The colours of Venice have been celebrated in prose, immortalised by artists and later captured in professional and amateur photography. Tintoretto created some of his most famous pieces here at his studio in the Canareggio district. More recently Barovier and Toso’s artistic director Luca Nichetto has also been taken by the charm of Canareggio. This summer Elizabeth Unique Venice, too, fell under the sestiere’s spell, choosing Canareggio for its Venetian outpost. The interiors take inspiration from the city’s light, heritage and colours – of course.

What's on your doorstep?

The main canal is approximately 10 minutes away and Tintoretto’s monumental oeuvres at San Rocco or the main square of San Marco are just 20 minutes away on foot. However, just behind the hotel is Europe’s first Ghetto and the Jewish quarter of Venice, which is worth exploring.

Along the same canal as the hotel are local restaurants and wine bars offering Venetian spritz and small bites locally known as cichetti. You might also find stalls selling fresh fish if you’re visiting on a Saturday morning.

Who is behind the design?

IUAV School of Architecture, Venice graduate Cristina Celestino knows and understands this city. Now based in Milan, the designer has worked with brands from Fendi, to Diptique since launching her studio in 2013. For her second Venetian project, designing a boutique hotel has meant designing an experience. 'I wanted to reinterpret the opulence of Venetian interiors through a contemporary sensibility, offering visitors an unexpected, yet distinctly Venetian experience,' she explains.

The 17th-century building has survived multiple alterations and Celestino first had to strip these back. 'The intervention involved removing those additions while retaining the elements that gave the palazzo its historical identity,” she says. “The historic timber ceilings and beams were an important part of this. They establish a continuity with the building’s past and provide a framework for the new interiors.'

In the bathrooms, large-format ceramic wall panels by Cedit reduce the number of groutlines to present a smoother finish in contrast to the colours of the seminato veneziano flooring. 'The floors had to be completely replaced, which gave me and my studio the opportunity to explore this traditional Venetian material,' she explains. 'It is deeply connected to the city’s architectural heritage, yet offers extraordinary freedom in its patterns and colour combinations.'

The room to book

There are 14 keys in total, evenly split between the suites and the bedrooms. The Canal Suite on the first floor, however, is the indisputable highlight, designed for repose; it is one of two featuring a sauna. Here, Celestino’s use of a light lagoon green complements the views of the water through high arch windows that run from the living area to the bedroom space. 'We developed a palette of green tones inspired by the water, creating a connection between the interiors and the view,' she says. In the bedroom the original beams feature a floral pattern while the rest of the beams in the hotel take on a neutral hue.

The suites are designed with room between the walnut wardrobes and the oversized headboard, establishing a small corridor that makes the room appear more spacious. In the hotel bathrooms, curved Art Ceram basins and sanitaryware hint at the traditional while offering modern comfort.

Dado-height crimson wood panelling creates tone-on-tone contrast with the pink doors and architraves, while low-pile light Besana rugs provide softness underfoot, while a mix of

Celestino’s own lighting and that of designers including Michele de Lucchi’s Dioscuri globe light offer options for illumination.

Staying for drinks and dinner

Accessed via a set of plush velvet curtains, Da grandMa is the restaurant that offers a range of Italian cuisine. Allowing visitors the opportunity to explore both local and national dishes in an intimate atmosphere. The famous Venetian creamed salt cod is on the menu and so is a delicious cuttlefish and pea risotto called Risi e Bisi, nuts are served at the end of the meal as an Italian nonna (grandma) might. Internally, the restaurant hosts 20 people with more seating outside. The banquette seats feature timber armrests and Philippe Tabet Orchestra chairs for Pianca offer style and comfort. Booking is recommended.

Where to switch off

The soft amber glow from the illuminated glass-encased pilasters by Venice-based firm Incalmi set a relaxing mood in the reception area. Backlit glass is also applied to the bar inviting you to pull up a stool and admire art pieces curated by Galleria Russo.

You can walk straight through this welcome area to an enclosed garden. On a warm evening you can enjoy an aperitivo or simply relax and marvel at the starlit night sky.

Each of the two upper floors has a communal area where Celestino’s Peonia sofas and armchairs are well positioned for relaxing with a good book.

The verdict

Elizabeth Unique Venice is a Design Hotel that has paid attention to the details and this makes a difference to your stay. From the brass Manital and Olivari door handles that give access to the rooms, to the distinct colour of the hotel slippers and trims on the bathrobes helping guests to distinguish their own during their stay. Throughout, the fabric selected features small patterns and delicate textures. 'These help maintain a quiet, measured harmony across the spaces,' Celestino explains. The separate street entrance to the suites gives the impression of walking into a private residence, and for a few nights it feels like it’s all yours.

Elizabeth Unique Venice, Fondamenta Cannaregio, 1061 - 30121, Venezia

Few Venetian hotels have enjoyed the social life of the Danieli, which has welcomed the glitterati to its palazzi on the Riva degli Schiavoni since 1822. Maria Callas met Aristotle Onassis at a party here in 1957, and Eleonora Duse and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s affair began within its rooms decades earlier. Reopened as a Four Seasons hotel in July 2026, the address received the discerning attention of Pierre-Yves Rochon (also responsible for the refreshed interiors of the Four Seasons Hotel George V in Paris), whose renovation preserves its gilded ceilings and Murano chandeliers while introducing the pale blues and greens of the lagoon outside.

Check-in now takes place in the Sala delle Maschere, a former events room where restored panelling and a frieze of theatrical masks surround paintings of carnival festivities and life along the Riva degli Schiavoni.

Wallpaper* checks in at Danieli, Venezia, A Four Seasons Hotel

What’s on your doorstep?

With the Doge’s Palace just across the Ponte della Paglia and Piazza San Marco a few moments away, the Danieli makes exploring Venice on foot wonderfully straightforward, allowing guests to slip out after breakfast or return between exhibitions without consulting a boat timetable. The Riva degli Schiavoni is busy, certainly, but the convenience is considerable, particularly compared with the lagoon’s island hotels, where a visit to this side of the city requires a crossing. Carlo Scarpa admirers are particularly well placed: his Negozio Olivetti is nearby on Piazza San Marco, while a walk inland towards Campo Santa Maria Formosa leads to the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, where his reworking of the palazzo’s ground floor and garden brings canal water into intricate arrangements of stone, concrete and mosaic.

Who is behind the design?

The Danieli occupies three interconnected palazzi, beginning with Palazzo Dandolo, built for the aristocratic Dandolo family and converted into a hotel by Giuseppe Dal Niel in 1822. Subsequent expansions incorporated Palazzo Casa Nuova, formerly the Venetian Republic’s Treasury, and the post-war Palazzo Danieli Excelsior. Under the supervision of the Soprintendenza, Italy’s heritage authority, Rochon’s studio adapted the buildings’ protected floor plans to accommodate dressing areas, enlarged bathrooms and additional suites. Palazzo Dandolo and Palazzo Casa Nuova have reopened with 120 rooms and suites between them, with the total due to reach 168 when Palazzo Danieli Excelsior’s restoration concludes in 2027.

‘We chose materials rooted in Venetian history and craft: Murano glass, terrazzo seminato alla veneziana, Italian marbles, Venetian mirror and woven damasks,’ says Rochon, explaining that each had to ‘extend the vocabulary of the palazzi and work with the light’. On entering Palazzo Dandolo, the eye is immediately drawn towards an azure ceiling patterned with gilded quatrefoils, its hand-painted decoration restored by specialist craftspeople who have also attended to the columns, stonework and floors below. The grand staircase continues the elaborate introduction, with gilded stuccowork and ornamental detailing accompanying the ascent.

The lobby lounge retains its pastel Murano chandeliers and restored roundel-glass windows, while a large painting of Venice now hangs at the entrance opposite a mirrored screen. The historic reception counter and key cabinet have also been relocated within the rearranged public rooms. Across the interiors, textiles from Rubelli and Dedar accompany bespoke furniture by Poliform, Medea and Salda, with mirrors and lighting by Arte Veneziana and Viamancinelli. The decorative collection includes intaglios, Venetian engravings and antiqued mirrors, drawing on the collecting habits of Grand Tour travellers.

