Living Room Collective uses live cyanobacteria within 3D printed biostructures to capture carbon dioxide from air in the Canada Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. Named Picoplanktonics, the exhibition commissioned by The Canada Council for the Arts is on view from May 10th to November 26th, 2025. designboom speaks with Living Room Collective’s lead and biodesigner Andrea Shin Ling about the project. In our interview, she says that architecture often uses the term ‘regenerative design’ when referring to circular or upcycled material systems. ‘In Picoplanktonics, we are talking about the biological definition of regeneration, which means the literal ability to regenerate or renew from damaged or dead parts,’ she tells designboom.

The research team has merged two ancient metabolic processes for Picoplanktonics: photosynthesis and biocementation. For the former, they turn to cyanobacteria, one of the oldest groups of bacterial organisms on the planet. ‘Cyanobacteria are among the first photosynthetic organisms and are believed to be responsible for the Great Oxygenation Event, where 2.4 billion years ago, the atmosphere transformed from a high CO2 environment to a high O2 environment because of photosynthesis,’ Andrea Shin Ling explains. They can also produce biocementation, or the process of capturing carbon dioxide from air and turning it into solid minerals, like carbonates. Because of this, the resulting minerals act like ‘cement’ and can store the carbon permanently, keeping it out of the atmosphere.

all images courtesy of The Living Room Collective | photos by Valentina Mori, unless stated otherwise

Infusing the bacteria during the printing stage

Before bringing them to Venice, Andrea Shin Ling and the Living Room Collective fabricated the 3D printed biostructures at ETH Zürich’s laboratory. The biodesigner shares with us that when they make these structures, they already infuse the living cyanobacteria during the printing stage instead of later on. Then, they need to let the bacteria grow and take care of them so they can grow. This means they have to provide enough light, warmth, and humidity so that they can proliferate and slowly harden the prints.

‘The idea is that the bacteria cooperate in a human-initiated fabrication process and, with our care, can continue and finish that process (in this case, hardening the printed structures they live in),’ says Andrea Shin Ling. She adds that for the 3D printed biostructure with live cyanobacteria in Venice, favorable conditions mean warm sunlight, high humidity, and access to salt water. ‘These are conditions that are common in Venice and achievable in the Canada Pavilion, which informed our design process,’ the biodesigner explains to designboom.

Living Room Collective uses live cyanobacteria within 3D printed biostructures to capture carbon dioxide from air

Microorganisms that can repair themselves to a healthy state

In Picoplanktonics, the Living Room Collective works with bacteria as the living component of their material system. It has the ability to grow and die within the 3D printed biostructures, as shown in Venice, and the colony can restore itself under favorable conditions after periods of decline. Andrea Shin Ling says, however, that the process isn’t necessarily consistent since it depends on the environmental conditions at a particular point in time.

‘So, for instance, a bioprint might dry out if the air is too dry that week, and many of the bacteria die. But because the system is regenerative, the bacteria population has the potential to restore itself when favorable conditions return and then continue their carbon sequestration work,’ she shares with designboom.

these biostructures are inside the Canada Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025

During their research process, the group has also had samples where the bacteria have gotten ‘sick’, worn out, or where they looked like they were over-oxidized. With some care, the live cyanobacteria were able to repair themselves back to a healthy state. This is what Andrea Shin Ling means when she describes regenerative design. It looks more into the potential of biological material systems that are dynamic and restorative.

‘But their responsivity can also create situations that we don’t want. So much of the project is then trying to understand what is causing these situations and monitoring conditions so that we can respond accordingly,’ the biodesigner adds. Visitors to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 can see the research process and progress of Picoplanktonics firsthand inside the Canada Pavilion. It remains on-site from May 10th to November 26th, 2025.

the research group takes care of the bacteria throughout the exhibition to maintain their healthy state

the bacteria need warm sunlight, high humidity, and access to salt water to thrive

the research group already infuses the living cyanobacteria during the printing stage | image © designboom

the bacteria harden the printed structures they live in | image © designboom

the research team has used ancient metabolic processes for Picoplanktonics | image © designboom

the cyanobacteria can also produce biocementation, or the process of capturing carbon dioxide from air

Living Room Collective’s lead And biodesigner Andrea Shin Ling

the exhibition is on view until November 26th, 2025

project info:

name: Picoplanktonics | @picoplanktonics

group: The Living Room Collective

team: Andrea Shin Ling Nicholas Hoban, Vincent Hui, Clayton Lee

commission by: The Canada Council for the Arts | @canada.council

event: Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 | @labiennale

location: Calle Giazzo, 30122 Venice, Italy

dates: May 10th to November 26th, 2025

research and development: Andrea Shin Ling, Yo-Cheng Jerry Lee, Nijat Mahamaliyev, Hamid Peiro, Dalia Dranseike, Yifan Cui, Pok Yin Victor Leung, Barrak Darweesh

photography: Valentina Mori | @_valentinamori_

production

eth zurich: Huang Su, Wenqian Yang, Che-Wei Lin, Sukhdevsinh Parmar; Tobias Hartmann, Michael Lyrenmann, Luca Petrus, Jonathan Leu, Philippe Fleischmann, Oliver Zgraggen, Paul Fischlin, Mario Hebing, Franklin Füchslin; Hao Wu, Nicola Piccioli-Cappelli, Roberto Innocenti, Sigurd Rinde, Börte Emiroglu, Stéphane Bernhard, Carlo Pasini, Apoorv Singh, Paul Jaeggi; Mario Guala, Isabella Longoni;

toronto metropolitan university: Venessa Chan, Minh Ton, Daniel Wolinski, Marko Jovanovic, Santino D’Angelo Rozas, Rachel Kim, Alexandra Waxman, Richard McCulloch, Stephen Waldman, Tina Smith, Andrea Skyers, Randy Ragan, Emma Grant, Shira Gellman, Mariska Espinet, Suzanne Porter, Stacey Park, Amanda Wood, Lisa Landrum, Dorothy Johns, Cedric Ortiz

university of toronto: Daniel Lewycky, Philipp Cop

visualisation: Adrian Yu, Nazanin Kazemi, Ariel Weiss

structural advisors: Andrea Menardo, Kam-Ming Mark Tam

graphic design: Shannon Lin

website: Sigurd Rinde, Shannon Lin

local project logistics: Tamara Andruszkiewicz

project advisors: ETH Zurich, Benjamin Dillenburger, Mark Tibbitt

support: Canada Council, Digital Building Technologies, Institute of Technology & Architecture, D-ARCH, ETH Zurich, Department of Architectural Science, Toronto Metropolitan University, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto, Royal Architectural Institute of Canada; Advanced Engineering with Living Materials (ALIVE) Initiative, ETH Zurich; Additive Tectonics GmbH; ABB Switzerland; Vestacon Limited and NEUF Architect(e)s

The post 3D printed biostructures with live bacteria capture carbon dioxide from air at venice biennale appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives transforms the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens into a stage for over 60 international artists grappling with one of the most urgent ethical questions of our time: how do we live with, and not over, animals? 

Running until January 7th, 2026, the museum-wide show spans five floors, combining visual art, science, philosophy, and activism to challenge speciesism and advocate for animal rights, sentience, and voice. ‘At its core, Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives is an attempt to shift our gaze from a purely anthropocentric worldview to one that recognises the rights, agency, and suffering of non-human beings.’ Katerina Gregos, curator of the exhibition and EMST’s creative director, explains, speaking with designboom. Inspired by John Berger’s seminal 1980 essay, Why Look at Animals? underscores the notion of ‘listening beyond language.’ It implicitly strives to ‘speak for those who have no voice,’ as the curator frames it, a driving force that shaped the entire process.

from left to right: Mark Dion, Men and Game, 1998. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, Los Angeles | Rossella Biscotti, Clara, 2016. Courtesy of the artist | all installation view images by Paris Tavitian, unless stated otherwise

listening beyond language: art as a site for interspecies empathy

The curatorial framework by the art historian Katerina Gregos pierces through the anthropocentric lens that has rendered animals invisible, both culturally and ecologically. ‘I’ve always felt the subject of animal rights and well–being to be an urgent one, and was puzzled how the so-called ‘art world’ did not consider it worthy of attention until very recently,’ she shares with designboom. Far from romanticising nature, the show boldly confronts the systems that exploit animal life: industrial farming, vivisection, the exotic pet trade, hunting, and entertainment. Works on view make visible the brutal disconnections of modernity, where animals have been relegated from myth, companion, and co-inhabitant to product and spectacle. Berger’s claim that animals have ‘disappeared’ from daily life is literal here – their erasure becomes the focal point of critical reflection and creative resistance.

While rooted in ethics, Why Look at Animals? also delves into science, drawing on neuroethology and animal studies to dismantle outdated ideas like Descartes’ bête-machine, the animal as automaton. ‘I’ve long been concerned with questions of injustice and inequality, particularly within the human sphere,’ Gregos tells us, adding that she ‘realised early on that they are sentient, intelligent beings who are disadvantaged in our world because they do not possess speech.’ Visitors are prompted to engage with animals as complex beings with emotional lives, intelligence, and social structures that may differ from human norms but are no less profound. Texts by thinkers like Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, and Tom Regan shape the theoretical spine of the exhibition, bringing together philosophical, legal, and environmental dimensions of animal advocacy. ‘This systemic disconnection from the lives and deaths of animals mirrors a broader ethical and ecological rupture, one that the exhibition at EMST seeks to confront,’ insists Gregos. In a world where animals are often framed as voiceless, this show turns up the volume, demanding a reconfiguration of how we think and live. Dive into our in-depth discussion with Katerina Gregos below.

Nikos Tranos, Terrain (bridle for horses), 2024. courtesy of the artist and Zoumboulakis Galleries, Athens | Jonas Staal, Exo-Ecologies, 2023. Commissioned by Power Station of Art l 14th Shanghai Biennale Cosmos Cinema, Shanghai. Courtesy of the artist

INTERVIEW WITH KATERINA GREGOS

designboom (DB): How did John Berger’s 1980 essay shape your vision for this exhibition? Are there particular passages or ideas from the text that served as a curatorial compass? 

Katerina Gregos (KG): The title of the exhibition is drawn directly from John Berger’s seminal 1980 essay Why Look at Animals?, which was both a starting point and a conceptual anchor for the project. Berger’s reflections on the estrangement of humans from animals resonated deeply with me and informed my curatorial explorations. He begins his essay by highlighting the important role that animals played in human societies; ‘The animals first entered the human imagination as messengers and promises’ he writes, thus acknowledging the deep symbolic and spiritual role animals once played in human cultures. However, he goes on to point out a sea change in the relationship between humans and animals during modernity, highlighting the fact that ‘In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared.’ This is a reference not only to extinction or physical absence but to their cultural and symbolic disappearance from human life. ‘Everywhere animals disappear’ he emphasizes, ‘In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.’ This is a striking statement on how animals have been marginalized and isolated in modern society, especially through artificial settings like zoos or circuses where they have been reduced to a spectacle or commodity – confined to manmade spaces, such as theme parks, factory farms, and, ultimately, to the abstraction of the supermarket shelf.

This systemic disconnection from the lives and deaths of animals mirrors a broader ethical and ecological rupture, one that the exhibition at EMST seeks to confront. Berger’s idea that animals have ‘lost their centrality’ in the human imagination helped shape the curatorial vision, which does not aim to romanticise animals or nature, but rather to challenge the mechanisms – economic, cultural, and visual – through which non-human lives have been rendered invisible, disposable, or instrumentalised. The book serves as the basis for the exhibition’s ethico-philosophical approach to non-human lives, and its plea for a consideration of animal rights. It is in this spirit that Why Look at Animals? becomes not only a question, but a provocation, one that urges viewers to reconsider how we see, relate to, and live with other species.

front to back: Maarten Vanden Eynde Homo stupidus stupidus, 2008. Private collection, Slovenia | Nabil Boutros, Celebrities / Ovine Condition, 2014. Courtesy of the artist

DB: What was the most challenging aspect of curating an exhibition that seeks to raise awareness and advocate for the moral and legal consideration of non-human life?

