Toward beyond-species intelligence: a walk through the Architecture Biennale 2025

Our conversation originally began to provide a key for those who have little time to devote to the Architecture Biennale 2025 but still seek reflection, thread, and depth. It turned into a critical inquiry into how different disciplines-architecture and art-are addressing some of the most pressing issues of our time: from the decolonization of knowledge to beyond-human intelligences to the possibility of imagining forms of collectivity beyond Western anthropocentrism.

All this happens in a small, crowded bar on either side of St. Mark's Basilica, some standing, some sitting, depending on what seats become available.

The first question that emerges when looking at the projects on display at the 19th Architecture Biennale concerns the defining power. Who decides what deserves to be called intelligence and what instead remains relegated to "wit, skill, dexterity"?

As Ilaria Conti notes, "the concept of the Chile Pavilion-which gives voice to absent intelligences in AI development, including social, mineral and water bodies-puts the question at the center: intelligence for whom? Instead of thinking of it as simply artificial, we should also call it social-because it is always embedded in relationships, territories, conflicts."

This observation puts a finger on an open wound: thecolonial imprint that permeates our definitions of intelligence. Traversing the pavilions, it becomes evident how evencontemporary architecture, while declaring interest in alternative forms of knowledge, tends to replicate Western conceptual structures. Even many countries with colonial histories seem to take these parameters as given, without questioning who historically has the power to determine what is "intelligent" and what is not.
The problem is not just technical or aesthetic, but deeply political and ontological. In contemporary design thinking, the question of intelligence remains predominantly technical-as if it were possible to separate "how" we build from "who" decides what is worthy of recognition as a legitimate form of knowledge.

"Collective intelligence must be seen as interspecies intelligence, not just in the human dimension," Conti argues, touching on the heart of the problem: "it is always humans who interpret it, call it intelligence and use it for their own purposes."

This tension between stated openness and de facto anthropocentrism emerges clearly when we observe how contemporary architecture treats "natural" intelligence. As we walk among installations that incorporate plant elements, biomimetic systems, and organic materials, it strikes me how rarely do these projects really question the design control of human beings.
Everyday experience with non-human life forms reveals intelligences that completely escape our categories of understanding. Observing climbing plants that "know" where to head to climb before they even "see" a support, one is confronted with levels of inexplicability that should challenge the very limits of what we call intelligence. Yet, in the projects seen at the 2025 Architecture Biennale, numerous projects remain "very much within the boundary of the seeded, all very intelligible" (I.C.)
What is probably missing is the recognition of forms of intelligence that exceed Western scientific categories. As Conti notes, the issue is not only about "multispecies" but about "post-human in the sense of beyond-species.

"It is not just a matter of multispecies - animals, plants, minerals. It is beyond-species: how do we include entities that for certain epistemic contexts are invisible? The forces, spirits, energies that other cosmologies recognize as real agents."

Spiritual forces, energies, presences that many non-Western cosmologies consider active agents in the built environment-all of these are absent from contemporary architectural discourse. Architecture could be the privileged field for experimenting with collaborations with beyond-human intelligences, since it works directly with materials, sites, ecosystems, yet it seems reluctant to abandon the myth of total design control.
The result is an architectural "nature" that remains fundamentally decorative or functional, never truly agentic.

In comparing different national approaches, a crucial tension emerges for all contemporary design thinking: to represent or to incorporate? Observing the pavilions of Peru and Mexico (both at the Arsenal) offers an illuminating reflection.

"Peru took symbolic elements, a part for the whole, and created an atmosphere," Conti explains. "It conveyed content without the didacticism of representation. And this is in contrast to Mexico, which makes an entire pavilion around a thousand-year-old indigenous farming system, the Chinampa, filling it with local Venetian plants-but beyond the scenic impact, does it really serve a purpose? What's left?"

This critique touches on a fundamental problem: many projects presented at the Architecture Biennale fall into the trap of didactic reproduction. If the theme is traditional agriculture, one literally reconstructs an agricultural system. If the subject is natural intelligence, plants are inserted. The risk is to reduce complex systems of knowledge to museum objects, depriving them of their real effectiveness.
Architecture is in a peculiar position compared to other disciplines because it must necessarily confront materiality, function, habitability-it cannot limit itself to representation. This is precisely why any failure to go beyond didacticism is all the more significant.
What emerges from the most successful projects is the ability to evoke, to create atmospheres that convey spatial and relational logics without expiring in the ethnographic museum. The Mexican project that juxtaposes culinary recipes and architectural projects reveals this potential: two forms of knowledge with different temporalities - the layered one of collective experience versus the design one of the future - that architecture can hold together when it is not limited to immediate function.

The most radical potential of contemporary architecture emerges when it manages to operate what we might call a "process geography": instead of representing cultural differences as folklore or as "unusual" ingredients, it connects design solutions through the common challenges that generated them.

"If we look at construction techniques in aquatic environments-from the solutions of those who inhabit lagoons in Amazonian settings to Venetian strategies-adaptive intelligences emerge that transcend cultural specificities while remaining deeply rooted in place," he says. "If I look from the point of view of building houses, filling them with local plants to the point of creating an intombment that makes an island, the Venice lagoon is ten meters away from the Titicaca lagoon," I observed during our walk.

In this respect, architecture reveals an advantage over other disciplines: it always works with material, climatic, and social constraints that can create bridges beyond geopolitical divisions. The point is "to connect threads that are kept apart so that you look at them no longer from a historical or geographical point of view but from a processual point of view-how that solution was arrived at" (I.C.)
This approach could allow architecture to practice the "pluriversality" that goes beyond cosmetic multiculturalism. However, as Ilaria Conti notes, "this pluriversality is not really fully and complexly articulated here. "

The question of pluriversality brings us to the heart of what "collective intelligence" in architecture might really mean. It cannot simply be the sum of individual contributions mediated by a universal technical language.

"Collective intelligence means working on shares, not languages," Conti argues. "The fundamental point is that there is no longer a master source. If you have to think about how to express a sentence in various languages-if you think of it right away in many languages together it is different from thinking of it first in English and then translating it. Collective intelligence is the other side of polyglotism, an existential, cultural polyglotism, not just linguistic polyglotism."

This insight is fundamental to envisioning a truly decolonized architecture. It requires the ability to think projects that arise simultaneously from multiple knowledge systems, without a Western "master source" that translates and reduces everything. Collective intelligence must inhabit the interstitial space where different spatial logics meet without canceling each other out.
Architecture has all the tools to reaggregate humanity on non-hegemonic lines-from the need to respond to local material constraints to the ability to create spaces of encounter and exchange. But this requires abandoning the myth of the universal architect-author in favor of truly collaborative processes with human and beyond-human intelligences yet to be recognized.
The challenge, which emerged clearly from our critical walk-through, is whether contemporary architecture is ready to accept this loss of control, this openness to forms of intelligence that cannot be easily pigeonholed within the parameters of the Project. What is at stake is not only aesthetic or functional, but concerns the very possibility of imagining habitable futures for multiple intelligences (and existences).