens and producing 10 degree Celsius temperature drops within 15 minutes using zero electricity. They continue to test these structures, experimenting with form to maximise results.

Their biennale exhibition will feature videos documenting their experiments in different formats: one is more holistic, whilst the other is task-orientated, to cater to different hemispheres in the viewer’s brain.

The project will be exhibited at the Arsenale and was supported by an RCA RKE-RDF grant, and by the RCA School of Architecture, with additional support from AHRC Enacting Gregory Bateson's Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design; University of Westminster School of Architecture and Cities, Atelier One engineers, and Rheomode Athens.

Dr Emilio Distretti will discuss Architecture of Repair in Palestine at the Studio Giardini townhouse for a breakfast event hosted by IASPIS, proposing the ways in which the language and praxis of repair persist within an environment of destruction. He sheds light on the myriad of informal, unnoticed, community-rooted and collectively led acts of repair in the entire neighbourhoods, schools, universities, places of worship, hospitals, infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural heritage that have been destroyed in Palestine. Through this, he discusses how reconstruction can be understood beyond a restorative act, as a painful process soaked in grief and deeply embedded in the rhythms of a daily life where healing seems to be so distant.

The Architecture of Repair in Palestine event is a part of the series Notions of Irreverence presented by IASPIS in collaboration with Salt and Krater Collective.