The room to book

The renovation has increased the number of junior and one-bedroom suites, introducing generous living areas and dressing rooms while enlarging bathrooms wherever the historic fabric permitted. Several suites connect to adjoining bedrooms, allowing families or guests travelling together to expand their accommodation, with layouts that also provide space for dining and working.

A lagoon-view suite is the one to book for the prospect of San Giorgio Maggiore across the water, revealed by automated curtains. Rochon carries the lagoon’s pale blues and celadon greens into the furnishings, with Rubelli’s San Marco damask recoloured for the guestrooms and Venetian mirrors reflecting daylight through the interior. Marble bathrooms have walk-in showers and Jesurum toiletries developed by La Bottega, while selected Grand Lagoon-View Suites also include a separate bath – worth specifying when booking.

The former bistro on Palazzo Dandolo’s fourth floor has been converted into the 133 sq m Presidential Suite, where contemporary furniture and artwork mark a departure from the damasks and antiques elsewhere in the hotel. Arranged as a one-bedroom apartment, it has a living room with a dining table for six, a separate dressing area and a marble bathroom with a bath, walk-in shower and a wall of windows.

Staying for drinks and dinner?

At Terrazza Danieli, tables overlooking San Giorgio Maggiore are inevitably the attraction. ‘As soon as the weather allows, every guest wants to be on the terrace,’ says Rochon, who has dressed the outdoor space in terracotta tones to complement the historic façade. Inside, sky blue and muted gold replace the former dark finishes, while mirrors reflect the lagoon into the dining room, ensuring the view remains part of dinner even when the weather intervenes.

Executive chef Adriano Rausa, Roman-born with Sicilian roots, joined the reopening team from W Rome, having trained in kitchens alongside Oliver Glowig, Gennaro Esposito and Ciccio Sultano. His Italian cooking acquires its Venetian accent through suppliers such as Osti in Orto on Sant’Erasmo, the island long cultivated as Venice’s kitchen garden, while fish arrives daily from the Rialto market. Homemade mezze maniche comes with blue lobster, cherry tomatoes and lemon, and the Mediterranean catch of the day is served oven-baked or salt-crusted with seasonal Sant’Erasmo vegetables.

At Bar Dandolo, cocktail From Venice with Love pays tribute to the hotel’s appearance in the 1963 James Bond film From Russia with Love, directed by Terence Young. The Vesper variation combines Tanqueray No. Ten gin and Altamura vodka with Mancino Bianco Ambrato vermouth, Nardini Acqua di Cedro, fino sherry and Aphrodite bitters, batched in advance and served ice-cold from the freezer. A classic Negroni is also on the aperitivo menu.

Where to switch off

Ahead of the permanent spa’s opening, a temporary treatment room offers appointments including the 75-minute Glow Facial, which uses Mario Badescu skincare and begins with a deep cleanse before a sequence of lymphatic, sculpting and relaxing massage techniques. For bodies fatigued by Venice’s bridges, the 60-minute Su Misura Massage takes its name from the Italian tailoring term for ‘made to measure’, with a consultation informing a personalised combination of Swedish massage, deep-tissue work, aromatherapy and stretching. The completed spa will have three treatment rooms, including one for couples, alongside a sauna and hammam.

The verdict

Rochon’s renovation gives the Danieli an inviting freshness, though what stayed with us was how naturally life continued beneath the restored ceilings: throughout our visit, the lobby and bar were busy, and the warmth of the service encouraged us to settle in. For all its celebrated romances and illustrious guests, this remains a sociable Venetian address where an evening downstairs is part of the pleasure of staying. There is something romantic, too, in seeing a building so familiar on the city’s skyline prepared for another generation of arrivals, whose dinners, encounters and return visits will gradually become part of the Danieli’s history.

Danieli, Venezia, A Four Seasons Hotel is located at Riva degli Schiavoni 4196, Venice, Italy. Rooms from €2,300, including breakfast.

To work with glass is to work with contrasts – precision and spontaneity, fragility and strength. This frisson was on full display earlier this month at the tenth edition of The Venice Glass Week. Dedicated to the art of glass, the festival hosted more than 200 events from both Italian and international participants in a meeting of tradition and innovation, and, most importantly, vision.

Explore 12 chandelier from some the world's most notable creatives

The flagship event was called Murano Illumina il Mondo (Murano Lights Up the World): twelve chandeliers, made in collaboration between leading contemporary creatives and Murano’s finest glassmakers, lit up the Procuratie Vecchie of St Mark’s Square (and will stay up until November 1).

Designed by renowned architect Lord Norman Foster and forged by Salviati, The Hydra Chandelier turns traditional Venetian chandelier design on its head – its 20 arms throw light upwards, eschewing the usual construction’s chiaroscuro so it can illuminate the ancient portico in a red glow.

For Foster’s first time working with the Murano maestri, he chose a frosted glass to showcase the distinctive fine lines of the Rigadin technique (a Salviati signature). It gives the piece a sense of lightness and flow, which in turn emphasises the continuous line of the chandelier – no ornate layering of arms, nor botanical motifs, here.

'It's everything about tradition, and yet it's a reinterpretation in today's terms,' says Lord Foster. 'Instead of the mass being the central spine, the visual elements are arms reaching out, which then gives a very interesting challenge technically in how you support that.'

Salviati is recognised for reviving the Murano glass industry since the late 1850s, and they worked with the Norman Foster Foundation team on significant research and development still. 'All those accumulated years of experience to produce a material which is inherently fragile, then assumes an extraordinary degree of strength. I mean, to see that process and to share it is inspirational and educational,' adds Foster.

Multidisciplinary designer Bethan Laura Wood worked with maestro Matteo Tagliapietra of Gambaro & Tagliapietra on Taiko. Inspired by the traditional Japanese drum, its vibrant barrel forms resound with Murano’s filigree techniques (where thin canne glass rods are embedded inside a crystal-clear glass body to form patterns). From the mosaic-like murrina to the lace-like reticello, Wood is fascinated with how glass behaves under pressure.

'I wouldn't say I understand it completely because I think glass is quite a magical mystery, but it was really exciting to start to try and get a better understanding of how you start to predict what might happen with the behaviour of the glass, and you start to understand the way that different paints can be built or pulled to change the way that they behave when they're worked,' says Wood. 'I also love this mix between solidity and fluidity, especially when you're looking at the murrine and the bubbles that we've produced together.'

Many of the architects, designers and artists involved in Murano Illumina il Mondo are continuing to work with the glassmakers they were paired with to create commercial versions of their chandelier with a 'perfection of the imperfection', as Foster puts it.

A rapid water taxi ride from St Mark's Square, Murano is around one square kilometre, and yet according to a report by Banca Ifis (sponsor of The Venice Glass Week), 160 glass manufacturers operate there. Many are still family-owned, and employ more than 900 people and generate revenues close to €180 million. Despite a volatile energy market, the furnaces keep burning, and the centuries-old craft finds new forms through the suggestion of modern creatives and the gesture of the master glassmakers.

'Glass continues to be a living part of its present and future, melding together art and work, culture and enterprise, tradition and innovation,' says the Mayor of Venice, Simone Venturini. 'Glass perhaps tells the story of Venice better than any other material. It is born from fire, from an incandescent temperature, from a moment when everything is still possible.'

theveniceglassweek.com is on view until November 1 2026

The language of the hands and the art of making take centre stage once again in Venice with Homo Faber 2026, the fourth edition of the biennial organised by the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship, this year titled ‘An Island of Light’. The vast and international celebration of fine craftsmanship has just opened (read our full Homo Faber 2026 review) and, until 30 September, takes over the space of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

Behind the scenes of Giorgetti at Homo Faber 2026

Among the new presences this year, orchestrated by the 2026 edition’s artistic director (and current Wallpaper* guest editor) Es Devlin, is Giorgetti, as the Italian furniture brand’s creative director Giancarlo Bosio explains. ‘For a company like Giorgetti, which for 128 years has built its identity around the dialogue between design, materials and craftsmanship, the desire to become part of it came naturally’, says Bosio. ‘Our conversations with the Michelangelo Foundation began shortly before the summer, when the curatorial concept for the 2026 edition had already been defined. It was our encounter with Es Devlin that opened up a new possibility.’ It was a certain affinity with her own design vision that led Devlin to incorporate the brand into an exhibition narrative that was already well established, Bosio explains.