KG: One of the most challenging aspects was finding the right balance between raising awareness and fostering critical reflection – without falling into didacticism or moralising or the trappings of simplistic agit-prop art. Art is not activism in the traditional sense; its strength lies in its ability to open up space for nuanced thinking, emotional engagement, and deeper contemplation. But when dealing with such an urgent and ethically charged subject as the rights of non-human life, the line between aesthetics, advocacy, and information is a delicate one. Another challenge was how to sensitively represent the often invisible or marginalised suffering of animals, especially those not typically granted empathy – such as lab animals, factory-farmed creatures, or those displaced by environmental destruction. How do you visualise their realities without sensationalising or exploiting their pain? How do you speak for those who have no voice? These were questions I constantly grappled with. That is why there are no taxidermied animals in the exhibition, or scenes of graphic violence.

On a practical level, assembling a constellation of works that reflected a diversity of voices, geographies, and cultural understandings of human-animal relationships was vital. It was important to resist a Western-centric narrative and instead draw attention to plural worldviews – particularly Indigenous, postcolonial, or non-Western perspectives – that often hold a much more holistic understanding of interspecies coexistence. Ultimately, the challenge was to curate an exhibition that doesn’t offer easy answers, but rather provokes questions – about ethics, responsibility, and our place in the wider web of life. I hope that Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives can contribute to a broader shift in consciousness and policy, while also encouraging a personal reckoning about the assumptions we have.

front to back: Maarten Vanden Eynde Homo stupidus stupidus, 2008. Private collection, Slovenia | Nabil Boutros, Celebrities / Ovine Condition, 2014. Courtesy of the artist

DB: How does the exhibition address our uneven empathy toward animals, especially those typically overlooked or excluded?

KG: The exhibition aims to challenge the hierarchy of empathy that governs our relationships with non-human animals – where certain species are cherished, while others are ignored, commodified, or exploited without a second thought. At its core is the recognition that all forms of life are interconnected, and that our survival is deeply dependent on the well-being of the ecosystems and species with whom we share this planet. Despite having histories marked by colonialism, fascism, and struggles for independence – oppressions that should have sensitised us to injustice – we continue to uphold a deeply anthropocentric worldview. We presume human superiority over other species, often failing to acknowledge the moral and ecological consequences of that belief. This mindset not only leads to the suffering of non-human lives but positions us as one of the few species capable of destroying its own habitat.

Through Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives, I hope to provoke a deeper reflection on these contradictions, and encourage viewers to reconsider the ways in which empathy is selectively applied. By bringing to light the lives and perspectives of animals we rarely think about – from those used in testing or factory farming to those displaced by extractivist practices – the exhibition seeks to foster a more just and inclusive understanding of coexistence. Empathy must be extended beyond the familiar and the lovable, to include all those whose lives are intertwined with ours – often invisibly.

the museum-wide show advocates for animal rights, sentience, and voice | image © designboom

DB: With artists from over 30 countries, how did you make sure the exhibition reflects culturally diverse understandings of human-animal relationships rather than a Western-centric view?

KG: From its inception, Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives was conceived not as a Western-centric exhibition about animals in art, but as a critical, ethical, and culturally expansive exploration of human-animal relationships across different regions, histories, and worldviews. One of EMST’s core commitments is to challenge the dominant narratives that often shape large-scale exhibitions, particularly those rooted in a Western canon. In line with the museum’s mission to explore ‘creative memory practices’ and resist presentism and amnesia, the curatorial approach deliberately sought out artists whose practices are embedded in culturally specific, historically layered, and often marginalised understandings of non-human life.

The exhibition features over 200 works by 60 artists from more than 30 countries across four continents, many of whom engage with non-Western cosmologies, Indigenous perspectives, and postcolonial critiques of human exceptionalism. This diversity was not incidental – it reflects the museum’s broader aim to foreground multiple, often contradictory, ways of understanding the world, particularly those shaped by colonial histories, forced industrialisation, ecological degradation, and ongoing systems of exploitation. Moreover, EMST’s position in Athens – as a city at the intersection of Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa – offers a unique vantage point from which to question binary worldviews. Greece itself has a hybrid identity shaped by Eastern, Levantine, and Western influences, and the museum draws on this complexity to amplify voices and narratives that sit outside of dominant curatorial models. In this sense, Why Look at Animals? is not only about animals, but also about how different cultures relate to the living world – how they remember, mythologise, commodify, mourn, or coexist with it. It is about making space for those understandings that have been excluded or undervalued, and about using contemporary art to surface new ethical relationships with more-than-human life.

Oussama Tabti, Homo-Carduelis, 2022 (installation view), Sound installation, Bird cages, speakers, 33’ (loop), Dimensions variable, Collection of EMST

DB: Do you see this exhibition as the beginning of a larger movement within contemporary art to address the rights of non-human beings? What role should artists and institutions play going forward?

KG: Yes, I believe this exhibition is part of a growing and necessary shift in contemporary art – one that seeks to dismantle anthropocentric worldviews and take seriously the rights, experiences, and agency of non-human beings. While this conversation has existed in philosophy, science, and activism for some time, contemporary art is now increasingly engaging with it in ways that are visceral, imaginative, and politically urgent. Art has a unique capacity to visualise the invisible, to make felt what is often ignored, and to propose new modes of thinking and relating. Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives contributes to a wider re-evaluation of how humans coexist with the more-than-human world – by foregrounding the ethical, emotional, and ecological dimensions of that relationship. The exhibition does not claim to provide definitive answers, but rather opens up a space for questioning, witnessing, and empathising – urging us to reconsider our own fraught and conflicted relationship with animals.

Going forward, artists and institutions alike have a responsibility to foster this kind of critical dialogue. For institutions, that means programming that reflects ecological urgency, supporting transdisciplinary approaches, and ensuring that diverse cultural perspectives on non-human life are represented – not just those rooted in Western scientific or philosophical frameworks. For artists, it means continuing to challenge dominant narratives, creating work that highlights urgent issues and how we understand them and using their practices to imagine more equitable multispecies futures. If there is a movement underway, it must also be an ethical one – grounded in care, accountability, and an openness to learn from other ways of being. The museum can – and must – be a place where such reorientations can begin.

visitors are prompted to engage with animals as complex beings with emotional lives | image © designboom

DB: In working on this project, did your personal relationship with animals or views on speciesism evolve in ways you didn’t expect?

KG: Curating Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives has been both a professional and deeply personal journey. I’ve long been concerned with questions of injustice and inequality, particularly within the human sphere. But I’ve also grown up with many different animals, living side by side with them, and realised early on that they are sentient, intelligent beings who are disadvantaged in our world because they do not possess speech. I’ve always felt the subject of animal rights and well–being to be an urgent one, and was puzzled how the so-called ‘art world’ did not consider it worthy of attention until very recently. Working closely on this exhibition, immersing myself in the vast and often disturbing realities of human-animal relationships, made me confront more viscerally the structural violence and moral blind spots that underpin speciesism.

What surprised me was not so much a change of heart – I have always felt that the way humans treat animals is profoundly problematic – but rather a sharpening of perspective, an expanded sense of urgency given the ecological crisis, in which animals are the invisible victims. The research forced me to confront the sheer scale and normalisation of cruelty towards non-human lives, often hidden in plain sight. I realised just how embedded this hierarchy is in our culture and how difficult it is to disentangle ourselves from it, even when we try. The exhibition also made me reflect more consciously on the idea of co-existence – not as an abstract ideal, but as a necessary ethical imperative. It’s no longer enough to think of animals as beings we must protect out of compassion. We must start acknowledging them as subjects with agency, presence, and rights, as lives that matter in and of themselves, not just in relation to us. This shift, I believe, is one that artists and cultural institutions must support. We have to help recalibrate the ethical lens through which we look at the world, to open up space for imagining new forms of kinship and solidarity across species.

Lynn Hershman Leeson The Infinity Engine, 2014 (detail) Multimedia installation, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist, Altman Siegel, San Francisco and Bridget Donahue, New York

DB: What kind of emotional or intellectual response do you hope to evoke in viewers?

KG: The exhibition confronts a range of exploitative and often invisible forms of violence against animals – whether through scientific testing, space exploration, genetic engineering, hunting, or habitat destruction driven by extractivist and industrial agricultural practices. At its core, Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives is an attempt to shift our gaze from a purely anthropocentric worldview to one that recognises the rights, agency, and suffering of non-human beings. I hope the show elicits both an emotional and intellectual response: empathy, reflection, discomfort, perhaps even outrage – but also a deeper understanding of the structural and ethical failures that underpin our relationship with the non-human world.

The goal is not to provoke guilt, but to awaken awareness and a sense of shared responsibility, and an impetus to change our habits (to meat, for example). By inviting viewers to confront the systemic ways in which human actions harm animal lives and degrade shared ecosystems, Why Look at Animals? aims to build a compelling case for reimagining how we cohabit the planet. The destruction we inflict on non-human life is ultimately a form of self-harm – an expression of greed, moral failure, and a profound inability to coexist with what is simply other than ourselves. If this project can spark meaningful dialogue, raise awareness beyond the art world, and contribute even incrementally to changing attitudes or policy, that would already be a powerful outcome.

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Taxonomic Trophies, 2005 – ongoing (detail)
Branches, wood and metal name tags
Dimensions variable 
Courtesy of the artist

Gustafsson & Haapoja Embrace Your Empathy, 2016/2025 (installation view) Installation, 20 Flags Dimensions variable Co-commissioned by EMSΤ Courtesy of the artists

Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal, Comrades in Extinction, 2020 – 2021 (installation view, detail), installation with wood, hardened oil landscape and gouache paintings. Dimensions variable, Production by EMST. Courtesy of Studio Jonas Staal

the show boldly confronts the systems that exploit animal life | image © designboom

Paris Petridis Lagia, 2001; Imathia, 2006; Thessaloniki, 2021; Galilee, 2011; Dead Sea, 2012. Courtesy of the artist

(from left to right): Marcus Coates, Extinct Animals, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London | Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost, hello, are we in the show?, 2012. Collection S.M.A.K., Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent | Anne Marie Maes, Glossa (bee tongue), 2024.

Marcus Coates Extinct Animals, 2018 (installation view, detail) Group of 19 casts, plaster Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London| image © designboom

project info:

name: Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives

curator: Katerina Gregos | @katerina.gregos

venue: EMST – National Museum of Contemporary Art | @emstathens, Athens, Greece

exhibition design: Flux Office | @flux_office

dates: May 15th, 2025 – January 7th, 2026

The post ‘why look at animals?’ at EMST: katerina gregos on speaking for the voiceless appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

MVRDV’s Winy Maas sits down with designboom to discuss the making of the kinetic Sombra Pavilion and the 3D printed Biotopia installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. Before the exhibition’s public opening on May 9th 2025, the Dutch architect, and the M of MVRDV together with Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries, explained the making and thinking behind the SOMBRA pavilion and the Biotopia installation. ‘It’s nice that the pavilion is not solar. In this case, it’s only the air pressure. What we use is our knowledge of the sun. We work a lot on shadow and light, and create and research complex solar programs. For Biotopia, I imagine a fully recyclable, biological world that combines all the properties we need: energy, oxygen, animals, shelter, light, flexibility, and changeability,’ the architect tells designboom during the interview.

One project uses physics to create shade without electricity, while the other imagines a future where buildings grow like living organisms. The SOMBRA pavilion – designed by a team led by MVRDV founding partner Jacob van Rijs – is at the European Cultural Centre’s Giardini Marinaressa, part of the Time Space Existence show. The Biotopia installation is at the Arsenale, part of the main exhibition curated by Carlo Ratti. Both of them are on view until November 2025. For the pavilion, built in collaboration with with Metadecor, Airshade, and Alumet, the structure turns reused beams into large arches, supported by metal ribs. This frame holds triangular panels fitted with perforated metal screens. The pavilion operates without electricity or motors. It relies on physics: when direct sunlight heats small air canisters located within the structure’s ribs, the air pressure inside increases. This pressure inflates small airbags attached to the panels. As an airbag inflates, it contracts, pulling its corresponding panel closed to create shade. When the sun moves and the canisters cool, the pressure decreases, and the panels reopen.

portrait of Winy Maas | image © designboom

Progress to building a biotopic world

Heading to the Arsenale of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, Winy Maas and his think tank The Why Factory collaborate with visual artist Federico Díaz to sculpt and present BIOTOPIA. The installation is in two parts. First, the 3D printed sculpture made of polymer. The second is an accompanying film documenting the Dutch architect’s research and how he imagines biotopia will be, which brims with self-sustaining systems. The kind of future here makes biology the foundation for all design. It reimagines cities as forests and architecture as something that grows like a tree. The core concept is a global Sponge, or a type of dynamic biomatter architecture. This Sponge would perform functions like cooling the air, filtering water, and generating energy, all while adapting like a living thing.

