 For the Estonian pavilion entry at the Venice Architecture Biennale, designers attached external insulation commonly found in Estonia on Soviet-era apartment blocks to the facade of a Venetian building. Photographer: Simone Padovani/Getty Images Europe There’s a distinct good cop–bad cop feel to the choice of exhibits at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale. The festival — presented under the themed heading “Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective.” — reflects a climate in which architects are painfully aware that construction needs a radical rethink to both manage climate change and reduce the industry’s contribution to it. In response, the exhibit swings between upbeat proposals for a greener future and bleakly apocalyptic, almost Boschian visions of what might happen if such efforts fail. On one hand, there are exhibits packed with bright ideas: The Belgian pavilion features a dense thicket of tropical plants, installed as an experiment to explore the possibility of using greenery to partly or totally replace air conditioning. Bahrain, which won the festival’s Golden Lion award for best pavilion, presented a cooling ceiling that could harness a geothermal well and solar chimney. And the US pavilion’s celebration of the American porch highlights how some useful ways of cooling and opening out buildings have been around for a long time. There is, however, a melancholic other side to the coin. Kosovo’s pavilion, for example, features an “olfactory calendar,” a collection of rural seasonal scents with a darker underpinning. Now that climate change has destabilized the old seasonal rhythms, Kosovan farms consulted for the exhibit cite these plant smells as somewhat more reliable ways of sensing where they are in the year.  For the Vatican’s first-ever entry in the architecture festival, the Holy See invited Mexico City’s Tatiana Bilbao Estudio and Barcelona’s MAIO Architects to design a glowy environment for spiritual reflection. Photographer: Simone Padovani/Getty Images Europe War also looms large. Ukraine’s contribution highlights the domestic roof’s function as a shield from aerial bombardment, while Latvia’s pavilion acknowledges the likely permanence of military fortifications along the Russian border by proposing ways to make them more aesthetically appealing. Germany has it both ways, with its pavilion pairing a cooler green room with one exhibiting the full oppressive conditions of a summer urban heat island. Perhaps the starkest display is an installation in the non-national, curated section of the Biennale, created by German climate-conscious engineers Transsolar: a windowless warehouse hung with air conditioning units. Working at full tilt but hung freestanding, so that they cannot perform the usual task of transferring the room’s heat outside, their spinning fans heat the space unbearably — mutely demonstrating the madness of relying on techniques to manage climate extremes that merely exacerbate the problem or shift it onto someone else.  The Nordic countries pavilion features a series of performances and interventions titled “Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture.” Photographer: Simone Padovani/Getty Images Europe  A performance at the Nordic pavilion. Photographer: Simone Padovani/Getty Images Europe Some exhibitors break out beyond this binary. Notably a few intriguing exhibits scanning the intersection between architecture, gender and sexuality. In the Nordic pavilion, Finnish artist Teo Ala-Ruona explores parallels between architectural re-use and the trans body, excoriating modernism as rigid and oppressive. This might be the festival’s liveliest, most-striking exhibit — with periodic live performances — although its implied vision of a flexible, adaptive architectural future seems uncannily similar to contemporary, already ubiquitous shipping container urbanism. Across the park, the Dutch pavilion ponders what a sports bar that is conceived for and by LGBTQ people might be like (spoiler: it will likely involve a lot of mauve). A few exhibitors — albeit surprisingly few — also address the AI theme nodded to in the title of this year’s festival. Japan’s pavilion houses an exploration of an “in-between space” where humans and AI might co-create in healthy imperfection. In the non-national section, meanwhile, an exhibit from the firm BIG pits traditional Bhutanese wood carvers against a robot carver imitating their work, in what Bjarke Ingels himself has called “not a clash but a convergence.” He’s wrong here: The magical spectacle of the human carvers and their work’s effortless superiority over the robot makes you want to actively boo the mechanical arm.
Overall, however, the many bright ideas here collectively create a sense of unease — appropriately enough, given the times. Chief is the mismatch between the small scale of many solutions explored and the sheer size of our problems. The only national exhibits featuring actual models of cities are those of Singapore and China, the latter sited as usual in the exhibition ground’s most peripheral location. An alien strolling through the Biennale Gardens might at times be forgiven for thinking that human architects were not members of a world-shaping profession, but a modest group of craftspeople focused mainly on restoring old buildings with recycled stone. — Feargus O’Sullivan  | | | Design stories we’re writing |  A model by Studio Gang for Tom Lee Park in Memphis, part of the US pavilion exhibit on porches at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Photographer: Simone Padovani/Getty Images Europe If you enjoyed Feargus’s postcard from Venice, check out his writeup from the US pavilion. For its entry, curators from the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture highlighted the humble porch. No question, this is a form of vernacular design seen throughout the world; indeed, the notion of the porch may have first come to the US by way of slaves who built shotgun houses based on designs from Haiti and West Africa. The history and typology of the American porch has been the subject of rich research by Germane Barnes and others in recent years. As O’Sullivan writes, the porch found its fullest expression in America.  New York residents got a first look at the new Davis Center at the Harlem Meer late in April. Photographer: Richard Barnes The wrongful conviction of five East Harlem teenagers for a sexual assault case in 1989 strained the relationship between Harlem residents and Central Park. A new facility aims to shore up that relationship. The Davis Center at the Harlem Meer features new swimming and skating facilities — upgrading amenities long used by residents — and restores waterways and other natural park features. Designed by the Central Park Conservancy with firms Mitchell Giurgola and Susan T. Rodriguez Architecture & Design, the new Davis Center is the result of discussions between park stakeholders and nearby community groups. As Rthvika Suvarna writes, the Davis Center project is an effort in rebuilding trust. Design stories we’re reading | A rare Frank Lloyd Wright skyscraper has been spared the wrecking ball in Oklahoma. (The New York Times) Newly minted Loeb Fellow Oliver Wainwright visits Annabelle Selldorf’s controversial renovation of the National Gallery’s similarly controversial Sainsbury Wing. (The Guardian) The US Department of Justice is opening an investigation into a new North Texas community planned by the region’s largest mosque. (The Architect’s Newspaper) Flying cars won’t make the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Games a car-free Olympics, Alissa Walker writes. (Torched) Park rangers discovered a new kind of desert wildflower in Big Bend, Texas. Parks! (Landscape Architecture Magazine) AI is coming for interior designers. (The Wall Street Journal) | 
