Shanghai’s biennial, RAMa 2025, takes architectural exploration outside

The newest architecture biennale has hit the scene. Since the founding of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980, hundreds of similar events have sprung up around the globe, but what makes each one stand out? Rockbund Architecture Museum assembles (RAMa) was founded two years ago in a historic district of Shanghai, once subject to colonial British rule. First curated by David Chipperfield in 2023 on the architect's completion of an 18-year restoration of the neighbourhood, RAMa is back for a second cycle, mixing six new installations with a new answer to the big question: what are biennales designed to address?

Explore the 2025 RAMa, the architecture biennial at Rockbund Art Museum

Unlike many bigger and arguably more famous biennales, all of RAMa 2025 is taking place outdoors, in public and for free. This generosity isn’t simply altruism but part of a remarkably precise curatorial strategy conceived by Rachaporn Choochuey, this year’s RAMa artistic director and cofounder of studio all(zone). For the Bangkok-based architect, her festival has a very clear goal: coax the real-estate company responsible for the area to allow a richer suite of amenities in the public spaces they control.

'I am trying to persuade the owner,' she tells me bluntly, but explains that, for her, the best way to win round sceptics is to be diplomatic. Instead of lobbying the landowners up-front to allow benches, drinking fountains, street vendors and the like, Choochuey is using the biennale to provide pop-up proof that such things are boons to the Shanghai streetscape. 'Critique can never be direct,' she smiles, 'with a very simple gesture you can do a lot of things.'

The six installations Choochuey has curated all provide a public amenity currently missing from the vicinity – food stalls by Alkhemist Architects, for example, and a long blue bench by Tangent Essays. Choochuey herself has created a multicoloured polyethylene canopy, a riff on larger pavilions she’s made previously in Australia and Thailand (such as her design for the 2022 MPavilion in Melbourne).

Most successful is a gregarious yellow drinking fountain by WWWorks, serving thirsty passers-by by filtering rainwater from an adjacent roof. It’s charismatic and playful with water spouts at three heights to maximise accessibility, and proportions that cleverly relate to some nearby pipework. It’s exactly the kind of exuberant and useful public realm upgrade from which the whole world would benefit.

Less persuasive are some clumps of moss created by Beijing-based Studio Vapore in an attempt to provoke debate about the value of nature in urban space. They make a valid point in principle, of course, but the bumpy green hillocks, made from earth and florist foam sitting on plastic membranes, prove no match for Shanghai’s 35-degree heat. Even with regular watering, the clumps fail to root and are already starting to turn brown just a few days into the biennale.

At first glance, nothing in the RAMa programme might seem especially radical (of course, benches and drinking fountains are nice!); however, such a line of critique would miss the point. The exciting thing about RAMa 2025 is not the topics it raises or the objects it has commissioned, but the laser focus of its underlying ambition.

With the impact of so many architectural biennales undermined by ponderous esoteric themes, too diffuse to effect change in practice, RAMa 2025 stands out for its humility and realistic mission. Choochuey is not arrogant or naive enough to think her biennale can change the world, even a little. But maybe it can change one neighbourhood of one city a lot.