The sculptural installation with Federico Díaz, called Propagative Structures, gives physical form to the idea of living matter, of architecture built from living organisms. The work emerges from research into biomimicry, or a field of design that takes inspiration from natural systems. The installation’s forms draw on the structure of mangrove root networks, a suggestion of a future where habitats are not built but cultivated like plants. In our interview with the architect, Winy Maas discusses the future of urbanism, our progress to a biotopic world, the use of computational designs and algorithms in architecture, and what lies ahead for MVRDV, to name a few.

all images courtesy of MVRDV | photos by Federico Vespignani, unless stated otherwise

Interview with Winy MaAs at Venice Architecture Biennale 2025

Designboom (DB): It’s wonderful to see you here in Venice, Winy. We saw the Sombra Pavilion in the garden on our way here. We also read that it’s kinetic?

Winy Maas (WM): It’s a kinetic structure, yes. It doesn’t need energy. Air pressure is generated by a heat difference within the structure itself. That helps to close or open panels, cooling the building at certain corners or not. That, of course, depends on the sun. It’s good to see it in the afternoon too because they placed it next to a tree, so it stands out. The film will be made in the coming months, so we can see the functioning of this air-driven structure. It’s nice that it’s not solar. In this case, it’s only the air pressure. 

What we use is our knowledge of the sun. We work a lot on shadow and light. We create and research complex solar programs. After that, we can start working on the solar panel industry. Sun Rock, for example, which is our project in Taipei for the Taipower Electricity company, is a building covered with solar panels. It’s an example of how we use the sun. It’s a nice project too, and I love it. 

the project uses physics to create shade without electricity

DB: So, the Sombra Pavilion is one project of MVRDV here at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. In the Arsenale, you have another titled Biotopia under The Why Factory, which is the think tank and research institute that you lead. Here, it comes in two parts. The first a 3D printed model with the visual artist Federico Diaz that explores the idea of living matter in continuous transformation. The other is a movie that documents and visualizes this future. First off, how do you see a biotopic world?

WM: Biotopia is a dream. Imagine a fully recyclable, biological world that combines all the properties we need: energy, oxygen, animals, shelter, light, flexibility, and changeability. There’s a huge list of properties we demand from our materials and surroundings. Biotopia philosophizes and speculates on the idea that if we create a material or combination of materials that can facilitate these needs precisely when desired by humans, nature, or animals, that will lead to a city you can’t yet imagine. I’m pursuing a few things with my Utopia concept. 

First, I’m trying to paint a sketch. The seven-minute accompanying film visitors see needs improvement, so it will progress over time, to the next step. Second, I’m creating a timeline sequence of materials, an interesting research project I’ll publish in a book. This timeline will detail all the properties we need, measured in time per second, for an average population density. That’s a crucial part. We calculate what we can do with current materials and what’s possible if certain material innovations occur. 

the pavilion is at the European Cultural Centre’s Giardini Marinaressa | photo by Jaap Heemskerk

WM (continued): There are three epochs in these steps, with the current epoch of innovation per technology, like improved 3D printing. The entire MVRDV group is part of this research. A lot is already happening; we have old materials and new materials emerging. We see this more and more, with layers of wood combined with glue, like glulam and CLT. We also have more types of sandwich constructions. Materials are becoming collaborative.  But what if this collaboration becomes more intense?

Materials could help provide light, others energy, and perhaps they could even move. That’s what this timeline aims to explore, too: what kind of collaborations are needed. We’ll depict these in the final timeline, the Blend, where everything is so interactive and active. It could lead to a completely different type of architecture or urbanism. Finally, we’re developing prototypes. These are diverse. One is 3D printing, aiming to move beyond current prefabrication methods. While prefab is fine, 3D printing offers more flexibility.

the structure turns reused beams into large arches, supported by metal ribs | photo by Jaap Heemskerk

DB: We were told that the sculptural installation at the Arsenale was supposed to be made of living organisms instead of 3D printed from polymer. 

WM: Yes, and I’m still completely open to it, but that’ll most likely be after the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. There’s this dream of using 3D printing that involves two components, or three elements, that are not currently part of 3D printing. The first is what we call the material bank. Carlo Ratti adopted this idea, which involved a machine design where you have various materials. You feed these materials into the 3D printer, which could have multiple nozzles – one for concrete, one for stone, one for glass, one for steel, one for minerals, and one for wood. 

This allows you to select the desired material as you print, changing nozzles along the printing line. This is part of the design. The second component is the printer itself, which is a mixed printer and an ‘un-printer.’ This allows materials to be changed and adapted. To achieve this, an analyzer scans the surface, determines its composition, and then initiates a destruction operation. This process varies depending on the material. For example, 100% glass is easy to break and can be burned in two steps. 

when direct sunlight heats small air canisters, the air pressure inside increases | photo by Jaap Heemskerk

WM (continued): You remove the material, burn it, and the burner sends it to the material bank, from which it can be returned to the printer. This applies to all types of materials. So, we have the mixer, the printer, the ‘un-printer,’ and the material bank. The final component is the monitor, where you design and input data. This input isn’t just for design; it’s also a control mechanism. During printing, you need to monitor the process to prevent cracking. 

This can involve adding more water because the printing material is like a pudding that needs to be as fluid as possible for adhesion. Adding more water helps with the drying period, and you can also use other polymers. I can provide the diagram, but I should patent it first. This is the dream, so far. There’ll also be these robots that would be there to help construct these. I also have a sequence of mycelium tests that I want to do with the school in Jakarta.

the frame holds triangular panels fitted with perforated metal screens | photo by Jaap Heemskerk

DB: That was our follow-up question: the use of biomaterials. It seems that you’ve already used them in your recent projects. In line with this, you’ve also had a talk discussing computational design and algorithms in architecture and design. In what ways have you and MVRDV adopted them into your workflow?

WM: We have our specialties as an office and research group. I cannot do everything, so we need to collaborate extensively. I’m proficient in scripting; our office was one of the first to adopt it, and now our department excels in it. Our team is well-trained in computation and computer science, which I believe is a significant asset. We are skilled in space design, like any architect, and we are also strong in visualization.

DB: What do you think is our progress towards a biotopic world?

WM: There’s a wide range of research I’m trying to gather and collect. We have the example of 3D printing and mycelium. I’m also looking into the lignification of lignin from trees to accelerate this process in the farming industry. This would make the material more fluid, more like willow. I’m also incredibly interested in the electrical changeability of materials, like electrical rubber, for instance. In short, it’s a long process, but the beauty of it is fantastic.

view of the Biotopia installation at the Arsenale | all exhibition photos by Celestia Studio

DB: Are there other materials you want to work or experiment with? What’s next for you?

WM: I like the lignin and the washing-stone technology. This is a new technique we’re developing with Eindhoven. You add a layer of stone, which washes away, and then it assembles into soil. So, it’s essentially accelerating soil creation through erosion and its distribution. This helps plants grow, especially in shadowy areas. We’ve already applied this concept in Dubai for a new pavilion. 

Let’s go back to what you said before we started the interview. We’re sitting in a park, and you asked if I have a relationship with nature. My background already explains it, and I think our architecture is involved in that, meaning nature. I think we make it possible to reconnect people with nature. I like your question about what’s next because that’s the topic of the book we’re making. My lectures are always about what’s next, and they include slides. There are many subjects. I can dream about utopia as a kind of end result, if that’s possible. 

Then, I also have to study mobility. I need to consider when I move and what makes sense, so we’re doing a new study on velocity with different industries. We’re checking how the city would look with a certain kind of mobility: if I walk only, or if I have horses, or if I have three types of mobility. I also want to add properties to drones. It’s not about sending packages, which we can already do. We have a drone skycar in Shenzhen, and surveying is another use. But you can also construct. So I ask my collaborators and clients, ‘What can I do if I want to build a house in the sky?’ Just as a hypothesis. We’ll see.

the installation comes with an accompanying film documenting the building of Biotopia

the first part of the installation is the 3D printed sculpture made of polymer

Winy Maas and his think tank The Why Factory collaborate with visual artist Federico Díaz for the sculpture

the installations are on view in Venice until November 2025

project info:

architect: Winy Maas

firm: MVRDV | @mvrdv

Biotopia

lead architect: Winy Maas

think tank: The Why Factory

artist: Federico Díaz | @federico_diaz_hands

location: Arsenale

event: Venice Architecture Biennale 2025

dates: May 10th to November 23rd, 2025

photography: Celestia Studio, The Why Factory | @celestiastudio

SOMBRA Pavilion

lead architect: Jacob van Rijs

collaboration: Metadecor, Airshade Technologies, MVRDV, Alumet, Van Rossum Raadgevend Ingenieurs, Arup, Kersten Europe, the AMOLF Institute | @metadecor, @airshadetechnologies, @mvrdv, @alumet_nl, @vanrossumbv, @arupgroup 

exhibition: Time Space Existence

location: Giardini Marinaressa

address: Riva dei Sette Martiri, 30122 Venice, Italy

photography: Federico Vespignani, Jaap Heemskerk | @federico_vespignani

The post MVRDV’s winy maas on kinetic sombra pavilion and biotopia installation at venice biennale appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

The Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris transforms into a mesmerizing aquatic and musical landscape with the unveiling of clinamen, an immersive installation by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. On view until September 21st, 2025, and curated by Emma Lavigne, General Director of the Pinault Collection, the large-scale project envelops visitors in a multisensory experience where porcelain bowls, water, and invisible currents form a delicate choreography of sound and movement. At the heart of the Rotunda lies an expansive basin, eighteen meters in diameter, filled with water. This vast, tranquil surface acts as a mirror, reflecting the Parisian sky visible through the museum’s iconic dome. White ceramic bowls drift across its surface, propelled by gentle currents, producing unpredictable melodic chimes as they serendipitously collide. 

While this is not the first iteration of clinamen – earlier versions have been staged at institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Centre Pompidou-Metz – it is the most ambitious to date. ‘This exceptional version of clinamen at the Bourse de Commerce doubles the size of the basin of the largest installations built to date,’ Céleste Boursier-Mougenot tells designboom. The museum’s architecture played a pivotal role. ‘My approach is largely based on taking into account the places and spaces where I am invited to present my work,’ the artist notes,‘I see the architecture of each new exhibition venue as a matrix into which the technical and aesthetic principles of the installation are cast, as if into a mould, resulting in a new version in situ.’ Encased by Tadao Ando’s concrete ring and capped by the monumental glass dome, the Rotunda offers a rare resonance.‘The immense rotunda, encircled by Tadao Ando’s cement casket, under the high glass roof, offers clinamen the opportunity to fully express its planispheric dimension,’ Boursier-Mougenot says.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, clinamen v.10, 2012-2025, courtesy of the artist, Paula Cooper Gallery (New York), Galerie Xippas (Paris), Galerie Mario Mazzoli (Berlin) | photo by Nicolas Brasseur | all images courtesy of Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection, unless stated otherwise

embracing unpredictability within the clinamen installation

Like many of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s works, the Bourse de Commerce installation exists at the intersection of sound, sculpture, and performance. It also marks the culmination of decades of experimentation with sonic systems that operate independently of human control. A musician by origin, Boursier-Mougenot approaches sound as a ‘living material’ – as seen in clinamen, where the traditional constraints of music are shed, replaced by a self-regulating system that breathes and changes with each passing moment. ‘My systems of sound or musical production are modeled or inspired by living, self-regulating forms like organisms,’ the artist explains. 