The choice fell on a series of Giorgetti’s ‘Summa’ poufs, deliberately designed without backrests, which could sit harmoniously within the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s Palladian Refectory. ‘Their apparent simplicity allows the quality of the detailing and the high level of craftsmanship behind them to emerge with particular clarity,’ explains Bosio. ‘Despite the short timeframe, the collaboration developed very naturally because it grew out of a genuine dialogue. It was never simply a matter of displaying a product, but rather of understanding how Giorgetti’s design language could become an integral part of the curatorial narrative conceived by Es Devlin.’

The resulting, evocative installation within the refectory, titled A Feast of Light – one of 15 conceived by Devlin for the event – celebrates the purity of white. ‘It is a space that naturally invites contemplation and creates a dialogue between architecture, art and human presence. I believe Es Devlin saw precisely this quality as the ideal context in which our contribution could find its most authentic meaning,’ says Bosio. ‘Our role was not to add a scenographic element, but rather to contribute to the experience visitors have within the space. I like to think that this is exactly what the project expresses: a moment in which design steps away from the foreground and instead chooses to enter into a relationship with the artwork, the architecture and the people experiencing them.’

In this sense, ‘Summa’ – which appears as a cylindrical pouf, sliced into separate vertical sections and recomposed in elements upholstered in contrasting fabrics and leathers – stems from an exploration of geometry and the way form is constructed through material, leaving the piece open to interpretation. ‘At first glance, it appears extremely essential, yet it embodies considerable technical complexity and a highly tailored approach to craftsmanship,’ says Bosio. It was precisely this versatility, he adds, that allowed Devlin to reinterpret the design while remaining entirely true to its identity. ‘Rather than adapting “Summa” to the installation, we allowed the installation itself to reveal a different expressive dimension of the piece.’

Paradoxically, the challenge of this project was one of reduction. ‘“Summa” was conceived as a design that celebrates the relationship between different materials and colours. For A Feast of Light, however, we chose to remove colour entirely and allow the materials themselves to carry all the expressive weight.’ Devlin selected two fabrics and one leather, all united by the same shade of white. In this way, Bosio continues, the piece no longer relies on chromatic contrast, but instead comes to life through the depth of its surfaces, the tactile qualities of the materials and the countless nuances revealed by the light.

‘It was a particularly interesting experience because it reminded us just how much narrative richness material can hold, even when it appears visually uniform.’ In this reinterpretation for Homo Faber, colour dissolves, leaving the materiality of the surfaces to take centre stage. ‘My first impression was that I could immediately recognise “Summa” and, at the same time, see it almost disappear. It steps away from being an object to be observed and becomes instead an element that helps shape the experience, actively becoming part of it.’

Ultimately, Giorgetti’s presence in this platform has a broader significance. ‘For us, Homo Faber is not an isolated occasion, but the beginning of a broader journey,’ concludes Bosio. ‘We believe that today a brand like Giorgetti should also engage with contexts where design intersects with art, architecture and contemporary culture. Not in order to seek out new languages, but to continue expressing our own through different perspectives.’

Homo Faber 2026 runs until 30 September 2026.

For more on Es Devlin read her Wallpaper* guest-editor interview and studio tour.

For our full Homo Faber review, read: Es Devlin casts Homo Faber 2026 in a new light

Upon entering this year’s Homo Faber – the fourth edition of the biennial showcase staged on Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore – visitors find a workshop caught in a moment of pause. Tools and materials lie scattered across benches; illuminated shelves are strewn with models, maquettes, samples and dust, as though the artisans have momentarily stepped outside. Then, from the darkness at the far end of the room, a screen flickers into life with footage of skilled hands at work. Narrated in the soothing voice of British artist and stage designer Es Devlin, the exhibition’s artistic director (and a new Wallpaper* guest editor), the film prepares us for the onward journey.

‘As you meet each piece, you're meeting a pair of hands and a body and a mind – a conduit to place, conditions, culture, weather, ideas and time,' says Devlin. 'Every object was made in a room like this, at a table covered in tools and trash, each found its form from chaos.' A door swings open and we are ushered through.

It is exactly this kind of atmospheric scene-setting – Devlin’s ability to harness light and sound to create an almost spiritual experience – for which she has become globally renowned, from stage designs for Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour and U2’s residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas to the kinetic UK Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai. At Homo Faber, she follows in the footsteps of film director Luca Guadagnino and architect Nicolò Rosmarini, who directed the 2024 edition.

The biennial is produced by the Michelangelo Foundation, a Geneva-based nonprofit established in 2016 by Richemont chairman Johann Rupert and Italian cultural entrepreneur Franco Cologni. Rupert serves as its president, while his daughter Hanneli Rupert, the Foundation’s executive vice-president, has led the development of Homo Faber since 2022. Devlin’s ability to combine large-scale scenography with an emphasis on individual human stories makes her a natural choice.

Across the sequence of 15 spaces that follows, we encounter a potentially overwhelming array of more than 700 objects by over 500 makers from upwards of 70 countries. Using this year’s theme, An Island of Light, as an organising principle, Devlin has structured the exhibition around different ways of perceiving craft: maker, silhouette, material, element, process, translucency, colour and sound. By doing so, she encourages us to slow our pace and look at familiar materials and objects anew.

In An Alphabet of Objects a circular rotating structure that you can walk in and around (something of a Devlin trademark, seen this year in Milan and at Castle Howard, UK) carries more than 100 works across it shelves. Visitors can examine the objects from all angles as they slowly sail past, casting extraordinary shadows on the walls.

Further on, in Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s former 1960s swimming pool, a glowing semicircular shelf laden with rotund vessels emerges from the water like a rising moon, illuminating the darkened space. In the background, Devlin recites Jean Toomer’s Evening Song: ‘Full moon rising on the waters of my heart, / Lakes and moon and fires, / Cloine tires, / Holding her lips apart.’

Called Full Moon Rising, the display pays homage to the Korean moon jar – a centuries-old functional vessel with a moon-like silhouette made of two halves – through specially commissioned interpretations handcrafted in ceramics, paper, glass, metal and other materials displayed in two rows that run along either side of the pool. The effect is hypnotic, encouraging visitors to lose themselves in their surfaces. From the rock-like texture of Patricia Shone’s Earth Jar to the six tentacles and countless eyes of Heidi Tarver’s Moon over the Pacific, each one invites closer inspection.

In A Rooted Ascent, Devlin asked the curators to find objects made exclusively from materials that had 'started as a seed' – including wood, reeds and lacquer. What interests her is the extraordinary variety produced by human hands from this shared organic origin – from the wild, untamed form of pieces like Andrea Mancuso's Silva chair made in collaboration with master carpenter Luciano Tousco, to Heechan Kim’s staggeringly intricate #20 sculpture, in which maple veneer is bent into flawless curves and stitched with copper wire.

In An Atelier Alive guests are given the chance to see the master artisans at work. In a polished studio space surrounded by dozens of completed masterpieces, embroiderer Laura Baverstock told us about the 200 hours she spent creating a watch dial for Vacheron Constantin featuring a prowling tiger, worked in nine-carat yellow- and white-gold embroidery wire, specially developed black ceramic-coated wire and green silk. Across all three editions attended by Wallpaper*, these encounters with makers have consistently proved the exhibition’s most illuminating element.

'The main protagonists of this work are the artisans themselves, they are the rockstars for me,' Devlin stressed, and for much of the exhibition this is overwhelmingly true: their 500 portraits even constitute one of its 15 immersive installations. In some of the more visually stimulating spaces, however, the scenography occasionally threatens to eclipse the work it was designed to illuminate.

