5 of the Most Exciting National Pavilions at 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale

The 2025 Venice Architecture biennale recently opened its 19^th International Architecture Exhibition. Curated by the esteemed Italian architect Carlo Ratti on the theme of Intelligens.Natural.Artifical.Collectiv, the fair will host some 65 national pavilions across Venice’s urban center, its Giardini park, and the Arsenale theatre. Controversy has built up alongside those pavilions, but to the show’s credit, many of the most exciting installations address issues around Indigenous sovereignty, bodily autonomy, and environmental stewardship—fields architecture and design might uniquely be called upon to explore. Below are a few that Galerie is most excited about as the Biennale takes on Venice from May 10 through November 23, 2025.

1. Brazil: (RE)INVENTION

Some 10,000 years ago, Indigenous peoples in the Amazon began developing infrastructures in their native jungle landscapes. This year, Plano Coletivo curators Luciana Saboia, Eder Alencar, and Matheus Seco look back at those strategies as a way to rethink Indigenous cultural innovation both in terms of its historical importance and as a source for dealing with 21st-century environmental challenges. In the “Garden-Platform” installation, native and adaptive species offer proof that seasonal landscaping can transform urban environments in careful balance, while the pavilion’s second level of suspended panels, stone counterweights, and steel cables ensure the entire installation can be recycled after the crowds move on.

2. Iceland: Lavaforming

Iceland is a country built on lava, necessitating the importing of virtually all building materials. Architect Arnhildur Pálmadóttir, founder of s.ap arkitektar, is looking to make the most of that situation by creating sustainable building materials from the lava itself. Instead of a threat, Pálmadóttir suggests lava can be a controllable, renewable resource. In a dramatic installation, she presents research into just how the volcanic power can be harnessed and capitalized upon, continuing a path towards natural sustainability the country embarked on with its ample geothermal power structure. 

3. Nordic Pavilion: Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture

In 1958, Sverre Fehn completed the Nordic Pavilion for Biennale exhibition organized by the governments of Sweden, Finland, and Norway. For this Biennale, Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki curator Kaisa Karvinen—and a team including architect A.L. Hu, set designer and artist Teo Paaer, and sound designer Tuukka Haapakorpi—transforms this masterpiece of Scandinavian Modernism, with its elegant integration of sunlight, trees, and concrete, into stages for meditations upon how trans bodies, and all bodies, interact with architecture. Marble for Alvar Aalto’s Finlandia Hall is reused as Finnish artist Teo Ala-Ruona offers five speculative scores that prompt performers to use their physicality to explore relations of body and space, modernism and 21st-century identities, power, and ecology.

4. Togo Pavilion: Considering Togo’s Architectural Heritage

For the Republic of Togo’s first participation, curator Studio NEiDA teamed up with Palais de Lomé founding director Sonia Lawson to survey the West African country’s built environment. From vernacular Nôk cave dwellings to the wild modernist confections like the Hôtel de la Paix, the installation examines the country’s colonial legacy, post-independence embrace of concrete public buildings, and 21st-century restoration and adaptive reuse. Designed in collaboration with Venice’s Zuecca Projects, the exhibition furthers a long-overdue reconsideration of West African architecture, not only for its historical and aesthetic achievements, but for its innovation in climate-compatible design.

5. United States: PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity

Whatever one might think of the current administration’s mandating that cultural projects flamboyantly advertise American patriotism, the State Department’s commission for the 2025 Biennial articulates a provocative idea of the United States. Curated by the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, the University of Arkansas, in partnership with DesignConnects and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the exhibition draws on legacies of Native American roundhouses and Gullah color theory for a structure comprising a mass timber veranda with deck and conversation pit—all centering the porch, that architectural bridge between public and private, stranger and relative.