The title clinamen comes from Epicurean physics and refers to the random, unpredictable motion of atoms. For Boursier-Mougenot, this idea mirrors the elemental operations at play in the installation. ‘The analogy between my work entitled clinamen and the phenomenon of clinamen described by Lucretius in De rerum natura also concerned the notion of declination in the combinatorial sense and the question of exhausting the possibilities of encounter, occurrence and permutation,’ the artist says. He sees the installation as ‘a kind of model, a fairly schematic example, in which all these interactions take place before our eyes and for our ears.’ The inherent unpredictability is central to the experience: ‘if in the moment before two porcelain bowls collide you try to anticipate the resulting note or timbre, most of the time your expectation will be foiled by the sound of the collision.’

clinamen takes over the iconic Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce

enveloping visitors in a multisensory experience

Boursier-Mougenot deliberately embraces unpredictability in his creative process, a practice he discovered when allowing external sounds to enrich his compositions. This openness led him to ‘think about the production of music based on self-regulating systems. These systems generate musical forms over which I have no control over the order of inputs, but the result is very important to me.’ This philosophy informs the entire structure of clinamen, which runs on a self-regulating system akin to a living organism. The materials, too, are deliberately fragile and mutable. Porcelain, water, sound. ‘It was while playing in my studio with everything needed to produce a catastrophe […] that this work took shape, almost thirty years ago,’ he recalls. Clinamen beautifully embodies a tension between apparent opposites: order and chaos, stillness and movement, silence and sound. The artist’s previous work, harmonichaos, which involved vacuum cleaners playing harmonicas, explored similar themes of unpredictable, self-regulating systems. ‘With harmonichaos, it’s impossible to predict when each of the thirteen vacuum cleaners will work or stop, nor the duration of silences or chords played and held by one vacuum cleaner/harmonica module or another,’ he shares, highlighting the interplay of chance and inherent system logic.

In a world defined by acceleration and distraction, clinamen invites a radical slowing down. Visitors become part of the installation simply by being present. ‘With my installations, I make it clear to everyone who visits that they can find a place within the work and become an integral part of it momentarily by their mere presence,’ he says. ‘The simple fact of inviting people to sit down and rest induces attitudes conducive to listening and daydreaming.’ Ultimately, clinamen is not only a meditation on matter, motion, and sound, but a quietly profound call to attention. ‘I don’t believe my art can change anything in the madness of today’s world,’ Boursier-Mougenot admits, ‘but since I’m invited to present my work, I bring the best I have.’ Read our conversation with the artist in full below, and watch clinamen in action here.

porcelain bowls, water, and invisible currents form a delicate choreography of sound and movement | photo by Florent Michel / 11H45

INTERVIEW WITH Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

designboom (DB): How did the architecture of the Rotunda in the Bourse de Commerce shape this version of the clinamen?

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (CBM): My approach is largely based on taking into account the places and spaces where I am invited to present my work. I see the architecture of each new exhibition venue as a matrix into which the technical and aesthetic principles of the installation are cast, as if into a mould, resulting in a new version in situ. In this way, many of the installation’s parameters can be redefined by the characteristics and particularities of the venue. At the Bourse de Commerce, the immense rotunda, encircled by Tadao Ando’s cement casket, under the high glass roof, offers clinamen the opportunity to fully express its planispheric dimension.

DB: The immersive installation has been shown before, but never at this scale. What new possibilities—or challenges—did this larger format bring?

CBM: You’re right, this exceptional version of clinamen at the Bourse de Commerce doubles the size of the basin of the largest installations built to date. At this stage, no one can say for sure whether everything will work as usual on this scale. It’s a challenge, with a multitude of technical issues to resolve in order to remain faithful to the work and its simplicity. To achieve this, I’m working with a team of excellent technicians, and it’s only at the time of the tests that we’ll know if everything is working. So it’s quite experimental, as I think any attempt at art should be.

at the heart of the Rotunda lies an expansive basin, eighteen meters in diameter, filled with water

DB: The title clinamen refers to the random motion of atoms in Epicurean physics. How does this idea connect to the movement and behavior of the installation?

CBM: Clinamen, this word and its definition came to me in the summer of 1997, as I was leafing through the pages of a dictionary. I was looking for a title for my new installation that would describe the principle of the work. I had the word declination in mind and was looking for a synonym here and there. The cosmic connotations of clinamen immediately captivated me and I found many analogies between the phenomenon it describes and my work in progress. So I adopted the title. Shortly afterwards, in view of the installation’s appearance, the title clinamen seemed a little pretentious, and for the work’s first exhibition I called it untitled. In the years that followed, untitled enjoyed great success in France and abroad in many different versions. Around 2003, production of the inflatable swimming pool model I had been using came to an abrupt halt. I had to design my installations with floating porcelain by having raised floors made into which one or more round pools could be integrated. Later, for exhibitions in vast spaces without walls, the raised floor took the form of a platform with access ramps and surrounded by circular benches, virtually acting as walls. As versions of the installation became larger and more planispheric, I decided in 2012 to rename the largest of them clinamen.

The analogy between my work entitled clinamen and the phenomenon of clinamen described by Lucretius in De rerum natura also concerned the notion of declination in the combinatorial sense and the question of exhausting the possibilities of encounter, occurrence and permutation. For materialists, the clinamen is the minimum angle that leads atoms, those inseparable and eternal particles, to collide and assemble to produce, by aggregation, all the perishable matter of our world, which constantly disintegrates and reformates : atoms are to matter what the letters of the alphabet are to language and writing, and it is from the variety of their combination that everything exists. In my work, there is also a curved movement that leads the cells represented by the porcelain bowls to collide, producing a world of sounds and potentially all the occurrences of the elements present. We can contemplate clinamen installation as a kind of model, a fairly schematic example, in which all these interactions take place before our eyes and for our ears. But if you try to trace the causal thread of a sequence, it’s impossible to do it live. In other words, if in the moment before two porcelain bowls collide you try to anticipate the resulting note or timbre, most of the time your expectation will be foiled by the sound of the collision.

unpredictable melodic chimes emerge as the bowls serendipitously collide

DB: The piece is guided by invisible currents, where ceramic bowls create sound through chance encounters. How do you work with unpredictability as part of your creative process?

CBM: I discovered the virtues of unpredictability for my music the day I accepted that outside sounds, totally unrelated to my own, such as those of the urban environment of the unspoilt place where I was producing my music, could mix with it and enrich it. Later, during a play by the company whose music I was composing, which was being staged on the roof of a campus building, the sounds of cars in the distance or the sound of the wind could be heard. The sounds of cars in the distance or voices, wind, planes passing in the sky and crows flying overhead mixed with my music for a noisy string quartet and reanimated it. It was all a question of sound levels and permanence of course, but it gave a “here and now” quality to my recorded and broadcast music. Later, I often used microphones to pick up sounds live outside theatres, reinjecting them and mixing them with my music. These experiences opened my ears and gradually led me to think about the production of music based on self-regulating systems. These systems generate musical forms over which I have no control over the order of inputs, but the result is very important to me.

ceramic bowls drift across the water surface, propelled by gentle currents

DB: Your choice of materials—porcelain bowls, water, currents—feels deliberately elemental. What draws you to these fragile, mutable mediums?

CBM: One day, Jack, a friend of mine who’s a piano maker, said to me: the piano is a collection of different materials – metal, wood, felt, glue, etc. – which can be dangerous to each other, and which are also subject to phenomenal mechanical tensions capable of destroying them. Fortunately, the ingenious arrangement of these materials results in an almost living object that only awaits the tension of the pianist’s nervous system to become the alter ego of the player.
For my part, it was while playing in my studio with everything needed to produce a catastrophe (inflatable pool, soft plastic, glass, porcelain, water, pump, electricity, heating element, etc.) that this work took shape, almost thirty years ago. In the field of art and installation, any object can be considered according to criteria that no longer have anything to do with its functionality.

as the bowls serendipitously collide they produce unpredictable melodic chimes | photo by Nicolas Brasseur

DB: You’ve described sound as a ‘living material.’ How do you approach sound, not just as music, but as something sculptural, spatial, and physical ?

CBM: Rather, my systems of sound or musical production are modeled or inspired by living, self-regulating forms like organisms. As I relate with the harmonicaos work and the use of tuners immersed in a form of hesitation or doubt that I notice and exploit to thwart forms of off-putting repetition.

DB: There’s a tension in clinamen—between order and chaos, stillness and movement, silence and sound. How do you see these opposites coexisting in your work ?

It’s funny, towards the end of the nineties, I called an installation harmonichaos. It consists of thirteen silent vacuum cleaners, each of which plays a small diatonic harmonica, whose tonality, or tuning of the vacuumed notes, is different from the twelve other harmonicas. The operation and shutdown of each vacuum/harmonica module depends on a frequency analyzer built into the module. This is a chromatic tuner used by musicians to tune their instruments. It accurately identifies the sound frequency of a single note at a time, but its analysis becomes more than uncertain as soon as the device detects several notes or a chord simultaneously. The device reacts to surrounding sounds, hesitates, contradicts itself …
Observing this, I thought that a logic other than the one for which the device had been designed was at work, because the time division seemed “alive” to me. It was only a short step from there to imagining a specific form of life. I used the device because of its unreliability. With harmonichaos, it’s impossible to predict when each of the thirteen vacuum cleaners will work or stop, nor the duration of silences or chords played and held by one vacuum cleaner/harmonica module or another. Each module interacts with the twelve others in the ensemble ad libitum. What’s more, this low-tech system is disrupted by variations in the voltage of the electrical network feeding it, making any attempt at prediction even more highly improbable.

clinamen is encased by Tadao Ando’s concrete ring and capped by the monumental glass dome | photo by Nicolas Brasseur

DB: Your installations often invite the audience into a sensory, open-ended experience. What role does the visitor play in activating or completing the work?

CBM: When you visit an exhibition, aren’t you yourself sensitive to the presence of other visitors? If they give you the impression of not knowing why they’re there? It can be funny, but it can also be pathetic. If they only look at the works through their cameras or smartphones, and step back without paying attention to the other visitors to frame a masterpiece, I think that’s awful. With my installations, I make it clear to everyone who visits that they can find a place within the work and become an integral part of it momentarily by their mere presence. When I succeed in doing this, I find it makes people more beautiful… I’ve also noticed that when I compose the spaces of my installations using circles or curves, it makes visitors’ trajectories more harmonious and their wandering more fluid than in orthogonal spaces. The simple fact of inviting people to sit down and rest induces attitudes conducive to listening and daydreaming.

DB: In an age of speed and distraction, how do you see your work offering space for slowness, attention, and contemplation?

CBM: I don’t believe my art can change anything in the madness of today’s world, I don’t presume to know what anyone needs, but since I’m invited to present my work, I bring the best I have.

the water surface acts as a mirror, reflecting the Parisian sky through the museum’s dome | photo by Nicolas Brasseur

the installation invites visitors to sit down and slow down | image © designboom

project info:

name: clinamen

artist: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot | @celesteboursiermougenot

curator: Emma Lavigne, Chief Curator and General Director of the Pinault Collection

location: Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, 2 rue de Viarmes, 75001, Paris, France | @boursedecommerce

dates: June 5th – September 21st, 2025

The post céleste boursier-mougenot turns bourse de commerce into immersive aquatic soundscape appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

At LUMA Arles, a pivotal chapter in the history of postwar art and innovation takes center stage in Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). This landmark exhibition, the first in France to explore the legacy of E.A.T. in depth, is presented in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute and traces the history of a movement that brought together hundreds of key avant-garde artists and the engineers who ushered in the information age. Founded in 1966 by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman alongside Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, engineers at Bell Telephone Laboratories – then the world’s leading center for electronic innovation and telecommunications research – E.A.T. emerged as a radical platform that reimagined the possibilities of creative practice through direct collaboration between artists and technologists.