Inside the dizzyingly mirrored An Infinite Birdsong, for example, it is easy to become absorbed by the kaleidoscopic experience rather than the individual pieces of bird- and insect-inspired jewellery. It reveals the tightrope Devlin must walk throughout: how to use spectacle to command attention for craft without allowing spectacle to become the principal attraction.

In an era of artificial intelligence, algorithmic sameness and frictionless consumption, it is moving to witness the extraordinary dedication these artisans bring to their work. An Island of Light treats craft as embodied knowledge, illuminating the intimate relationship between human hands, natural materials and time – forms of intelligence that are increasingly at risk of being undervalued.

'When I was a teenager, there was a famous song by Grace Jones called “Slave to the Rhythm”,' remarked Homo Faber’s general director Alberto Cavalli at the opening. 'I’m afraid this new generation is becoming rather slave to the algorithm.' Manual skill, he argued, offers young people a means of affirming their individuality, vision and creativity.

Homo Faber is, in part, an exercise in resisting the digital trend: giving forms of specialist knowledge an international platform and demonstrating that, far from nostalgic, they remain capable of evolution. Here, makers and their work are treated with a degree of theatrical seriousness more commonly reserved for fine art.

Yet the exhibition also advances a particular conception of craft: exceptional, rarefied, exquisitely staged and frequently aligned with the luxury market. That is hardly accidental. Richemont’s maisons depend upon the proposition that hand skill, rarity, time and inherited knowledge imbue an object with value. Supporting the craft ecosystem is therefore not wholly detached philanthropy; it also protects the skills and value system upon which brands including Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and Vacheron Constantin rely.

This does not make Homo Faber’s mission disingenuous. Rather, it reveals the complexity – and perhaps the effectiveness – of the enterprise: cultural, philanthropic and commercial interests collide in a shared argument for the value of human making. At its best, An Island of Light makes that argument powerfully.

Homo Faber runs until 30 September 2026, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, San Giorgio Maggiore Island, Venice

homofaber.com

Venice has no shortage of grand hotels, including a run of glossy new arrivals. But there's something reassuring about stepping into an icon. Hotel Cipriani, A Belmond Hotel, is exactly that: a Venice institution as established as the Biennale or the Film Festival.

For seventy years it has held its prime spot on the island of Giudecca, ever since Giuseppe Cipriani dreamed up a hideaway across the water from Piazza San Marco. Built in 1956, at the dawn of the jet-set era, it has amassed seven decades of stories: Paul McCartney signing the butlers’ guitars, Princess Diana reportedly declaring herself ‘home at last’ on its steps. It was Cipriani, at his own Harry's Bar (itself a haunt of the glitterati), who invented the Bellini, its rosy hue inspired by a Venetian sunset.

Wallpaper* checks into Hotel Cipriani, A Belmond Hotel, Venice

What’s on your doorstep?

Cipriani’s original vision was simple: a hotel close to Piazza San Marco, but far from its crowds. Giudecca still delivers on that promise, adrift, it seems, in a charmed world of its own making. An evening stroll here is accompanied by little more than the sounds of birdsong, the murmur of diners and water lapping the promenade.

Giudecca also serves as a reminder of why Venice is one of the most beautiful cities in the world: a mix of medieval, Renaissance and baroque architecture, arched bridges, and cafés and restaurants spilling onto wooden pavilions. Doge’s Palace, the Bridge of Sighs, the Grand Canal and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection are all within easy reach – though such proximity feels almost improbable from the tranquil folds of Hotel Cipriani.

Who’s behind the design?

Over the years, the property has expanded into the adjoining 15th-century Palazzo Vendramin and been acquired by Sea Containers before joining Belmond under LVMH in 2018. It is a storied history, but not one the hotel is content to rest on. A multi-phase renovation by Peter Marino – the architect and designer who has done much to define the modern language of luxury retail – is currently underway. This year, the transformation has delivered a Dior Spa and a reimagined Oro, the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant.

Marino, who chairs the Venetian Heritage Foundation and brings an insider’s grasp of the city’s craft traditions, has said his renovation isn’t about reinvention. Instead, he’s balancing three threads: the handcrafted heritage of historic Venice (Murano glass, antique furniture, museum-quality art); the glamour of the 1950s and ’60s ‘dolce vita’; and a current of contemporary art and design, drawing on the influence of the Biennale. His touch shows in the luminous, double-height lobby, its seamless flow into the fountain garden and pool, and in thirteen newly redesigned suites.

The room to book

Accommodations range from 21-square-metre Double Rooms to Exclusive Suites starting at 105 square metres. At the top end, the Palladio Suite offers 180-degree lagoon views, while the Dogaressa Suite looks across the water to Piazza San Marco.

The ‘room to book’, however, is of course one of Marino's redesigns – chief among them the Serenissima and Laguna Suites, where traditional terrazzo floors meet hand-blown chandeliers and 17th-century cabinets are set beside contemporary sculptures. The palette – creams, pale greens, warm bronze, silvery grey, soft blue – echoes the shimmer of the lagoon.

Staying for drinks and dinner?

Oro has been reimagined by Marino as an homage to gold, down to the gilded plates and table decorations. Chef Vania Ghedini lightly inflects local ingredients – shellfish, seaweed, 36-month-old Parmigiano Reggiano – with Maghrebi notes of her heritage: cardamom, verbena, sesame.

Elsewhere, dinner at Cip’s Club at sunset is hard to beat. Suspended over the water, the whole scene glows as gold-drenched as Oro. Chef Roberto Gatto keeps things hyper-local and unfussy – a fresh catch from the Rialto market, or a plate of traditional Veneto pasta.

Il Porticciolo is the hotel's beach bar, and no visit is complete without a Bellini made to Cipriani's original recipe at the Seagull Bar – sipped, as tradition dictates, alongside a plate of carpaccio. Breakfast is its own ritual: Marostica cherries, honey from the island of Sant'Erasmo and Pan del Doge while watching the gondolas and vaporetti on their morning rounds.

Where to switch off

This spring brought the Marino-designed Dior Spa, spanning two floors with five treatment rooms and a boutique stocking Dior beauty products. Hotel Cipriani is also home to the only Olympic-sized, seawater-heated pool in central Venice – the slightly farcical but happy result of a feet-to-metres miscalculation during construction.

Then there are the gardens – arguably the hotel’s ace in giving it the feel of a country estate rather than a city palazzo. Named the Casanova Gardens after the Venetian who is said to have courted lovers there, they're planted with rose-covered arches, Annabelle hydrangeas and pomegranate trees, and host, according to the hotel, a rabbit, three ducks and some chickens.

The verdict

Seventy years on, Hotel Cipriani still trades on Giuseppe Cipriani's original promise: the allure of Venice, without the crowds. Marino's renovation brings the hotel into the present while holding fast to the details that have long defined its legend: Bellinis at sunset, the cypress-filled gardens, and an archive of stories from the golden age of travel.

Hotel Cipriani, A Belmond Hotel, Venice is located at Giudecca, 10, 30133 Venice, Italy

'It’s going to be alright, just imagine you’re a country,' said the architect to Baby Grecia. So begins Once upon a time in Grexia, a myth-making catalogue text by Andreas Angelidakis, written to accompany his show, ‘Escape Room’, at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Taking over the Greek Pavilion, architect-turned-artist Angelidakis reimagines the building as a drag queen in the throes of an identity crisis, desperate to shed her role as a national subject. Like drag, Angelidakis suggests, nationality is a performance, and for Giardini’s Baby Grecia, becoming an escape room is one way of slipping out of costume.

Stepping inside the pavilion feels like entering the glitch-ridden vortex of the early internet. Maybe also a kink dungeon. Or a queer goth disco. Or a souvenir shop. For Angelidakis, it’s also a cave, a metaphor for Plato’s famous allegory where all of these typologies collapse into one another like an oven-baked moussaka. There are neon lights, light-up floors, soft chain-wrapped columns hanging from the ceiling and a soundtrack that includes Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1980s anthem ‘Relax’, playing over and over in dizzying loops.

