Bartlett Academics and Alumni Exhibit at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale

Widely regarded as the most significant event in the architectural calendar, the Venice Architecture Biennale brings together leading voices from around the world to explore critical issues shaping the built environment today. Taking place every two years, the Biennale offers an unparalleled platform for experimentation, reflection and exchange across disciplines and geographies.

The 2025 edition, curated by Carlo Ratti under the theme Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective., focuses on the role of intelligence – human, ecological and artificial – in shaping the built environment amid accelerating climate and technological change.

Members of the Bartlett community are contributing to the Biennale through national pavilions, the main international exhibition and a range of collateral events. Their research-driven and design-led work engages with themes including environmental repair, material experimentation, planetary resources and collective futures.

• Laura Allen and Mark Smout (Smout Allen) will collaborate with modem (Kathryn Moll & Nicholas de Monchaux) on Ascents: Events: Implements in the main curator exhibition. The installation reimagines our relationship with Earth and technology through speculative instruments inspired by the 1972 Apollo mission. Read more here.
• Prof Murray Fraser, working with Yara Sharif and Nasser Golzari as the Palestine Regeneration Team (PART), is exhibiting within the British Pavilion exhibition, GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair with Objects of Repair, an installation that explores the architectural and geological fractures of Palestine. The British Pavilion is commissioned by the British Council. Read more here.
• Cristina Morbi will present Lithic Chords / Corda Litica in the Arsenale with collaborators Andrea Granitzio and Francesco Banchini. Their work explores the structural potential and resonance of stone through a sustainable and sensorial approach, the historical practice of spolia – tradition of repurposing stones from disparate origins – informs the project’s layered materiality. Read more here.
• Prof Eva Branscome's project Beadwork of Empire and the Architectures of Diaspora will be presented as part of the British Pavilion’s curatorial programme in her capacity as research advisor to the curatorial team.
• Claudia Pasquero will present FundamentAI with ecoLogicStudio, the Synthetic Landscape Lab (Innsbruck University), and the Urban Morphogenesis Lab (Bartlett, UCL). The project explores synthetic ecologies and generative design. 
• Levent Ozruh, Architecture MArch alumnus, will present the ANTI-RUIN project at the Biennale in two formats and locations: firstly as a documentary in the main exhibition where a 20 minute video will show the manufacturing process of stone and sand 3D-printing; and secondly as a full-scale 2.75 metre-tall 3D-printed structure made entirely from stone and sand aggregates at the Turkish Pavilion.
• Sara Alissa and Nojoud Alsudairi, Situated Practice MA alumni and co-founders of Syn Architects, have designed this year's Saudi National Pavilion. The Um Slaim School is a living archive exploring Riyadh’s architectural heritage through ecology, identity and place-based pedagogy. Sara and Nojoud were also named winners of the prestigious AR Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architecture at the Venice Biennale. Read more here.
• Dr Wafa Al-Ghatam (Architectural Space and Computation PhD, 2024) was part of the team behind the Kingdom of Bahrain's pavilion Heatwave, which won the prestigious Golden Lion for Best National Participation. The pavilion addresses rising global temperatures with an innovative cooling structure derived from traditional cooling techniques. Read more here.
• Bartlett alumni Rita Morais (Bio-Integrated Design MArch), Tanvi Khurmi (Architecture MArch) and Alexa Cam (Bio-Integrated Design MSc) will display Blue Garden: The Architecture of Emergence at Venice's historic Arsenale venue. Combining concrete with waste seashells, the project creates a hybrid garden designed for both humans and seaweed. Read more here.
• Enriqueta Llabres Valls will participate in a Biennale Session titled Anticipating the Unprecedented. Architecture Can’t Wait, organised by the School of Architecture at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, in collaboration with Hubert Klumpner (Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, ETH Zurich). The session will explore alternative approaches in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design, especially within contexts marked by extreme vulnerability and crisis.
• Heechan Park, Architecture MArch and Part 3 alumnus, is exhibiting Time for Trees at the Korean Pavilion. The work consists of architectural apparatuses responding to the trees and vegetation surrounding the pavilion, including A Shadow Caster, Giardini Travelers and Elevated Gaze 1995. Through site-specific interventions, the project visualises the interdependence between the Korean Pavilion and its surrounding natural environment, redefining architecture as a dynamic mediator with nature as part of the pavilion's 30th anniversary celebrations. Read more here.
• Bio-Integrated Design MArch/MSc students Arin Aydogdu, Kayan Patel and Parisa Azizi Shamami have been selected to present their project n-swaddle as part of an open call for the Türkiye Pavilion, Grounded (Yerebasan). n-swaddle was exhibited at The Bartlett Autumn Show 2024. The project is a hanging, multidimensional garden that incubates plants using microorganisms within a living fabric structure, exploring primary succession in the context of urban artificiality. Read more here.
• Prof Priti Parikh of The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction represented UCL and the Institution of Civil Engineers at a panel discussion on Collective Baukultur curated by the World Economic Forum on behalf of the Davos Baukultur Alliance. She highlighted the importance of culture, context, community and collaboration for creating sustainable and inclusive cities of the future, with particular focus on youth and children.