On view through January 11, 2026, the exhibition surveys a transformative period in which the barriers between disciplines – between art and science, experimentation and activism – were actively dismantled. Through a wealth of archival documents, film footage, case studies, and rarely exhibited works by figures such as John Cage, Fujiko Nakaya, Andy Warhol, and Rauschenberg himself, Sensing the Future traces the movement’s arc from the heady optimism of the late 1960s through its more decentralized but no less ambitious projects of the 1970s.‘The mid-60s to mid-70s period were by all accounts the most fervent years of E.A.T.,’ Simon Castets, Director of Strategic Initiatives at LUMA, tells designboom. ‘The stars were truly aligned, not only in terms of funding, but also of mutual fascination between the then impermeable realms of art and science.’ The 1973 oil crisis signaled a shift: public funding dried up, and technology itself became more accessible, prompting many participants to pursue independent trajectories. Even so, Billy Klüver –together with his partner Julie Martin – remained devoted to stewarding E.A.T.’s legacy, preserving an archive that would later prove indispensable to understanding the entwined histories of art and technology. By revisiting the trajectory of the movement, Sensing the Future offers more than historical reflection. It reveals how the questions posed by E.A.T. – about interdisciplinary exchange, innovation, and the future as a shared project – remain not only relevant, but urgent.

Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), LUMA Arles | artwork: Facsimiles refabricated by The Andy Warhol Museum – mylar filled with helium (front) | Larry Keating, The Artist and the computer, 1976 – video (back) | all images © Victor&Simon – Victor Picon, © ADAGP, Paris, 2025, unless stated otherwise | header image: E.A.T.’s Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70, Osaka, Japan, 1970, March 18 | photograph by Shunk-Kender | Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in Memory of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust

LUMA ARLES UNPACKS THE HISTORY OF E.A.T. IN LANDMARK EXHIBITION

Sensing the Future takes over the Living Archives Gallery of the LUMA Arles Tower, unpacking the landmark moments that defined E.A.T.’s short but influential lifespan. The exhibition begins with a deep dive into the group’s beginnings in the mid-1960s, tracing how a visionary alliance between artists and engineers gave rise to one of the most ambitious interdisciplinary initiatives of the 20th century. Artworks and documentation outline E.A.T.’s establishment in 1966 through the 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering event in New York, where ten artists, among them John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, teamed up with dozens of Bell Labs engineers to stage multimedia performances that employed infrared cameras, wireless sound transmission, and video projection – technologies then still foreign to the art world.

From that unlikely synergy grew an ethos of experimentation, grounded in collaboration, access, and action. Among E.A.T.’s most ambitious undertakings was the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. Artists Robert Whitman, Robert Breer, David Tudor, and Forrest (Frosty) Myers made early contributions to the design of the pavilion, while eventually the design team grew to twenty artists and fifty engineers and scientists. Conceived as a gesamtkunstwerk, or total artwork, the pavilion featured a geodesic dome clad in a mirror-finished surface, an internal sound-responsive light system, and a water-vapor cloud sculpture by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya. Her contribution, an enveloping cloud of artificial mist that obscured and transformed the pavilion’s form, ushered a new vocabulary of ephemeral, site-specific art that blurred perception and challenged the dominance of the visual in technological environments. More than half a century later, Nakaya’s legacy continues to reverberate across contemporary practice. Alongside Sensing the Future, another of her works, Fog Sculpture #07563, is on view as part of LUMA’s concurrent exhibition, Streaming from Our Eyes (evolving title, formerly Dance with Daemons).

view of the section dedicated to the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka with materials by Harris Shunk, Janós Kender, Fujiko Nakaya

THE RADICAL MOVEMENT’S ENDURING LEGACY

Whether through the immersive fog-drenched environments of the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka or civic initiatives addressing environmental design and urban communication, E.A.T. continually pushed the boundaries of what art could do, and whom it could serve. A pivotal section of the exhibition is dedicated to Projects Outside Art, a bold strand of E.A.T.’s activities that extended the group’s collaborative ethos beyond the traditional confines of the art world. First presented as an exhibition in New York in 1971, Projects Outside Art marked a shift toward socially engaged, systems-oriented experimentation. ‘Projects Outside Art ushered in a series of exploratory initiatives across the world in partnership with governmental agencies and universities, aimed at broadening the scope and impact of E.A.T.’s mission, as well as its international reach,’ notes Simon Castets. ‘With, for example, research into the educational potential of television in India, El Salvador and Guatemala, E.A.T.’s ambition reflected a deep belief in advanced technologies as a means to advance social aims. While more often than not the projects remained unrealized, their methodology and ethos of cross-disciplinary collaboration have had an undeniable impact on our way of thinking today’s infrastructures of innovation.’

In an age increasingly defined by technological acceleration and its discontents, the utopian idealism at the heart of E.A.T. feels at once remote and urgently necessary. As Simon Castets observes, ‘today, innovation is much more frequently framed as a threat, often rightfully so. Yet, the legacy of E.A.T.’s collaborative spirit could help bring out technology’s positive potential across fields.’  Much like the early 20th-century Futurists envisioned the artist as a vital force within industrial society, E.A.T. imagined new roles for artists across domains as varied as education, public policy, and environmental research. Reengaging with that vision today invites us to reconsider the artist’s capacity not only to reflect society, but to reshape it, through dialogue, through experimentation, and through the conviction that creativity and criticality belong at the core of every system we build.

performance inside the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, 1970 | photograph by Shunk-Kender | archival inkjet print from negative, Getty Research Institute, 2014.R.20. | gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk and János Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust

LUMA’S LONG-TERM INTEREST IN artist-led use of technologies

Sensing the Future originated as part of the 2024 edition of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a region-wide initiative presented by the J. Paul Getty Trust across Southern California, comprising over 60 exhibitions and public programs exploring the intersections of artistic and scientific inquiry. Organized by the Getty Research Institute (GRI) – a global leader in visual culture research and home to one of the world’s most extensive art libraries – the exhibition brought renewed scholarly and curatorial focus to E.A.T.’s interdisciplinary legacy. In adapting the show for its European debut at LUMA Arles, the curatorial team embraced both continuity and expansion. ‘E.A.T. is much better known in the U.S. than in France,’ notes Simon Castets. ‘Therefore, in the additional time we had, it behooved us to build upon the extraordinary research done by the Getty Research Institute and include additional works and archival elements. The core structure of the exhibition remains the same, yet, together with Getty, the work continued and we were able to also feature key artworks by other essential figures of that history, including Marta Minujín, Wen-Ying Tsai, Andy Warhol, Lilian Schwartz, and Hans Haacke, alongside dozens of archival documents.’

As the first exhibition in France devoted exclusively to E.A.T., Sensing the Future reflects LUMA Arles’ long-term research interest in the artist-led use of technologies. ‘LUMA’s longstanding commitment to artist-led, innovation-driven initiatives resonates with E.A.T.’s pioneering collaborations between artists and engineers,’ Castets explains. ‘Both share a belief in the generative power of process over product, valuing experimentation as a catalyst for new ways of thinking.’ This alignment lends the exhibition not only historical significance but also a pressing contemporary urgency. At a time when the role of the artist is increasingly intertwined with disciplines ranging from environmental research to artificial intelligence, Sensing the Future underscores how fertile such crossovers can be, particularly when grounded in mutual respect, curiosity, and the open-ended nature of experimentation itself.

interior of the Mirror Dome at the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, 1970, Photograph by Fujiko Nakaya |  Gelatin-silver print Getty Research Institute, 940003 | Art © Fujiko Nakaya, courtesy Experiments in Art and Technology. © J. Paul Getty Trust

Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, 1970, photograph by Shunk-Kender | archival inkjet print from negative, Getty Research Institute, 2014.R.20 | gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender | Floats © Robert Breer/Kate Flax/gb agency, Paris | Fog © Fujiko Nakaya, courtesy Experiments in Art and Technology | light Towers © Forrest Myers.© J. Paul Getty Trust

Floats, 1970, Robert Breer, photograph by Shunk-Kender | archival inkjet print from negative, Getty Research Institute, 2014.R.20. | gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk and János Kender | Floats © Robert Breer/Kate Flax/gb agency, Paris. © J. Paul Getty Trust

Fog Sculpture, Pepsi Pavillion, Japan World Exposition 1970, Fujiko Nakaya, Getty Research Institute, © J. Paul Getty Trust

performance inside the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, 1970 | photograph by Shunk-Kender | archival inkjet print from negative, Getty Research Institute, 2014.R.20. | gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk and János Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust

Fujiko Nakaya at the construction of the Pepsi-Cola Pavillon, photographed by Billy Klüver, © Julie Martin

Marta Minujín, Minuphone, 1967 | Marta Minujín, Greetings from Marta Minujín, 1967 – Postcard from 1969 with the Minuphone | Marta Minujín, Marta Minujín’s Art Works, 1966-1969 – Video | © Victor&Simon – Grégoire D’Ablon

Greetings from Marta Minujín, Postcard from 1969 with the Minuphone (1967), © Marta Minujín

Marta Minujín, Minuphone, 1967 © Victor&Simon – Grégoire D’Ablon

Variations VII, 1966, John Cage | photograph by Peter Moore |. Gelatin-silver print. Getty Research Institute, 940003 © Northwestern University. © J. Paul Getty Trust

Fakir in 3⁄4 Time, 1968, Lucy Jackson Young and Niels O. Young | photograph by Shunk-Kender | Gelatin-silver print, Getty Research Institute, 2014.R.20. | Gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender | Art courtesy Thomas Young © J. Paul Getty Trust

section dedicated to the movement’s beginning’s | Harris Shunk, Janós Kender, Tom Gormley,Anders Österlin, Robert Whitman, E.A.T.

Harris Shunk, Janós Kender, E.A.T, Robert Rauschenberg, Harold Hodges

Robert Rauschenberg, Harold Hodges, Dry Cell, 1963 | Silkscreen ink and oil on Plexiglas, metal coat hanger, wire, string, sound transmitter, circuit board, and battery-powered motor on metal folding camp stool

project info:

exhibition name: Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)
participating artists: Robert Breer, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Ivan Dryer, Jean Dupuy, Öyvind Fahlström, Hans Haacke, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Marta Minujín, Peter Moore, Forrest Myers, Fujiko Nakaya, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Lillian Schwartz, Harry Shunk & János Kender, Wen-Ying Tsai, David Tudor, Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and others
location: LUMA Arles, France | The Tower, Living Archives Gallery, Level -2 | @luma_arles
dates: May 1st, 2025 to January 11th, 2026

organizer: LUMA Arles in partnership with the Getty Research Institute | @gettymuseum
LUMA Arles team: Simon Castets, Director of Strategic Initiatives; Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Artistic Director; Fabian Gröning, Project Manager for Strategic Initiatives; Martin Guinard, Curator

Getty Research Institute team: Nancy Perloff, Curator, Megan Mastroianni and Andrew Park, Research Assistants, Alex Jones, Curatorial Assistant, Daniela Ruano Orantes, Curatorial Project Assistance

The post LUMA arles revisits E.A.T., the radical 1960s movement that fused art and technology appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Lagos-based architecture practice Oshinowo Studio brings ‘Alternative Urbanism: self-organising markets of Lagos‘ to the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, spotlighting three of the city’s most dynamic informal markets—Ladipo, Computer Village, and Katangua. Invited by curator Carlo Ratti to respond to his circular economy manifesto, the studio explores how these systems repurpose waste from the global north into valuable goods, offering a powerful model of embedded circularity. ‘These markets don’t work just as places of commerce and exchange,’ notes founder Tosin Oshinowo in an exclusive interview with designboom. ‘What is fascinating is the factory-like process that occurs when a source material is re-appropriated and adapted through different sectors in these markets,’ she tells us. Through immersive film, photography, data visualisations, and recycled denim maps crafted in Katangua, the exhibition reframes Lagos’s markets as complex infrastructures of ingenuity, shaped by scarcity and sustained by collective intelligence.

