city of plants explores coexistence among humans, plants and AI

MAD & PARCNOUVEAU PRESENT City of Plants at VENICE Biennale 2025

More than an installation, City of Plants is a research project that questions our relationship with nature in the urban realm. Presented at the Biennale Architettura 2025 and curated by Carlo Ratti, City of Plants is the result of a collaboration between Parcnouveau and MAD and explores new scenarios of coexistence among humans, plants, and artificial intelligences. In an era where cities are complex layers of materials, technologies, and living presences, the project proposes a paradigm shift: to rethink the landscape not as a static backdrop, but as a relational and dynamic system where people, nature, and AI coexist as active agents.

invited by Carlo Ratti, curator of the 19th Venice International Architecture Biennale, Ma Yansong presents City of Plants, an architectural installation by MAD | all images courtesy of MAD

CARLO RATTI CURATES ai-RESPONSIVE ECOSYSTEM

The installation by MAD emerges from this investigation as a responsive ecosystem made up of three main elements: a base equipped with environmental sensors, three living micro-landscapes enclosed in transparent cases, and an immersive sound and light environment that constantly evolves. With the contribution of the Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, electrodes capture the environmental conditions affecting the plants—humidity, temperature, light—and translate them into sound frequencies that compose a real-time musical landscape. At the same time, visitors’ movements are detected and interpreted by intelligent algorithms, generating an ever-changing dialogue between humans and the vegetal world.

In this shared space, natural and artificial intelligences converge to create a common language in which plants are no longer passive presences, but active interlocutors capable of expressing states, needs, and rhythms. The design combines advanced technologies of sensing and bio-interaction with a material and spatial presence that blurs the boundary between art, architecture, and landscape. Transparent domes, resting on organically shaped bases, host curated micro-forests: miniature self-regulating ecosystems that recall both autonomous and fragile worlds. Their futuristic, greenhouse-like appearance evokes landed spaceships, while the interplay between the engineered shell and the spontaneous vitality of the vegetation generates a subtle tension between architecture and nature.

City of Plants presents a vision of a future urban landscape where humans and nature coexist in harmony

CITY OF PLANTS IS AN INVITATION TO RETHINK LANDSCAPE

Visitors are invited to touch, listen, and perceive, transforming the installation into a sensitive machine where the human body becomes part of the work. The historical backdrop of the Corderie dell’Arsenale, with its raw bricks and traces of time, contrasts with the smooth surfaces of the structures, producing a suspended atmosphere in which past and future intersect. Here, nature is not nostalgia, but a project of future cohabitation.

As Margherita Brianza, founder of Parcnouveau, affirms: ‘City of Plants is an invitation to rethink the role of landscape in contemporary cities—towards spaces that are not only efficient or optimized, but capable of hosting creative encounters between intelligences and generating harmony through complexity.’ On view inside the Corderie dell’Arsenale until November 23, 2025, City of Plants will continue to evolve through the passing days, seasons, and the relationships it will be able to activate.

City of Plants continuously monitors plant growth conditions in real time through environmental sensors

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in this future city, the richness of human sensory experience within nature becomes the primary measure of urban quality

the installation is composed of a responsive base equipped with high-precision sensors, an integrated AV interaction system, and three connected ecological landscapes enclosed within dome-like structures

as visitors enter, sensors embedded in the floor detect the rhythm of their footsteps, which are also translated into sound through a custom algorithm

City of Plants is enclosed within a single dome that unifies the entire installationwith this project, MAD symbolizes both ecological conservation and a vision for a hopeful future

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project info:

name: City of Plants

event: 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale Di Venezia
design: MAD | @madarchitects & Parcnouveau | @parcnouveau

principal partners: Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, Yosuke Hayano
design team: Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, Yosuke Hayano, Andrea D’Antrassi, Chiara Ciccarelli, Giuseppe Zaccaria, Evrim Ecem Saçmalı, Licia D’Antrassi, Giovanni Colombara, Fiona Ziying Qi, Alessandro Fisalli, Julian Salvadori
experience design and AI research: Bruno Zamborlin
landscape: Parcnouveau | @parcnouveau
lighting: Flux CS
bonsai specialist: Crespi
musical composer: Michele Tadini
visual artist: Proloog.tv
additional support: ENEA (Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development), Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Logli Saint-Gobain