Behind the design of national pavilions in Venice: three studios to know

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 opens to the public on 10 May – and there's just time to gen up on the architecture studios behind some of the national pavilions before the big reveal.

The overall theme of 'Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective' promises a cross-disciplinary, collaborative and broad take for this year’s festival. Drawing on curator Carlo Ratti’s research and practice, as well as making the most of an open call for submissions (the first ever for the Biennale), displays are set to touch on sustainability, human invention and the future in an effort to reimagine the relationship between nature and technology within architectural discourse.

As the 2025 edition opens and invites us to explore who and what is important in the field today, the national pavilions – running parallel to the main festival’s show – typically create their own, distinct universe, connected in varying degrees to the overall theme but always offering their rich, hyperlocal interpretations of the architectural zeitgeist. Here, we pick three of the most exciting studios, collectives and individual practitioners to know this year.

Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 national pavilions: 3 studios to know

Cave Bureau, Kenya

Cave Bureau is a Nairobi-based group of architects and researchers whose work examines the post-colonial African condition through the lens of landscape. Founded in 2014, the studio owes its name to its geographic origins in Kenya, and more specifically, Cave Bureau’s proximity to a site known as the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa spawned an interest in the origin of the human race as a species.

For the 2025 biennale, Cave Bureau is involved in the British Pavilion – which, as always, is commissioned by the British Council, and this time led by an expert multidisciplinary team including UK-based curator and writer Owen Hopkins and academic professor Kathryn Yusoff. The curatorial team cites The Great Rift Valley as the basis for the exhibition’s geographical, geological and conceptual focus.

Lisbeth Sachs, Switzerland

Architect Lisbeth Sachs (1914–2002) may be little-known outside her home country of Switzerland, but she is about to be granted a spotlight as part of this year‘s Swiss Pavilion in Venice. Curators and architects Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins and Myriam Uzor of the Annexe group, working in collaboration with artist Axelle Stiefel and graphic designer Emma Kouassi, will recreate a site-specific, temporary art installation designed by Sachs for the 1958 Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA) in Zürich. Through this piece, the team asks: ‘What would have happened if it was Lisbeth Sachs, not Bruno Giacometti, who had designed the Swiss Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale di Venice?

Sachs' rich, characterful work is aptly represented in a compact home, Summer House Strauss (pictured above), which was completed in 1976 and is located on the shores of Lake Hallwil (Hallwilersee), a popular holiday destination in Aesch, close to Lucerne. It was commissioned by Dr Frank Strauss in 1964.

Pedro y Juana, Mexico

You might expect a business called Pedro Y Juana to be named for its respective partners, but the dynamic, Mexico City-based architecture and design practice is, in fact, led by co-directors Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo and Mechy Reuss. They explain that their choice of studio name had more to do with ideas of authorship and the nature of architecture practice than any literal representation. However, their choice of name signifies their transdisciplinary make-up and 'gives us the possibility for a more collaborative future,’ the founders explain.

Their participation in the 2025 biennale’s Mexico Pavilion is a case in point. The studio formed a collective with two more architecture offices (Estudio IUAPdA and Locus), graphic design agency Estudio María Marín de Buen, plant experts Lucio Usobiaga Hegewisch and Nathalia Muguet, and Miguel Ángel Vega Ruiz, Xavier Delgado González y Shantal Gabriela Haddad Gómez of lighting consultants ILWT. Their exhibit will explore Mexico’s chinampas – an ancient agroforestry system of growing crops on small plots within wetlands.

Read our guide to the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, which runs from 10 May to 23 November 2025

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