It’s fun, light, and even a little camp, but this head-spinning sensory ‘pleasure dome’ is underpinned by a serious critique of nationhood. Using the building’s architecture as a starting point, Angelidakis studied the details of its symmetrical, neo-Byzantine façade, and found within it a snapshot of Greek modernity. Notably, he discovered the building’s exterior columns are simplified replicas of those in Hagia Sophia. 'Byzantium was not a random choice for a Greek pavilion,' Agenlidakis explains. Rather, these architectural flourishes functioned as a state-sponsored act of imperial yearning mirrored by the right-wing sentiment to ‘make Istanbul Constantinople again’.

The parallels between modern-day MAGA are not lost in the show, which features a series of sculptures that approximate the movement’s infamous red caps, each more incoherent than the last as random letters disappear and reappear.

'The event that inspired this [exhibition] is the 6 January storming of the Capitol,' Angelidakis told me, smoking a cigarette on a printed column-turned-beanbag outside the pavilion. 'We saw this internet culture, people who were dreaming of crazy war, spilling out onto the Capitol.' By making physical the hyper-stimulus of our mediated reality — a space where images and events both past and present fracture into replicas, projections and in some cases sheer illusions – ‘Escape Room’ updates Plato’s allegory of the cave for our algorithmic age. While the original story describes a struggle to see past illusions to the truth, ‘Escape Room’ presents a hall of mirrors where history itself is the prisoner. 'Don't believe anything,' Angelidakis warns. 'We live in the fake news mode. That's why in the catalogue it says in Greek; free errors, free mistakes.'

Curated by George Bekirakis, the exhibition itself is split into two parts, each operating as a reality-building mechanism. The first space references the nation and is built like a stage with an LED-flashing dancefloor and a 21m-long screen whose mind-bending video effect is created by surveillance cameras turned in on themselves to create a kind of tautological panopticon – a closed loop, like a bathroom-mirror selfie that goes on forever. Soft sculptures resembling the pavilion’s columns lie slumped across the floor, as if exhausted by the labour of upholding Grecia’s conflicting national narratives. By turning marble into plush, Angelidakis flattens the hierarchies they are built to uphold. By inviting people to sit on them, he domesticates them, too.

The second part of the exhibition resembles a more commercial space, riffing on the typology of the periptero, a Greek street kiosk, which is a direct translation of ‘pavilion’ in modern Greek. Typically found on urban corners selling everything from cigarettes to ice cream, these local hubs are reimagined here as a distribution point for national myths. In this neon-lit market, display cases are filled with distorted plastic trinkets, 3D-printed figurines that resemble classical sculptures chewed up and spit out by a computer. Nearby, giant plush books rest open on fetishistic metal frames, while racks hang heavy with oversized plush T-shirts. Both are printed with ‘clues’ – a collage of newspaper clippings, Wikipedia entries and fragments from Angelidakis’ own archive. 'Modern Greece was literally a souvenir of ancient Greece, arranged to be a country by the British, French and the Russians. We are a bibelot of antiquity, of all those ancient ideas,' Angelidakis contends. 'I'm trying to restate modern Greece in a way that makes sense, not as a fabricated national story.'

Koyo Kouoh, the curator of this edition, who sadly passed away in 2025, chose ‘Minor Keys’ as the Biennale’s theme, a musical modality that casts a shadow across ‘major’ notes. Angelidakis leans into this register by weaving overlooked histories into his disruption of larger national narratives. He foregrounds figures like Zak Kostopoulos, the queer activist and drag artist brutally killed in Athens in 2018, and Andreas Nomikos, the city's legendary ‘feather lady’, a street hawker and formative figure for Angelidakis: 'That was the first time in my life I heard someone outside of me who I understood was gay.' Though this minor attunement manifests most poetically at the entrance, where a heavy black veil hangs in homage to the artist Vaso Katraki, who won an award at the 1966 Venice Biennale before being imprisoned the following year for her political beliefs.

In its heady collision of political history and queer pop culture, ‘Escape Room’ gamifies the idea of the nation, presenting the visitor – or player – with clues that reveal the conditions of its development and the contradictions that exist within it. Only here, the goal isn't to win but to navigate a confusing system that lays bare the architecture of the fictions we inhabit. 'The moment we start asking if an event is real means we have passed believing images and video as evidence. Now, we’re in a time of post-truth.' He shows me a tattoo on his hand: another hand, throwing dice into the air. It is a fitting motif for the exhibition, a delirious meta-environment where ‘truth’ is up for grabs.

The Venice Art Biennale until 22 November 2026, labiennale.org

‘Canicula’ – meaning the ‘dog days’ of summer, or the peak of a heatwave – is an appropriate name for Fondazione In Between Art Film’s current exhibition in Venice (until 22 November 2026).

The institution’s exhibitions of commissioned film works are unique, not only in their support of a tough medium, but also for their unflinching response to world events. ‘Canicula’, curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi – respectively, the artistic director and the curator of Fondazione In Between Art Film – seeks to give a litmus test of how artist filmmakers are parsing the contemporary global landscape.

‘I think the shows are largely inspired by the time we're living in, but also try to make room for the work of the artist,’ says Rabottini. ‘[They] sit in a context. And in the last few years, the physical, emotional and psychological temperature [of that context] has risen so much.’

‘Canicula’ is held at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, a former hospital, hospice and respite space dating from 1527. An apocalyptic orange hue permeates the space, as the scenographers use light to seemingly pull the artworks off the screen and into the physical space.

‘The idea with this third show was to end a trilogy about atmospheric metaphors, but also provide a different mood, a different feeling,’ Rabottini adds. ‘The first two shows had a melancholic tone in a way, and we thought that we needed more of an aggressive feeling, because the metaphor was about excessive light and heat.’

The first film is installed in the property’s majestic 16th-century chapel, with the burning light searing through the towering windows, highlighting its baroque features and the single-channel work playing in the centre. Baby I’m Yours, Forever, (2026) is shot in a meat-packing plant and we see racks of meat hooks before we see bodies, naked, folded, combined and then dancing. Are we in a sauna or a nightmare?

'It is an allegory of sacrifice. So, you see a sequence of scenes that deal with this idea that life, in order to film itself, has to consume other forms of life,’ says Rabottini.

‘It's literally moving-image architecture within the architecture of the church. So it's basically like it's a work made of spaces and bodies,’ adds scenographer 'Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli.

The second work is Boring Billion by Yuyan Wang, which explores the inner and outer life of robotics and machines through thousands of spliced found images. Liquid moves through pistons and screws while rubberised outers are placed over mechanical bodies; we see the flow of the making of robots and how they exist in the world. The results are both meditative and sobering.

‘It really deals with this overabundance of information and, in this case, the structural obsolescence of technology. It starts [with] current attempts to humanise technology,’ says Rabottini.

Further along is Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s 450XL: The Story of Fugitive Sound, which was a standout work for many people attending the preview week of the 2026 Venice Art Biennale in May, when the exhibition opened. Known for his sonic investigative work – he uses aural witness accounts and audio analysis in his investigations of human rights abuses – in Lebanon, Syria and the Golan Heights, the artist turned his attention to anti-corruption student protests that took place in Belgrade in spring 2025. During the silent vigil, the crowd was attacked with a sonic weapon, LRAD 450XL.

‘I did not choose Belgrade; the student movement chose us!’ says Abu Hamdan. ‘[After] the attack happened, our inbox was flooded with requests from many individuals who were attacked to investigate the incident.’

In the resulting work seen here, screens shaped like placards are staggered through what was once a hospital musical therapy room, and the gridded floor vibrates as viewers are encouraged to walk through the installation, as well as watch it at a remove. The students’ accounts of what happened combined with some simulations of the sounds used spell out the use of this sinister form of oppression.

‘At the core of our investigation were 15 “earwitness” interviews that helped produce the sonic identikit of the [artwork’s titular] fugitive and negated sound. Each of these witnesses occupies a screen in this installation; in this way they speak both as a collective and in their individuality. The installation is designed to use the screens/protest placards as a scenography for thinking through the power of collective silence and the emergence of new kinds of weaponry that seek to atomise its subjects,’ says Lawrence Abu Hamdan.

