| After two days of talks in Switzerland, trade negotiators for the US and China announced on Monday a major de-escalation in tariffs. You can follow Bloomberg News for developments as markets react. Meanwhile, over in Venice, the 2025 Architecture Biennale opened this weekend. Bloomberg Businessweek’s Europe editor David Rocks visited and gives his impression of a few highlights. Plus: In ICE towns, communities are convinced that financial survival depends on locking people up, and the CEO of Chomps talks about the popularity of meat sticks. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. Every two years, the world of architecture—from students to starchitects—descends on Venice for the Biennale. The 2025 edition opened this weekend with the likes of Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas and Anne Lacaton on hand. Although the biggest themes are clearly designing for a warming world and creating a more circular construction economy to slow that warming, the 60-plus national pavilions and the vast central exhibition address topics from the microscopic to the extraterrestrial. The Architecture Biennale runs through Nov. 23 and isn’t to be confused with the Art Biennale (which occupies the Venetian Giardini and the Arsenale in alternate years). I spent three days exploring the exhibition, and I’m sure I missed far more than I saw. (Bloomberg Philanthropies, the philanthropic organization of Bloomberg LP founder and majority owner Michael Bloomberg, is a sponsor of the Biennale.)  The US Pavilion. Photographer: Simone Padovani/Getty Images Many of the exhibits seem as much art as architecture, which may be due to this year’s somewhat inscrutable theme: Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. The central exhibition, in the 1,000-foot-long hall where Venetian craftsmen once made rope, begins with a walk through an intensely hot and humid room, aimed at showing that the future of architecture lies not in “control over nature but in partnership with it as temperatures rise.” The exhibit, curated by Carlo Ratti, an Italian architect and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, includes hundreds of small installations showing, for instance, traditional, low-tech cooling techniques such as shading streets with strips of cloth in Spain. There are meditations on the growing role of artificial intelligence, with humanoid robots that dance, play a steel drum and chat (while I was there, a 5-year-old asked, “Do you like being a robot?” “It’s all I know,” came the response). At the far end, the focus turns to space, with a proposal for an orbiting greenhouse and the proposition that such initiatives might spur us to better appreciate Earth, which is infinitely more hospitable than anything beyond it. In these tense times, of course, war and conflict play a central role in many of the national pavilions. Lebanon focuses on the “ecocide” the country has endured in generations of almost constant warfare. Poland points out that building is fundamentally about finding shelter from the elements but also offers a survey of technologies to stay safe from more human threats, such as fire extinguishers and bunkers. Ukraine’s exhibit is called “Dakh,” Ukrainian for “roof,” which is both the most fundamental form of shelter as well as the first thing hit in a war. The exhibit highlights how Ukrainians have retrieved structural elements from the rubble to create new homes. “We’re speaking about architecture without architects,” curator Bogdana Kosmina told me, “the local masters who transmit their knowledge of building.”  The Ukrainian Pavilion. Photographer: Simone Padovani/Getty Images Several pavilions included sound installations; I highly recommend Luxembourg’s, where you can chill out to a rumbling rendering of various sounds that the authors say are aimed at counteracting “the hegemony of images.” Kosovo goes a step further in the dehegemonization of images, with an installation that envelops you in various smells from the country’s farmland. (It’s less gross than it sounds.) The US focuses on the front porch—a feature that in the 19th and 20th centuries became one of the defining characteristics of American architecture. The curators have built a wooden “porch” in front of the 95-year-old pavilion building, to highlight it as transitional space from the public/street outside to the private/home inside. The idea is to offer a better understanding of this place where people “stop by, sit, converse and play music,” pavilion co-commissioner Susan Chin told me. Some exhibits are difficult to make sense of, yet kind of cool. The Nordic countries’ pavilion, for instance, includes a graffiti-covered car with concrete pillars bashed through the hood and the rear windscreen. Um … what? Serbia features intricate textiles hanging from the ceiling that will be slowly unraveled over the next six months, returning to their original form of 125 balls of wool, to emphasize circularity and temporality. (So if you like weaving, it’s probably a good idea to visit sooner rather than later.) If it’s all a little bit too much, you can always stop in at the Argentine Pavilion, which features a 100-foot-long pillow in a darkened room with ambient music superimposed on sounds of wind, waves, rainfall and birdcalls. “We wanted to offer a place for a siesta,” the attendant said as I puzzled over the exhibit’s meaning. “Just please take off your shoes.” |
