Machine learning can assist architects in designing public housing; urban mining can prevent unnecessary demolition and the waste of new materials; there are possible solutions for living in extreme climates — but the crisis is already here, and it must not be ignored. Impressions and moments of reflection from the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Intelligens is not an official word in any language. It is a neologism — an invented term. The curator of the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, Carlo Ratti, took the Latin root of “intelligence” and added a linguistic suffix associated with biological structures — one that implies emergence, transformation, and multiplicity. The term refers to a pluralistic form of intelligence: artificial, natural, and collective. It is an intelligence that emerges from relationships between species, disciplines, and temporalities, in a world of crises, demographic collapse, and information overload. The concept of “adaptation” comes to mind as we acknowledge that we cannot stop climate change, only adapt to it. And the demands of this adaptation extend beyond the climate crisis to a series of interrelated crises: migration, democracy, housing, and more. If adaptation is indeed the key word of our time, we must understand that it is not merely a matter of image or narrative, but one of practical and structural capacity. The poetic ideas presented by the Biennale are thought-provoking, but meaningful tools are needed: policy, regulation, and new economic models — to transform knowledge into real momentum toward change, and to enable adaptation to this new reality.