Rejecting voyeuristic representations of African spaces, the installation at the Arsenale avoids still images of deprivation and instead offers a technical view into the working mechanics of these markets. ‘It was important that the narrative be optimistic; after all, I live and work in Lagos,’ Oshinowo says. ‘I do not see what happens here as backwards or deprived; I see this as fascinating, innovative, and the other extreme of global capitalism,’ she adds. With her team’s mapping, video documentation, and textile production done within Katangua, the pavilion elevates local material knowledge to an international stage. In doing so, it delivers a clear message to Biennale visitors.‘The biggest lesson and shift in perspective I hope to share and inspire with this global audience is that we all can do more with less,’ Tosin Oshinowo suggests.

Alternative Urbanism: self-organising markets of Lagos at the Arsenale | image by Paul Raftery

Oshinowo Studio offers a blueprint for adaptive urban futures

Ladipo Market deals in second-hand car parts; Computer Village in used electronics; and Katangua in recycled fashion. While their contents differ, their shared value lies in how they extend the life of consumer goods through a communal network of reuse, repair, and resale. ‘These specialist markets emerge across the city in white and brown-fill sites, residential zones, and defunct industrial parks,’ Tosin Oshinowo shares with designboom. ‘Through a collective intelligence, the city operates at a sophisticated level outside of orthodox methodologies and functions at scale without the expected industrialized infrastructure.’ Her exhibition doesn’t romanticize the struggle but rather reframes Lagos’s informal urban systems as prototypes for sustainable cities—systems built from adaptation, making them increasingly relevant in a time of global resource scarcity.

As Oshinowo explains, these spaces represent ‘a glimpse into an urban condition without imperialism, colonialism, and modernism imposed on the continent.’ Far from being symbols of deprivation, the markets are framed as energetic ecosystems shaped by ‘bottom-up structures and soft-power systems.’ Located in areas ranging from residential zones to defunct industrial parks, each market illustrates the kind of grassroots adaptability often excluded from conventional urban planning. With Nigeria’s currency devalued by 700% since 2005 and most of the population living on under $2 a day, these markets respond with a resilience that blends necessity with aspiration. ‘The majority of Africa is urbanized but not industrialized,’ the Lagos-based architect explains. ‘This situation creates an urban condition that is alternative to conventional expectations of progress and development.’ Read on for our full interview with Tosin Oshinowo.

the studio explores how these systems repurpose waste | image by Paul Raftery

interview with Tosin Oshinowo

designboom (DB): Alternative Urbanism is a powerful title—how does it reflect your view of Lagos’s informal markets, and in what ways do they challenge conventional models of urban planning and sustainability?

Tosin Oshinowo (TO): The title is impactful; however, it simply states a reality that occurs as parallel development with the rest of the world. The majority of Africa is urbanized but not industrialized, and this situation creates an urban condition that is alternative to conventional expectations of progress and development. This research project uses the informal market as an entry point to understand this condition. Lagos is a heightened example of this condition because of its critical mass—the city has 0.3% of Nigeria’s surface area and 10% of its population, 26.4 million. With insufficient industrialized infrastructure, it is challenging to manage the city structurally. This density allows us to observe this condition in concentration. These markets happen when bottom-up structures and soft-power systems come to the foreground.

Rem Koolhaas’ research in the late 1990s and early 2000s observed that the urban condition in Lagos defied orthodox planning methodologies. Here, I suggest that instead of defying these methodologies, what we observe in the city condition reverts to an evolution from tradition. It could be considered a glimpse into an urban condition without imperialism, colonialism, and modernism imposed on the continent. The informal African market is the most unadulterated urban artifact of our city’s developmental framework. It is the fabric of the commons, a shared space everyone contributes to and shares in its benefits. The markets operate in a capitalist model and outside of it. The markets have evolved from pre-colonial times to their present state in the post-colonial African city. Holding more than just places of commerce and exchange, but also of divine importance. In Yorùbá culture from southwest Nigeria, the market holds divine significance in mythology as it is seen as the point of final departure for the soul from the earth (ilé) as it rightfully returns to the heavens (òrun).

recycled denim maps crafted in Katangua | image by Paul Raftery

DB: Carlo Ratti’s circular economy manifesto set the tone for this year’s Biennale. How did it resonate with your existing observations of Lagos, and what discoveries emerged from your research into these self-organizing markets?

TO: When I first read Carlo Ratti’s manifesto, I was excited that this research resonated with the theme and perfect timing. There is nothing more euphoric than realizing that you are part of a change movement. Circularity has been a long-standing practice in regions that deal with austerity. It is encouraging that there is a growing understanding globally that we all need to embody this methodology. When I started the research on the markets, it was initially out of an interest to understand how global south cities function at scale with inadequate infrastructure.

As I developed this narrative, I observed how sophisticated the system of markets and circularity is embedded into commerce and city life. I observed that due to Nigeria’s challenged economic condition and the reality of desires to live in modernity, capital-intensive consumer products are outside of the immediate reach of the average Nigerian consumer, with the Nigerian Naira devalued by 700% since 2005. These markets don’t work just as places of commerce and exchange. Several specialist markets sell second-hand products considered redundant from the global north. What is fascinating is the factory-like process that occurs when a source material is re-appropriated and adapted through different sectors in these markets. These markets effectively take waste from the global north and extend product life while producing less carbon.

the exhibition reframes Lagos’s markets as complex infrastructures of ingenuity | image by Andrea Avezzù

DB: Ladipo, Computer Village, and Katangua each represent a different kind of circular ingenuity. Why these three, and what do they collectively reveal about resilience and resourcefulness in urban Nigeria?

TO: So far, the research has documented 80+ specialist markets, as the convergence of like-for-like across the city’s urban fabric has been fascinating. I selected these three markets for the exhibition because their content deals with circularity. Like all markets, they deal with consumer goods, but these three represent staples of modernity. And the opportunity for people in these regions to afford capital-intensive consumer goods like cars, electronics, and clothes. Where does the hyperconsumerist global north dispose of its waste? Today, two-thirds of Nigerians live on less than $2 a day. These conditions create the fertile ground to harbor this kind of circularity not seen before structural adjustment programs imposed on the global south from the mid-1980s and early 1990s.

the installation offers a technical view into the working mechanics of these markets | image by Andrea Avezzù

DB: Your pavilion merges data, video, and recycled textiles to evoke the atmosphere of the markets. How did you navigate the challenge of capturing their energy and complexity within the formal setting of the Arsenale?

TO: It was challenging, particularly because I was mindful not to share this as a narrative of deprivation, which can easily come across by using still images from Africa. It was important that the narrative be optimistic; after all, I live and work in Lagos. I do not see what happens here as backwards or deprived; I see this as fascinating, innovative, and the other extreme of global capitalism.

The essence of the immersive film of the market captured a narrative of intense activity and optimism. It was a great privilege for the team to have access to film and photograph these spaces, and we do not take for granted the immense trust we have been given. It was also important that this did not become just an immersive film; we wanted to ensure that we showed a technical prowess to document the urban condition of these markets, which we showed through a series of mappings taken of each market and its surrounding urban fabric. The medium we used to show these was heat-transfer graphics placed in recycled denim patchwork, all produced in the Katangua market. Coupled with pause moments captured through photography, it created a visual language that was intriguing and enigmatic in its context.

immersive film, photography and data visualisations shape the exhibition | image by Paul Raftery

DB: The notion of ‘communal intelligence’ underpins your curatorial narrative. How do these markets embody that idea, and what lessons might formal design systems draw from it?

TO: The specialist markets in Lagos are informal; the state does not plan them, and they have emerged due to specific conducive political, social, and economic conditions. These markets as individual nodes have clear governing and management structures. Still, observing from the macro level, it’s fascinating to see that through a collective intelligence, the city operates at a sophisticated level outside of orthodox methodologies and functions at scale without the expected industrialized infrastructure. It is outside of conventional ways of thinking about the modern city, which tends to be the top-down result of the collective few. These specialist markets emerge across the city in white and brown-fill sites, residential zones, and defunct industrial parks. These markets resonate with the theme of communal intelligence, highlighting the system that speaks to an alternative urbanism, which contributes sparingly to our global carbon challenge in their operation and an optimistic conversation on circularity.

Katangua Market overview | image by Andrew Esiebo

DB: With a global audience in Venice, what shifts in perception about African cities—especially Lagos—do you hope this exhibition might provoke or inspire?

TO: The world can learn a lot from African cities. This region, which is the least industrialized yet urbanized, contributes the least to global carbon emissions while suffering some of the most severe damage. The biggest lesson and shift in perspective I hope to share and inspire with this global audience is that we all can do more with less.

market stall at Computer Village | image by Nengi Nelson

project info:

name: Alternative Urbanism: self-organising markets of Lagos

architect – curator: Lagos-based | @oshinowo.studio

founder & lead curator: Tosin Oshinowo | @tosin.oshinowo

location: Arsenale, Venice, Italy

program: Venice Architecture Biennale | @labiennale

dates: May 10th — November 23rd, 2025

photographers: Paul Raftery | @paulrafterystudio, Andrea Avezzù | @ave_zz, Andrew Esiebo | @andrewesiebo, Nengi Nelson | @nenginelson1, Taran Wilkhu | @taranwilkhu, Amanda Iheme | @amandaiheme, Olarenwaju Ali | @olanrewaju_v

The post ‘we all can do more with less’: oshinowo studio brings lagos’ markets to the venice biennale appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

In response to this year’s Triennale Milano International Exhibition theme, Inequalities, the Polish Pavilion becomes a sanctuary for both human and ecological bodies, exhausted by capitalism, climate crisis, and care work. Curator Katarzyna Roj and architect Aleksandra Wasilkowska share more about A Brief Vacation with designboom, their show that reimagines the ancient tepidarium as a contemporary chamber of collective rest. ‘Rest,’ Katarzyna Roj tells us, ‘is not something to outsource to individual willpower. It’s something we need a policy for.’

Beneath the vaulted halls of the Palazzo dell’Arte, visitors are invited into the transsanatorium, a sensorial refuge that rethinks how cities distribute comfort, challenging the structural inequalities that determine who gets to rest and who doesn’t. A Brief Vacation asks, who can afford stillness in the burnout economy? Through immersive installation, sculpture, scent, sound, and movement, the pavilion reflects on the distribution of peace and bodily care. Roj’s vision, together with Wasilkowska’s design, turns urban infrastructure inside out, reimagining it as a sanctuary where marginalized bodies, caregivers, migrants, and frontline workers, can pause, regenerate, and be seen. Rest, often seen as a luxury, is here reframed as a basic hygiene that demands public policy. ‘This profound fatigue,’ the curator continues, ‘is not only dedicated to humans but also to ecological systems and exhausted resources. We need to think about how we can build infrastructure of care for all of that.’ 

image by Jacopo Salvi, Altomare.studio

A Brief Vacation revives affordable hygiene rituals

The project, part of the 24th Triennale Milano International Exhibition, takes its title and its concept from Vittorio De Sica’s 1973 film Una breve vacanza, where a Milanese factory worker finds unexpected dignity and healing in a mountain sanatorium. ‘It tells the story of Clara,’ explains curator Katarzyna Roj. ‘A Milanese working-class hero who gets tuberculosis and is sent to a sanatorium in the mountains. There, she gets her own room, with good food, and with the whole infrastructure of care, she experiences a social uplift. And this became a starting point for us—to ask, who has the right to rest, especially in times of mass migration, war, and reproductive work?’  The pavilion builds on this cinematic starting point to ask who today is allowed to rest and who is excluded. For Roj, hygiene should not be left to the individual. ‘We need to think of rest as collective infrastructure, especially in the context of mass migration, ecological fatigue, and reproductive labor,’ she adds.

The Polish Pavilion, organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute with support from BWA Wrocław Galleries of Contemporary Art, builds on the legacy of spaces like Milan’s subterranean Albergo Diurno Venezia, once offering affordable hygiene rituals to working-class residents. Wasilkowska’s design revives this spirit through a transcultural lens, proposing a network of future urban grottos: small-scale sanctuaries responding to crises of heat, drought, and displacement with care. These spaces could integrate with metro infrastructure, capturing underground temperatures, filtering rainwater, and offering emergency sanitation services in overheated cities. ‘Usually when you build a metro, you excavate around one million tons of earth,’ says the Warsaw-based architect during our interview. ‘That soil is transported outside of the city. We want to reuse it, to build a healing mountain next to the station—with sanitary infrastructure inside, like a cross-section of the future?’ One such ‘healing mountain’ is envisioned as a layered grotto of transcultural bathing rituals and rest zones. ‘We’re not just asking who gets to rest,’ states Roj. ‘We’re asking how we build for it—across borders, species, and systems.’