Elsewhere, Ukrainian duo Roman Khimei and Yarema Malaschuhuk present Wishful Thinking, 2026, an installation across three rooms in which we see Ukrainian actors enact the future regrets of Russian soldiers. Each of the rooms is made architecturally awkward and oppressive as the films play out tropes of regret from each soldier, at the end of their life, which vary from explanations to silent acceptance.

‘We thought conceptually that the future is not interesting anymore, that the future is boring, essentially. We know what will happen, everything will be good, whatever good means; we will still have these documentaries about these war criminals saying these boring things…’ they say of the work. ‘We usually deal with it after things have happened. What if we already know how this will be treated in the future? For now, there is no dialogue.’

Until 22 November 2026 at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, inbetweenartfilm.com/en/canicula

In 1979 the press secretary of the British embassy in Buenos Aires, Randoll Coate, woke from a dream where his friend, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges had died. Writing to Susana Bombal (who had originally introduced them in the 1950s), he unveiled his idea: inspired by Borges’ short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, he vowed to create a labyrinth in his honour whenever the day came.

True to his word, after the writer’s death in 1986, the maze maker’s design came to life in Argentina. Due to its success, Borges’ widow Maria Kodama began to propose Coate’s project to places dear to the writer. Venice, itself a winding labyrinth of a city, held a special place in his heart.

Labirinto Borges at the Giorgio Cini Foundation

In 2011, twenty-five years after Borges' death, the labyrinth opened on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Set in a weathered cordon steel skeleton to protect it from the elements, vivid green boxwood plants wind in long articulated lines, revealing the form of an open book, the writer’s surname splayed out in elegant type on each 'page', mirrored and intertwined.

Looking closer, images emerge: a question mark, a cane, a pair of eyes. 'The labyrinth’s perimeter asks us with its symbols and signs to remember the reasons why it was planted,' says Pedro Memelsdorff, the musical director of the Giorgio Cini Foundation. '[It’s] a monumental tribute to Borges for the future and for future generations.' Today, forty years after the writer’s death, thanks to the generous support of PwC Italia the labyrinth has been fully restored.

Restoring the original maze

'We might think of it as a mosaic, with the plants as the tiles that live or die,' says Renata Codello, the Secretary General of the Foundation. The process of creating and maintaining the maze is 'a constant action … always living and present.' 165 dead or severely damaged boxwood plants were removed, while the irrigation system responsible for maintaining the verdant green was inspected and repaired where faults were found. Only time will tell if the older plants accept the new ones; like a body after an organ transplant, things need to unite. In the 15 years since it was first planted change was inevitable, with this revisitation the 1,1150 metres of winding path have been trimmed and unified. Weeds painstakingly removed by hand, the soil revamped, refreshed, and enriched with additional fertilization.

Thanks to a collaboration with the Italian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired, the restoration also includes the addition of a tactile map at the start of the maze. Borges lived for the last years of his life in darkness, his sight gradually deteriorating over time until he went blind at the age of 55. So this small but powerful gesture creates another moving link to the author, allowing visitors to understand the structure of the labyrinth and feel its twists and turns before they take that first step into the unknown, and experience it for themselves.

The Labyrinth is now open to the public
visitcini.com

Like many of the palazzi in the city, Orient Express Venezia has two entrances: one on the street, one on the water. The latter is the only way to do it. As your boat glides through Cannaregio's canals, medieval façades rise straight from the water, their reflections broken by the steady choreography of gondolas and vaporetti. A doorman appears at the blush-pink façade of Palazzo Donà Giovannelli, home of the hotel, opening a portal into a world of frescoed ceilings, ornate stucco and Murano chandeliers.

Wallpaper* checks into Orient Express Venezia, Venice

What’s on your doorstep?

Cannaregio isn't the Venice of postcards. It lacks the grandeur of San Marco and, yes, there's a Claire's Accessories around the corner. This is a neighbourhood where Venetians actually live – where laundry hangs over the canals. It's home to the Jewish Ghetto, founded in 1516, the Gothic church of Madonna dell'Orto. But besides, when the address in question is the 15th-century Palazzo Donà Giovannelli, quibbling over postcode hardly feels apposite.

Who is behind the design?

Built in 1436 during the height of the Venetian Republic, the palazzo passed through some of Venice's great noble families before becoming one of its leading cultural salons. In the mid-19th century, architect Giovanni Battista Meduna introduced the neo-Gothic interiors – the octagonal staircase and the lavish reception rooms are some of the palace's most breathtaking features.

‘The restoration was a labour of love requiring rare interventions, from drying the palazzo’s foundations and building a dam around the façade walls, to the removal and treatment of each stone on the walls and floors. Over nearly a decade, hundreds of artisans worked across fresco restoration, sculpture, gilding and woodwork,’ explains Lebanese architect and designer Aline Asmar d'Amman, who is behind the latest chapter of the building, it’s transformation into Orient Express Venezia.

She resisted turning the hotel into a museum piece: original frescoes meet mirrored walls, and silk, velvet and embossed leather run into patinated plaster, carved timber and time-worn stone. ‘Beyond a monument to history, I see Orient Express Venezia as a living story, where the past shapes the future,’ she says. ‘It was important for me to honour the palazzo’s history while reimagining it for the present.’

The palette is clever. Asmar d'Amman drew on Venice's ‘lost colours’ – the rich reds, ochres, blues and greens that once animated the city before centuries of salt air and sunlight softened them to powdery hues. The designer embraces the spectrum that remains: baby tones woven through upholstery, curtains and finishes. This finds its fullest expression in the public rooms – the sorbet-hued Salone Vittoria and the Sala della Cultura, crowned by a lapis lazuli ceiling, are the undeniable stars of the renovation.

The room to book

They're rivalled only by the six Signature Suites, the largest of which span 145 square metres and incorporate incredible original details, including 19th-century frescoes depicting mythical winged figures and vast marble fireplaces. Tall windows frame canal views, while antique-inspired furnishings and rich textiles capture the essence of Palazzo Donà Giovannelli at its most romantic. ‘I wanted guests to be touched by the grace of [the palazzo’s] undying youth, while also experiencing a sense of cinematic progression,’ says Asmar d'Amman. ‘It becomes a great discovery, where one moves through layers of history.’

‘I love the act of re-using what once belonged to a glorious past, with an infinite interplay between old soul and contemporary interior architecture,’ she continues. The Cherubini Suite, for example, is home to a 1958 Carlo Scarpa chandelier as well as a vintage Murano chess table, weaving together distinct threads of Venice's architectural and artisanal heritage.

The guestrooms, by comparison, dial things down. Finished in coffee tones, pale timber and fretwork inspired by the Ca' d'Oro, the Grand Canal palace also designed by Meduna, they're elegant, if a little overshadowed by the spectacle outside.

Staying for drinks and dinner?

Dining is split between relaxed Venetian cooking at all-day La Casati and the more ambitious Heinz Beck Venezia. La Casati takes inspiration from the persona of Marchesa Luisa Casati, who would famously take her pet leopard for walks in Piazza San Marco, serving seasonal dishes from cicchetti to marinated beef with artichokes and creamed cod ravioli.

At Heinz Beck Venezia, the three-Michelin-starred chef brings his ingredient-led approach to lagoon produce in the palace's restored orangerie. Before or after dinner, cocktails are served at Wagon Bar, an art deco space that subtly references the golden age of rail travel in a nod to the Orient Express name. ‘A loving tension reigns between the Orient Express world, marked by the glamour of the 1930s, and a reinterpretation of Venetian living. It embraces the duality of legacy and reinvention,’ says Asmar d'Amman.

Where to switch off

Perhaps the greatest luxury at Orient Express Venezia is its rare tranquillity in the city's tourist centre. The hotel's walled garden – almost unheard of in this part of Venice – is a pocket of calm restored with fountains, antique gates and lantern-lit pathways.

The spa follows the same philosophy, borrowing from Roman, Venetian and Ottoman bathing traditions to create a lagoon-inspired sanctuary.

The verdict

Orient Express Venezia’s location should not be mistaken for compromise – few addresses in the city can rival Palazzo Donà Giovannelli’s scale and atmosphere. The romance of Venice is palpable here, with contemporary interventions executed so deftly that you barely notice them.

