air conditioners & water confront energy impacts at venice biennale

confronting climate conditions at venice architecture biennale

At the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, a heavy burst of heat and dimly illuminated pools of water mark a physical and symbolic gateway to Carlo Ratti’s reflection on the planet’s future. The immersive opening room at Corderie dell’Arsenale addresses the shared dilemma of how architecture might reckon with the futures it has helped produce, with two vital positions — both urgent, uncomfortable truths. While one installation exposes the mechanisms and costs of environmental inequity, the other insists on imagination and collective praxis as the path forward.

Terms and Conditions by Transsolar, Bilge Kobas, Daniel A. Barber, and Sonia Seneviratne pulls the air conditioner, a quiet agent of comfort, into the foreground. The suspended (inactive) devices encircle visitors stepping into the main exhibition in the ‘waste side’ of this thermal ease, surrounding them with heat expelled by the very systems cooling adjacent galleries, and asking what, exactly, we’ve agreed to in the name of indoor climate control. Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte’s The Third Paradise Perspective offers an equally provocative yet more symbolic vision of transformation. Drawing on artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s concept of a ‘Third Paradise’, a synthesis of the natural and artificial, it visualizes current climate futures of Venice and reframes architecture as a bridge between planetary care and democratic co-creation.

all images by Marco Zorzanello, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

terms and conditions suspends inverted air conditioners

Developed by Transsolar (see more here), Bilge Köbaş, Daniel A. Barber, and Sonia Seneviratne, Terms and Conditions dismantles the logic of air conditioning by reversing its flow and inverting its form. Rather than cooling an interior, it pushes the exhaust that is typically hidden outdoors into the exhibition space itself. This literal inversion turns the exhibition space into a site of confrontation, with the whirring of compressions and the damp heaviness of displaced heat rendering a sense of physical discomfort, in parallel with the symbolic connotations of the broader systems that make thermal comfort possible for some, and impossible for others.

The familiar, sealed coolness of air-conditioned environments that are now standard across malls, offices, and homes comes at a cost: rising emissions, overloaded electrical grids, and a growing dependence on fossil fuels. In this installation, the design team renders this cost no longer invisible and undeniably palpable. Comfort instead becomes conditional, contingent on someone, or some place, bearing its externalized consequences. The project thus visualizes a thermal divide: on one side, environments engineered to be consistent and silent; on the other, noisy, damp spaces left to absorb the excess. By confronting visitors with this imbalance, Terms and Conditions spatializes the global inequities embedded in climate-controlled architecture, and becomes a thermal allegory.

confronting climate conditions at Venice Architecture Biennale

Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte’s third paradise perspective

While Terms and Conditions plunges viewers into the waste heat of the present, The Third Paradise Perspective invites them to step into a symbolic threshold between what is and what could be. Developed by Fondazione Pistoletto Cittadellarte, the work is rooted in artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s long-standing symbol of the ‘Third Paradise’ which ponders a reconfiguration of the traditional infinity sign, expanded to include a central loop that represents the union of nature and artifice. Here, the Third Paradise is imagined as not just a far-away utopia but a close future closely dependent on present responsibility.

The experience of the installation is intentionally symbolic, creating a ‘flooded’ room with water reaching 70 centimeters — the predicted sea level rise in Venice by 2100 — traversed by a pathway in the shape of the Third Paradise. With this, it suggests that the path forward is not linear progress, but what the collective calls ‘demo-praxis’: a reframing of democracy as cooperative creation enacted in everyday negotiations, shared practices, and design processes. In this worldview, architecture becomes a framework within which we can reimagine our relationships to one another and to the planet. This orientation toward incompleteness and active engagement also resonates with the installation’s emphasis on shared responsibility. ‘Preventative peace,’ as the design team puts it, is the opposite of apathy and serves as an invitation to recognize architecture’s role as both a spatial and political practice that is shaped by the choices we make together, in ‘nano-parliaments’ of communities, institutions, and collectives.

a heavy burst of heat and dimly illuminated pools of water mark a physical and symbolic gateway