Polish Pavilion becomes a sanctuary for exhausted bodies

The transsanatorium combines global sanitary typologies

The underground chambers draw from global sanitary typologies. The transsanatorium incorporates a transcultural matrix of public bath typologies. ‘My idea was: how can we think of public space for nomads and diasporas living in the city?’ explains Wasilkowska. ‘Inside the healing mountain, there’s a mikveh, a mezzakal from South America, Greek and Roman baths, a Japanese sento, and even a ghat from Hindu culture. It’s like a protopian-utopian mix, because cities today aren’t monocultures anymore.’

This pluralistic approach extends even to sanitary architecture. ‘Toilets, for example, should have squatting and sitting options next to each other, you never know who will come. I saw it at the Istanbul airport, and I really appreciated it,’ the architect argues. ‘Migration is accelerating, and we need to adapt our designs to the people who live in our cities, not some imaginary standard user.’

In the age of hustle culture and planetary exhaustion, A Brief Vacation also confronts deeper taboos. ‘Lying down in public space is forbidden in European cities—it’s a class issue,’ Wasilkowska adds. ‘This idea is also about redistribution of luxury. It’s cheap—built from waste—but it’s for everyone. You don’t have to travel to an expensive sanatorium. It’s right here, in the metro.’

The pavilion’s central chamber features a sculpted daybed by artist Olaf Brzeski, soundscapes by Antonina Nowacka, and custom fragrances by Monika Opieka, aiming at sensual immersion. ‘We want people to lie down, to slow down, to notice their body in space,’ notes Roj. 

a brief vacation reimagines the ancient tepidarium as a chamber of collective rest

challenging the structural inequalities that determine who gets to rest and who doesn’t

Roj’s vision, together with Wasilkowska’s design, turns urban infrastructure inside out

a sanctuary where marginalized bodies can pause, regenerate, and be seen

rest, often seen as a luxury, is here reframed as a basic hygiene that demands public policy

the project takes its title and its concept from Vittorio De Sica’s 1973 film Una breve vacanza

Polish Pavilion builds on the legacy of spaces like Milan’s subterranean Albergo Diurno Venezia

the transsanatorium incorporates a transcultural matrix of public bath typologies

custom fragrances by Monika Opieka aim at sensual immersion

A Brief Vacation confronts deeper taboos

Wasilkowska’s urban proposal could integrate with metro infrastructure

project info:

name: Polish Pavilion, 24th Triennale Milano International Exhibition | @triennalemilano
exhibition title: A Brief Vacation

location: Triennale Milano, Milan, Italy

dates: May 13 – November 9, 2025

curator: Katarzyna Roj | @krojczy

architect of transsanatorium: Aleksandra Wasilkowska | @shadowarchitecture

sculptor: Olaf Brzeski | @olafbrzeski

composer: Antonina Nowacka | @antoninawidt

olfactory artist: Monika Opieka | @olfaktorie_bottanicum

photographer: Łukasz Rusznica | @lukaszrusznica

choreographer: Alicja Wysocka | @alfa_omegi

graphic designer: Agata Bartkowiak | @agatabe

support: Maciej Bujko

organizer: Adam Mickiewicz Institute | @culture_pl

co-organizer: BWA Wrocław Galleries of Contemporary Art | @bwawroclaw

director, AMI: Olga Wysocka

deputy directors, AMI: Olga Brzezińska, Piotr Sobkowicz

production and coordination: Joanna Andruszko, Tytus Ciski, Natalia Gedroyć, Klaudia Gniady, Tomasz Koczoń, Barbara Krzeska, Malwina Malinowska, Julia Marczuk-Macidłowska, Agata Opieka, Karolina Padło, Marcin Pecyna, Michał Sietnicki, Joanna Sokalska, Francis Thorburn, Julia Wójcik

co-financed by: Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland, Municipality of Wrocław

partners: Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Milan, Polish Cultural Institute in Rome, PFR Nieruchomości (part of Polish Development Fund Capital Group)

photographer: Jacopo Salvi | @jacopo_salvi, Altomare.studio | @altomare.studio

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It’s a very pink day for Gustaf Westman and his collection of camping gear and playful objects for the Mercedes-Benz CLA. The Swedish designer is the second act of the car company’s Class of Creators initiative after Ice Spice’s molten chrome car. Let’s go back to March 13th, 2025: we’re in Rome, Italy, the city where Mercedes-Benz unveils the CLA for the first time. A few hours before that, designboom sat down with Gustaf Westeman for an interview, ahead of his art pieces’ debut. It’s a gloomy day, but the photos he shows us are all bright and pink.

‘My sketch process is making a kind of function, so you can use the vehicle in another way,’ the designer tells designboom. ‘Basically, it’s a car that has a picnic table at the rear that you can slide out and even sit on. It also has a tent on the car’s roof where you can sleep. It’s life-size. Let me show you.’ It’s exactly how he describes it: the Mercedes-Benz CLA shines in pink with a glossy surface, and right above it is a cupola-shaped tent that the vehicle can bring anywhere. These were only sketches when we met. In the evening of May 22nd, 2025, two months after our interview, Gustaf Westman shows the real-life models at the Protein Studios in London’s East End.

all images courtesy of Gustaf Westman

Collection with ‘star’ plates and hotdog tray

The Gustaf Westman spin on the Mercedes-Benz CLA is family-friendly and perky. The stowable picnic table at the rear slides in and out of the chunky pink car. There are two benches on both sides, then the sliding table between them. Just below the Mercedes-Benz insignia, there are four tubes that pop out of the car, serving as the wine glass holder for the diners. The pink Mercedes-Benz CLA and its pink tent aren’t the only ones in pink. Gustaf Westman has made an entire collection of it for the Class of Creators. There’s even a pink roll-up backpack that, once unfolded, reveals lots of plates, cups, and some trays for hotdogs (yes, the ones with buns). It also doubles as a picnic blanket. Once laid out, it has nine distinctive squares, reminiscent of bubble wrap but without the circular form.

Picking up one of these circular plates, which is a recurring theme in the designer’s repertoire, it’s so clear that the design is patterned after the car company’s iconic emblem star. That’s good, though, because there are three sections for food, so diners can eat three different meal types at once. Other than that, the designer pays more attention to the rounded edges of the plates. ‘When you look at the CLA’s base, it has the same base as the plates. I wanted to work with that base because it’s really nice. So, I used the existing lines around the Mercedes-Benz car and extruded them to make them chunky and fluffy,’ he explains to designboom.

picnic table at the rear that users can slide out and even sit on

Gustaf Westman’s vibrant colors for Mercedes-Benz CLA

That chunky and fluffy feel reappears in the hotdog tray. It’s a thick but cute slab, like a jolly-looking charcuterie board, with multiple pockets to hold hotdog buns on. ‘I just like how they kind of capture the shape, and then they disappear. They have no endings, which gives these objects a life,’ Gustaf Westman shares with us. As our conversation moves forward, the designer says this is his first time venturing into the automobile world. 

Even so, the design approach isn’t so different from when he creates homeware and other party-ful objects. ‘It’s more that it takes longer to understand what I want to do. I have to understand the Mercedes-Benz CLA first before starting to design the collection,’ says Gustaf Westman.  In the end, he has achieved that enlightenment, and it pours through his ever-bright use of colors. It’s a staple of his works, and one that he’s not looking to change. 

the Mercedes-Benz CLA shines in pink with a glossy surface and a cupola-shaped tent on its roof

‘I see these colors as helping you understand the shape. I like the idea that you can understand an object in a second. Then, I also don’t want the color to make you feel too much because I want you to focus on the shape,’ he tells us. For the designer, the muted and hushed-down shades give a mysterious feeling, and he’s not looking for that. It’s easy then to look at Gustaf Westman’s works, including the playful collection for the Mercedes-Benz CLA. They’re light and attuned to happy inklings. The shades recall the time between spring and summer, the airy afternoon in a garden or park, after lunch and before the sun begins to set. 

Our conversation with the Swedish designer is coming to a close. Before we get up, he says he has tried playing with AI tools because it’s fun. He thinks it’s bad, though. He hasn’t used it in any of his designs, and he has no foreseeable plans to adopt them. ‘I could just go on Pinterest if I want to see and do those kinds of things,’ he says. Is he on Pinterest all the time? ‘I try not to be,’ he replies. It’s a platform that lets users organize their pinned images in a digital board, and that’s not him. He’s chaotic, he says, and by definition, it means disorder. We disagree, then, because in Gustaf Westman’s purchasable collection for Mercedes-Benz CLA, it’s anything but chaotic.

view inside the tent on the car’s roof

there’s even a pink roll-up backpack

once unfolded, the backpack doubles as a picnic blanket

view of the hotdog tray

the CLA exterior lines inspire the tray’s design

Star Plate with the car company’s emblematic star

there’s enough food space on the Star Plate

portrait of Gustaf Westman during the CLA unveiling in Rome, Italy | image © designboom

the designer holding his winged mirror in London

project info:

designer: Gustaf Westman | @gustafwestman

company: Mercedes-Benz | @mercedesbenzusa

initiative: Class of Creators

The post it’s a pink party with gustaf westman’s camping gear and picnic table for mercedes-benz CLA appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

designboom joins designer Thomas Heatherwick and Longchamp CEO Jean Cassegrain inside the newly renovated Longchamp flagship, La Maison Unique, in New York. Ahead of the public opening, the duo reflects on their long-standing collaboration and presents the store’s intimate new interiors, nearly two decades after the building’s first transformation. The flagship was originally unveiled in 2006 as La Maison Unique. At that time, it marked one of Heatherwick Studio’s earliest works and has since remained a New York destination for design lovers with its ribbon-like staircase.

‘With this new space, we let loose a bit,‘ Heatherwick notes. ‘Now it has a sense of randomness which I’ve come to appreciate.’ Today, the renewed interiors offer an atmosphere that feels at once familiar and transformed. It is attuned to a different cultural rhythm, but is grounded in the same spirit of invention.

images courtesy Longchamp

a partnership which started with a bag

The partnership between Heatherwick Studio and Longchamp began not with a building in New York, but with a bag. ‘This project started back to front,’ Heatherwick recalls. ‘We’d made a bag built entirely of zip.’ The unlikely origin speaks to the designer‘s fascination with scale and material, a thread that carries through from product design, to architecture, to urban planning. Originally, the design of La Maison Unique faced an immediate dilemma — a compressed street-level footprint and an expansive upper floor. ‘We had to lure people upward,’ Heatherwick tells designboom. ‘That became the problem to solve.’ The result is a sweeping sculptural staircase, a ribbon-like hillside that cuts through the building and functions as both a circulation system and an interior landscape.

In its current iteration, this now-iconic staircase returns updated in the brand‘s Energy Green, further referencing the gently climbing hillside which it mimics. ‘We’re not retail designers,’ Heatherwick says. ‘Our passion is making places that connect with people’s emotions.’ His approach here is at once about the display and the journey.

Heatherwick’s Longchamp flagship reopens with renewed interiors nearly two decades after its 2006 debut

towards intimacy and randomness

Material gestures guide the experience throughout. Industrial columns are wrapped in carpeting which swells into swirling green rugs, an inversion of the expected. ‘Carpets want to be flat,’ Heatherwick reminds us. ‘So we wanted to do the opposite.’ The team worked with heritage French textile maker Lelièvre to wrap these structural elements in a tactile softness so that they blur the line between structure and furniture. In transforming an industrial space into a living room, Heatherwick Studio embraces these obstacles with a playful solution.

