Venice Pavilion in the City – 19th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia
Ardielli Fornasa Associati at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale
“Project Operational Room” at Ca’ Tron – Venice Pavilion in the City
The Università Iuav di Venezia takes part in the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective, curated by Carlo Ratti (10 May – 23 November 2025), with a series of initiatives that transform the university into a city-wide exhibition platform. Iuav curates the Venice Pavilion, hosting the exhibition “Libraries. Building Venetian Intelligence”, which, for the first time, extends across several Iuav venues in Venice—from Ca’ Tron to Tolentini, from the Ligabue Warehouses to the Cotonificio Veneziano—bringing the Pavilion to life as a truly “diffused pavilion” embedded in the urban fabric.
Within this context, Ardielli Fornasa Associati present the “Project Operational Room”, curated together with Giulia Piacenti, and hosted at the Sala Camino of Ca’ Tron. The installation is part of the Venice Pavilion in the City and functions as an active space for reflection and assessment on Iuav’s design methodologies and their relevance to the future development of Venice.
Twenty-four ongoing projects are displayed through lenticular imagery, enabling visitors to simultaneously perceive their past and future, their current impact and long-term vision. These mental images reflect the transcalar and synchronic nature of Iuav’s projectual thinking, highlighting a systemic and integrated approach to design.
Project assessment is visualized through a contemporary quipu, inspired by the ancient Incan system of knowledge encoding. Each proposal is evaluated according to four key parameters: progress status, feasibility, connectivity, and replicability. The result is a new, intuitive tool to grasp the layered complexity and interconnections of present and future interventions.
All projects are developed by Iuav in collaboration with C.SCARPA – the Advanced Centre for Understanding, Anticipation, and Applied Projectual Research – established under the University’s “Departments of Excellence” programme for 2023–2027. The “Operational Room of Projectuality” is thus not only an exhibition space, but a strategic arena for collective verification—staging, with clarity and intelligence, the operative dimension of architectural research.
In addition to the installation Project Operational Room at Ca’ Tron, the studio contributes with two published texts:
– the volume Fare Masterplan, curated by Marco Ardielli and published by IUAV Quaderni, which outlines a methodological approach to contemporary urban transformation;
– and the essay ReclAIming Gaza, featured in the collective book Proactive Reconstruction by Urbicide Task Force, a manifesto on reconstruction and AI-driven design in post-conflict territories.