At home in Brighton, Stanley Donwood is looking forward to looking forwards.

The artist is still sorting the screeds of archive pieces that have been returned to him after January’s conclusion of ‘This Is What You Get’, Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum’s sprawling, five-month retrospective gathering his and Thom Yorke’s visual work together for Radiohead. ‘My studio is just full of boxes and stuff,' says the puckishly energetic artist, 57, a friend and collaborator of Yorke’s since their late 1980s days together at Exeter University. 'It’s really difficult. You have to move everything to move anything. Phew, I’ll get there in the end.'

There has been, too, the work on ‘Motion Picture House’, a Radiohead installation based partly on the visuals Donwood created for the paired albums, Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001). Having launched at California’s Coachella festival in April, it’s currently showing in Brooklyn.

'I haven’t seen it for real. I only saw sketches, mock-ups, then fancy computer fly-throughs of virtual environments. It’s its own little world,' he explains, born out of 'that digital exhibition-slash-game that’s not a game [we made] with Epic during the whole Coronavirus time. It’s the film of that, in this quite out-there installation with giant stick figures.'

Then there was the merchandise Donwood created for Radiohead’s surprise, don’t-call-it-a-comeback tour in autumn 2025. As it happens, when Donwood’s and Zoom call with me clicks into life, I’m wearing my T-shirt from the first show in Madrid. Awks-not-awks.

'Nice to see one in the wild!' says Donwood, chirpily. And nice to have a bespoke T-shirt specifically from that gig, I say. 'Yes, I do like doing different shirts for different shows. I was going to do that for every show when they did a tour some years ago. Then they expanded the tour. It became a nightmare of endlessly making new T-shirts, with different trees on them.'

Donwood is just back from Venice and the 2026 Biennale, returning the slow way with his partner. 'We got the train to Bologna, then walked to Florence. It was a lovely thing to do, to get all the Venice stuff out of my head.'

All the 'Venice stuff' was, at least in part, the excitement around ‘No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)’, Donwood and Yorke’s first exhibition, staged with Tin Man Art, outside the UK. It’s a collection of 15 pieces, ink on Japanese paper, that combine the pair’s mutually completed drawings and paintings with assemblies of the word scree that Donwood found in Yorke’s notebooks.

To highlight one image shown alongside this story, titled I have read, understood & agree to the terms, the text that appears underneath runs thus:

'Let me refresh your glass! Go ask the unicorns! The mad king… no happy ending… Throwing knives reflect what you have in mind. There’s a tranquilliser dart for you; keep a left turn at the exit. Pounded against unseen rocks without mercy, the wind and the tide, the ghost wide-eyed. (But with today’s new air-conditioning methods and extensive satellite connectivity.)'

And then, underneath that, 'The thisness of thatness.'

Wallpaper*: So, Mr Donwood: what’s the this-and-that that made the Venice Biennale the right place for you and Mr Yorke to ‘tour’ your work for the first time?

Stanley Donwood: Ahhhhhhh…. The right place? I don’t know what the right place would be. But this is a really tiny exhibition in a really small space: three metres high, four metres wide and five metres long. It’s basically a small box. But it’s got a posh door. It must have been once the entrance to quite a big townhouse. But it’s just the lobby, small and plain. And Venice as a place to do a show? Why not? There are loads of people who are into art there. Let’s hit them up.

W*: When we spoke last summer, Thom said you would be getting back into the painting studio in the autumn. Are these the works that resulted?

SD: Yes. We did a load of work in October, then more earlier this year. It was all done over the course of two months in total. It was nice to just paint. I’m a bit fed up with computers. I mean, they’re kind of useful. But I’m very bored with computers and the internet. I was really keen in the 1990s and early 2000s on everything digital. But it's soured a bit for me. The unintended consequences of the internet, really. Who’d have thought it would lead to a massive global rise in Nazis? I didn’t see that coming. I thought it was gonna be great!

W*: These painting studios – where are they?

SD: Some of it was here [in Brighton, UK]. But also, Thom’s got a new studio, in London town. So I’ve been going up to work there. We do a lot of work in the same studio, but also over the phone – taking photos of things and saying [to each other]: ‘What should I do next? I’m stuck.’

W*: With this exhibition, were the materials – ink on Japanese paper – a founding principle of what these pieces would be?

SD: When we were doing the paintings that became the artwork for [Yorke’s side-project] The Smile, back in 2022, we were using tempera paint, which is very beautiful. And at the same time, we got interested in Japanese painting and how that’s done. So we ended up using this ink made from walnuts, and the paper is Japanese, made from another tree, the bark of the mulberry. It has lovely, long fibres for making paper.

W*: The image that’s titled I have read, understood and agree to the terms: I’m describing that as seven blobby people on their knees, with their hands behind their backs, looking like… they’re about to be hanged. What was the inspo?

SD: With swapping the paintings back and forth, we do the drawing in the evening, usually in front of the telly. Draw a bit, pass the drawing over to the other guy, and it goes backwards and forwards like that. So Thom drew the sitting figures. And I drew those things coming out of their heads. They’re not supposed to be [being] hanged. But I guess they do look a bit like that. Depends on what’s in your mind, really. I think they were supposed to be thoughts coming out of their heads. But now you mention it, they do look a bit sinister.

W*: Then we have Numbers That You’ve Never Seen – an open-topped, stepped, Mayan temple, I’m going to suggest.

SD: There are loads of paintings in that style. They’re like ziggurat structures. There are so many little reasons things are like what they are. But I find if I try to explain it, it sounds like a garbled load of nonsense. Because by the time [the work] comes out, it is a bit garbled.

With these drawings, they’re not really… considered. They’re not planned. They don’t have a start point and an endpoint. They’re the result of an evolving and unfinished thought process. They’re partly from half-remembered dreams. Mis-remembered dreams, really.

So the pictures are one thing. Then there are the words which go with them, which I think are half of the work…

W*: Ah yes. How do you come by those?

SD: Those come from going through Thom’s [writings]. When Thom’s working on music, he collects loads of words. He’s like a park worker with a leaf-blower, but he’s just blowing loads of words. He ends up with this massive load of words that he then picks through to find lyrics.

So I got all of the words he had, all these pages of writing – well, words really. You can’t call it writing because it isn’t yet, it’s the raw material. So I went through it, picked out what I liked, reordered it, sent that back to Thom and he reordered it again. And from the reordering of the reordering, we extracted sequences of words that looked like titles of paintings.

W*: Was this alongside doing the paintings?

SD: This happened at a different time to making the drawings and paintings. So you’ve got this picture and you apply words to it. You give it a title, then you put some other words where normally a painting in a museum would have a description underneath of what it is.

So it makes a different thing. We might have been thinking one thing when we’re painting a picture, another thing when we’re putting the words together. But when you look at the picture and read the words at the same time, we’ve made another thing that we didn’t plan.

That’s as close to a… ah… process as I can get. It sounds awful! Maybe it’ll sound better when you write it down.

W*: We’ll let Wallpaper* readers be the judge of that… Anyway, the exhibition title: ‘No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)’. Thom’s said that that’s a reference to a time he was ‘absolutely fucking wasted in some terrible hotel in Miami and the key card wouldn’t let me in’. Any further intel on that?

SD: I don’t know. I wasn’t there at the time when he lost his keycard. He’s probably had quite a lot of keycards in his time. But, yeah, it’s the sort of thing you can lose, I guess. Actually, I was in a hotel in Zurich the other day and you had to use your keycard to get up in the lift. And I did have a keycard and the elevator was going. I felt like a success.

W*: What might that title convey?

SD: Again, I don’t know. We’ve got this bizarre, meaningless title, but it just sounded quite nice. It looked great as a website too. So we’ve got nogoelevator.com. Which for some reason no one had. It’s a brilliant dot.com. And on that, each picture has its words associated with it.

Weirdly, even though the words and the pictures don’t mean anything by themselves, it still took us ages, and a lot of toing and froing, to work out which title goes with each drawing. I don’t know why. But once they were stuck, we thought: ‘Well, of course that picture's called that. What else could it be called?’

