81. Venice Film Festival
80. Venice Film Festival
79. Venice Film Festival
The Biennale Arte Guide
Foreigners Everywhere
The Biennale Architecture Guide
The Laboratory of the Future
The Biennale Arte Guide
Il latte dei sogni
In a Biennale that urges architecture to mobilize all forms of intelligence to address the climate crisis, Canada’s National Participation responds to Biennale curator Carlo Ratti’s call to learn from natural systems by transforming its Pavilion into a living organism.
Picoplanktonics is a living architecture experiment that uses bacteria as a construction material, integrating technological innovation and biology. At its core, large-scale robotic-printed structures host Synechococcus PCC 7002: microorganisms similar to picoplankton (marine cyanobacteria that, 2.4 billion years ago, were the first to enable the formation of an oxygen-rich atmosphere). These organisms absorb carbon dioxide and, through photosynthetic processes, help stiffen the material via biomineralization. The structures – among the largest ever created with living material – were cultivated in the laboratory and then transferred to the Giardini of the Biennale, into an environment where light, humidity, temperature, and water salinity are carefully calibrated to sustain their growth throughout the exhibition. Born out of research at ETH Zurich on architectural-scale biofabrication platforms, the project is the work of the Living Room Collective, led by Canadian architect and bio-designer Andrea Shin Ling, together with Nicholas Hoban, Vincent Hui, and Clayton Lee.
This collective of scientists, artists, and educators operates at the intersection of architecture, biology, and digital fabrication technologies. Their goal is to move beyond extractive production models and develop design methods and processes rooted in natural systems. More than a mere installation, Canada’s contribution is a living laboratory: the material is alive and changes over time, growth is monitored, and care itself becomes part of the project. In this sense, the exhibition stages a process of stewardship – or “ethical management” – that assigns architects the unprecedented role of caretakers and organizers rather than creators. Figures of care, rather than demiurges who generate and then abandon. Picoplanktonics does not offer utopian visions or futuristic promises, but instead provides a tangible prototype of coexistence. It is an invitation, addressed to designers and visitors alike, to imagine processes in which the built environment does not dominate nature, but becomes part of it.