The second floor is curated with vintage mid-century pieces — croissant-shaped sofas, Gio Ponti tables, and Danish bar stools. Some furnishings were designed by Heatherwick’s team, while others were sourced to align with Longchamp’s postwar beginnings. ‘It’s a reference to the beginnings of our brand,‘ says Cassegrain. ‘And to the idea that retail doesn’t need to be rigid. The looseness makes it feel more like a home.’ Interspersed among the furniture are archival Longchamp objects, each bringing another layer of history and handcraft.

the new design retains the signature ribbon staircase, now in Energy Green to draw visitors upward

For Longchamp CEO Jean Cassegrain, the updated New York flagship, La Maison Unique, reflects how retail itself has changed over two decades. ‘We used to think in terms of efficiency,’ he explains. ‘Now we think in terms of comfort.’ The renewed space embraces this shift. The laminated logic no longer informs every decision. Instead, interiors open toward plush seating and vintage design objects. ‘We give more space to the customer,’ Cassegrain explained. ‘We want them to feel welcomed, and to linger.’ There is a sense that the store has transitioned from a dramatic display case to welcoming salon.

While many of Heatherwick Studio’s spatial ideas remain from the original 2006 intervention, the renovation of Longchamp’s New York flagship marks a tonal departure. ‘We were more rigid back then,’ said Heatherwick. ‘Everything followed a north-south logic. Now we’ve let go a little. There’s a softness, an ad-hocness.’ This evolution is intentional. Even the light now reaches deeper into the space, thanks to newly opened sightlines across the facade. Instead of controlling every gesture, the design now welcomes imperfections and interactions.

interiors blend structure with furniture and shelving that emerge from the floor and ceiling

carpeted columns created with French textile maker Lelièvre soften the industrial building

vintage furniture and archival objects reference Longchamp’s midcentury origins

the renewed space prioritizes comfort and emotional connection over efficiency

welcoming new interiors encourage lingering and social interaction

project info:

name: La Maison Unique

architecture: Heatherwick Studio | @officialheatherwickstudio

brand: Longchamp | @longchamp

location: 132 Spring Street, New York, NY

The post ‘we let loose a bit’: heatherwick studio renews iconic longchamp flagship in new york appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

At the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Uzbekistan turns towards one of the lesser known icons of its modernist heritage: the Sun Institute of Material Science, better recognized as the Heliocomplex. As the protagonist of the nation’s pavilion, titled A Matter of Radiance, the structure’s underlying dualities and ambiguities are embraced and reconstructed by Ekaterina Golovatyuk and Giacomo Cantoni of GRACE to reflect on its potential as a center for sustainable innovation and cultural inquiry.

The pavilion has been commissioned by Gayane Umerova, Chairperson of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF) and builds on the long-term research project, Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI, which they launched in 2021. Since then, the architects, guided by ACDF, have been working to document and preserve 24 modernist structures across the city, one of which is the Heliocomplex located just a few hours away in Parkent. In conversation with designboom, Golovatyuk and Cantoni share that across this initiative, the Heliocomplex built in 1987 was the one that best responded to Carlo Ratti’s curatorial theme for the biennale, Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective. As a site conceived to harness solar energy at extreme temperatures for material testing, now evolving to further this scientific research with an embedded social layer, its identity is not fixed. The Heliocomplex, they note, also stands out for its several spatial and conceptual contradictions — monumental yet fragile, futuristic yet obsolete, scientific yet mystical. The pavilion thus interrogates this enduring ambiguity: ‘We decided to decline the conventional narrative of preservation and instead intersect it with one of sustainability. The Heliocomplex allowed us to speak about both,’ Golovatyuk tells designboom. The pavilion thus presents a dual narrative through fragments of objects from the site, or envisioned for it, that reflects on the Heliocomplex’s role in Uzbekistan’s recent modernist legacy.

image by Gerda Studio, courtesy of ACDF

grace studio reconsiders dualities of the heliocomplex

Situated near Tashkent, the vast structure is one of the last infrastructures built before the collapse of the Soviet Union, designed for scientific experimentation. Today, it stands largely underutilized as one of only two large-scale solar furnaces still in existence globally, yet, for the Milan-based practice GRACE, it remains a powerful symbol of scientific and architectural research that ACDF seeks to revitalize. Although the furnace was operational for just five years, it continued to host scientific work in shifting capacities well into the post-Soviet period, and its monumental scale, typical of late Soviet infrastructural ambition, along with the socio-political background of the time, rendered it both functionally redundant and open to reinvention. The curators take this unresolved quality as a productive tension for the Uzbekistan Pavilion, proposing that the building’s vast, sculptural form and multiple layers is what allows it to adapt to new purposes and meanings over time.

To stage this conversation, the architects have broken the Heliocomplex down into fragments, from scientific relics, and architectural reconstructions to new artistic commissions, that each extend the building’s meaning in a different direction. These include solar reflectors, structural components, and a working solar cooker placed at the pavilion’s entrance.‘One example is a table installation by Esther Sheynfeld who presents this kind of debris of research, putting together pieces that found application, and others that didn’t,’ Ekaterina Golovatyuk tells us. ‘We also brought in a small heliostat, just one-fifth the size of those in Parkent. This one is a newer-generation prototype, and after the Biennale, it will return to Parkent where it can help upgrade the outdated 1980s-era technology. In that sense, the exhibition is also about enabling the site’s future development.’ While some of these objects have been slightly modified, their recontextualization reveals latent meanings, functions, and imaginaries embedded in the original site. Through a sparse but evocative spatial arrangement, the exhibition also poses an embodied reflection on energy, technology, and the narratives we construct around infrastructure and heritage. Read our full conversation below.

image by Luca Capuano, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

interview with grace studio

designboom (DB): Please introduce your journey into this project. How did you come to focus on this particular structure from Tashkent’s modernist heritage, and what drew you to the Heliocomplex as the pavilion’s protagonist?

Giacomo Cantoni (GC): Everything stemmed from a wider research initiative called Tashkent Modernism, about the city’s modernist architectural heritage. This project led us to identify 20 buildings that were later listed as national monuments. Among them, the solar furnace stood out because it aligned most closely with the curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti for this year’s Biennale.

Ekaterina Golovatyuk (EG): We decided to decline the conventional narrative of preservation and instead intersect it with one of sustainability. The Heliocomplex allowed us to speak about both. Preservation is not always sustainable, per se, so we were interested in embracing that ambiguity. We wanted to define sustainability in a more subtle, complex way, than just talking about simply harnessing solar energy.

image by Gerda Studio, courtesy of ACDF

DB: How does the curation frame these ambiguities and dualities?

EG: We’re not just leaving it open-ended, but we’re embracing the ambiguity as a value in itself. This isn’t unique to the Heliocomplex — all technology is ambivalent, and all technology is a result of social, political, and economic decisions. It’s never absolute or neutral, so this space opens up conversations around this. We explore this by deconstructing the Heliocomplex into a number of fragments. Some parts speak to its scientific values, while others reflect the more triumphant or less successful moments of its existence.

image by Luca Capuano, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

DB: Can you walk us through some of the works in the pavilion that capture these different dimensions of the Heliocomplex — its scientific, symbolic, and architectural layers?

EG: One example is a table installation by Esther Sheynfeld who presents this kind of debris of research, putting together pieces that found application, and others that didn’t. We also brought in a small heliostat prototype, just one-fifth the size of those in Parkent. It helps us speak about the humongous scale of the Heliocomplex, and after the Biennale, it will return to Parkent where it can help upgrade the outdated 1980s-era technology. In that sense, the exhibition is also about enabling the site’s future development. Then there’s the architectural component represented by a one-to-one scale model of the original lab building’s facade, which had been dismantled due to obsolescence. Using original drawings and with support from Italian structural engineers, we reconstructed and optimized it for the pavilion.

 image by Luca Capuano, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

The Heliocomplex itself featured four sculptural works, so we also included a Soviet-era chandelier by Latvian artist Irena Lipiene that reflects the tradition of monumental art in Soviet scientific projects. It is called Parade of Planets, a rare astronomical event when seven planets align. In a way, we see it as a latent declaration of the Soviet Union’s space conquest ambitions. Then we brought in the original model from the late 1970s, which was used to convince government officials to support the construction of the Heliocomplex. And finally, we included a painting depicting the authors of the original project. It shows the human presence behind it all.

GC: And these benches which we are sitting on, they’re also found on-site in Parkent. It’s interesting because the infrastructure was originally restricted and not open to the public, yet the benches are also typical of public space. Including them was a way to reflect on that shift.

image by Luca Capuano, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

DB: Alongside these architectural and scientific elements, how did the new commissions contribute to deepening or reframing the narrative around the Heliocomplex?

EG: Each of the three artists we invited tried to give a more poetic, cultural reading of the Heliocomplex. Mohideen Rizkiyev worked with scientists to create a 40-centimeter ceramic plate which is the same size as the solar furnace’s focal point, and it is an installation for meditation. Azamat Abbasov created a video installation that tries to bind all the pavilion’s different elements into one narrative, and he tries to connect them using the only thing we don’t really see — light.

Many of the original elements are also being reactivated with new meanings in a contemporary context. The Heliocomplex is being reinterpreted from just a scientific monument to a hub for sustainability, which wasn’t part of its original identity. It’s also become an educational infrastructure with a public dimension, so we’re trying to communicate that layered complexity in the pavilion.

image by Luca Capuano, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

DB: Although you speak of these elements as ‘fragments’, they come together to evoke all these interconnected aspects of the building’s identity. How did you approach the spatial arrangement of the pavilion?

EG: Giacomo and I have long been preoccupied with the theme of preservation, and even in our exhibition design, we care deeply about how context interacts with the work. We never want to erase that or dominate the space. At the Arsenale, we wanted to keep the space very open, letting in natural light, so that the existing architecture would interact with the objects we brought in. That context adds richness and complexity to what’s on display.

image by Gerda Studio, courtesy of ACDF

DB: In terms of context, then, the historic industrial language of the Arsenale contrasts quite sharply with the modernist expressions of the Heliocomplex. Does that juxtaposition creates new layers of meaning, or does it function more like a scenography?

EG: It’s an interesting parallel that adds another narrative layer, I think. The Arsenale was once a piece of utilitarian infrastructure, and in a way, so was the Heliocomplex, though from a very different era and for a very different purpose. Also, it’s always a challenge to curate an architectural exhibition, especially because of scale. Unlike art, when you’re displaying the object itself, here you’re evoking something that’s absent.

GC: That’s why we brought in original elements or built new ones at a one-to-one scale. We deliberately stretched the installation across the pavilion to evoke the scale and presence of the actual Heliocomplex.

image by Luca Capuano, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

DB: You mentioned the heliostat prototype will return to Parkent. Were all the new works and reconstructions conceived with a post-Biennale application in mind?

EG: Yes, we designed the pavilion so that nothing would go to waste. Everything either came from Uzbekistan and will be returned, or was created here to be used there afterward.

The stands that support the commissioned works, for example, are actually mirror-testing tripods used by scientists. We also plan to reinstalled the facade mock-up at the actual site to persuade authorities to restore the original architecture. The heliostat model is fully functional and will be used for future scientific research, and, actually, we also see it as an opportunity to create collaborations between European and Uzbekistan researchers.

Even the bench, the only object that might not return, is made from an organic concrete alternative using rice husk. It can be dismantled and returned to the landscape. And since rice is a key part of Uzbek culture and agriculture, maybe this can stimulate new types of construction typologies that are both sustainable and culturally embedded. The Biennale is a great platform where such connections can take place.

image by Luca Capuano, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

image by Gerda Studio, courtesy of ACDF

image by Luca Capuano, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

image by Luca Capuano, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

image by Gerda Studio, courtesy of ACDF

project info:

name: A Matter of Radiance 

curator: GRACE | @grace.office

architects: Giacomo Cantoni, Ekaterina Golovatyuk

location: Uzbekistan Pavilion, Arsenale, Venice, Italy

commissioner: Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF)

program: Venice Architecture Biennale | @labiennale

dates: May 10th — November 23rd, 2025

The post GRACE on revitalizing uzbekistan’s soviet modernist legacy at venice architecture biennale appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.