I like that sort of thing. The accidental creation of sense from nonsense.

W*: The exhibition runs until early June. Will you then bring it to the UK?

SD: Oooh! I hadn’t thought of that. I… don’t know. I’ll mention it to my agent. But that’s a really good idea. Because we wouldn’t need much space, so the rent would be quite cheap. We could use a Portakabin or shipping container. We don’t even need that. We could do it in a shed to be honest.

W*: Any other new projects with Thom?

SD: We’re going to try to do some more painting soon. But for me and Thom, it’s been a lot of backward looking. There was the 20th anniversary of OK Computer in 2017. Then all this Kid A and Amnesiac stuff. The show at the Ashmolean. It’s like, everything’s back there [cranes head behind him]. You get a crick in your neck after a while. Looking through old things, I don’t think it’s very healthy. So I just want to do new stuff – not on the computer. Computer not OK!

‘No Go Elevator (not without no keycard)’ is at Castello 2432, Fondamenta dei Penini, 30122, Venice until 7 June 2026, veneziatiamo.eu

‘I've always been influenced by Italy’s ecclesiastical spaces. I'm sure it's in my work already,’ says Barry X Ball upon the opening of ‘The Shape of Time’, in Venice’s church and monastery, The Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore. ‘People tell me my work here looks site-specific – it all came together.’

Ball’s canonical works do look right at home in the church, located on an island of the same name. It is an appropriate marking of the latest initiative from the non-profit branch of the monastic Benedictine community, who work to strengthen the bonds between church and contemporary art by fostering relationships with artists.

The island, open to all, is a beautiful haven in Venice. It is easy to see why Ball’s work, situated in the basilica’s arresting architectural spaces originally designed by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, seems site-specific, with imposing sculptures and works cast in a textural prism of materials referencing a classical tradition.

For New York-based Ball, this recontextualisation is a natural part of a practice that has spanned a mix of mediums and methods, and has seen him juxtapose a classic figurativism with a contemporary methodology, uniting raw material with 3D digital-scanning and printing, computer-controlled milling and hand-carving.

‘This church is an incredible example of balance, symmetry, organised space and beautiful mathematical principles,’ says Ball on why he was drawn to exhibiting in the space. ‘It is a service model for civic architecture in my country – Thomas Jefferson admired Andrea Palladio above all architects, and his principles extended to the civic architecture of Washington, DC, and also, at the same time, to Britain. They were then linked to the founding of the world's first democracy in America. At our highest point, we had high aims. We've fallen far from a lot of things in our country of late, but I feel like it's my job as an American to respect this place as a work of art.’

Ball’s work is in dialogue with this deep historicity. ‘The Shape of Time’ unites 23 sculptures in the space, many of which are being shown for the first time. They include the magnificent Pope Saint John Paul II – 12 years in the making and crafted from solid silver and 18ct gold, it cuts a striking silhouette against the basilica’s wooden stalls. It is a classical foil for other works, such as Mirrored Buddha Herms, which mingle both the ancient and contemporary, the Catholic and the Buddhist in stone Buddhas, poised in elegant golden plinths which almost resemble a lunar landing module. ‘The world divides into those who think it's landing, and those who think it’s taking off,’ says Ball.

Ball is adept at utilising modern technology to bring these histories to life, best epitomised in Pietà, which pays homage to Michelangelo's unfinished Pietà Rondanini sculpture. Ball and his team 3D-scanned the work in 2011, and now it is cast in Iranian onyx, its proportions streamlined into a seamless strobilated form.

'I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian Protestant, but I was really affected by my contact with the Catholic Church through my many years of studying art in Italy,' Ball adds. 'I've been touched by the church's interaction with me, and how warm they've been in inviting me here.'

‘Barry X Ball – The Shape of Time' at Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, until 22 November 2026

abbaziasangiorgio.it

barryxball.com

With less than a year to go, speculation on the Venice Architecture Biennale 2027 is ramping up; who will the newly appointed co-curators choose to participate in their main show? And who is poised to win the biennale's coveted awards?

One question was answered today - that of the theme. At a press conference in Venice today, it was announced by Venice biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and the curators Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu that next year's festival will be centred on: 'Do Architecture: for the possibility of coexistence facing a real reality.'

To expand on this and keep you up to date with news as they come, our biennial, ultimate guide for the world's biggest festival of the built environment is now here, designed to follow rolling coverage, breaking news and, of course, everything you need to know about exhibits, participants and logistics.

At the recent press conference, which revealed the theme for 2027, the two curators emphasised ideas of peace and coexistence in their speech, drawing attention to action and a deep connection with existing environments - both nature and human-made contexts.

They jointly said: 'If somebody asks us what the most beautiful architecture is, we always say the garden, especially the Chinese garden.' This draws on metaphorical uses of the notion of a garden too; they continue to explain, seeing gardens as a symbol of peace. It is about 'an architecture of coexistence. A gentle residence in a violent world. We hope for world peace,' the architects concluded.

Welcome to our Venice Architecture Biennale 2027 ultimate guide

Following architect Carlo Ratti's much-discussed Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 and its theme, 'Intelligens,' and 2024 RIBA Gold Medal winner Lesley Lokko's 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale's influential focus on Africa as 'The Laboratory of the Future', the pressure is on for the next event, which marks the seminal 20th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. Here is what we know.

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2027 co-curators

In November 2025, the biennale announced Chinese architecture duo Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, founders of Hangzhou-based Amateur Architecture Studio, as the joint curators of the upcoming 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale. The pair have led their studio collaboratively since 1997, and also teach and are a respected voice within the architecture community.

They are also no strangers to the biennale, having taken part in the main show in 2006, 2010 (when they received the Special Mention for their project 'Decay of a Dome') and 2016.

The prolific architects are behind works such as the Xiangshan Campus of China Academy of Art, the Tiles Hill in Hangzhou, the renovation of Wencun Village, the Lin’An Historic Museum, and the Xi'an Opera House and Concert Hall. Wang Shu won the Pritzker Prize in 2012 and has served as a judge for the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2013.

‘'Conceptual experiments driven to extremes are often divorced from reality, and over-commercialisation tends to [make for] merely popular and short-lived [projects]. [There is a] breaking away from the connection with the real place. It will lead to the death of architecture. Architecture becomes a kind of delusional expression about the future,’ the architects said at their announcement as curators, hinting perhaps at themes they are keen to explore through their show.

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2027 theme: 'Do Architecture'

Much like every biennale iteration, the curated main show revolves around a key theme – from the very first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980, centred on Paolo Portoghesi's 'The Presence of the Past', to last year's 'Intelligens' which explored the relations, common points and inspiration to be found in the natural and the artificial.

As a response, perhaps, to last year's imaginative speculations and experiments that brought together futuristic technology and themes of science, Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu turn the spotlight this year to doing, action and practice, focusing on not speculative, but hands-on building, bringing notions of natural materials and tactility into the discussion.

Wang Shu said at the theme announcement's press conference: 'The future is full of uncertainty. Overly conceptual experiments are often detached from reality, and in order to survive, we need rapid change. Among the world's crises, the one between nature and human-made construction is the most profound. This does not only refer to untouched nature but also human environments. We must remain highly alert to the power that the technological progress of our times has given to architects.'

Lu Wengyu added, 'Architecture should remain linked to reality. We should not destroy villages and cities that we have inherited. Architecture should not leave this world behind. It is an architecture that should rely on material, not visual power.' She continued: 'For 2027, we decided to confront reality with a series of questions. How can we avoid the vulgar cloning of new buildings? How can architecture acknowledge and practice differences, the authenticity of lived experience?'

'There are different approaches to climate change, and how can they walk next to each other? How can we resolve the conflict between urban and rural through architecture?' pondered Wang Shu.

The main theme will provide conceptual grounding and a common starting point for both the participants to build their submissions around and the national pavilions to riff off on for their own exhibits.

National Participations

Between Giardini della Biennale, where many of the individual countries' national pavilions are, and various locations across Venice's canal city (for those countries not claiming a pavilion in the Giardini), the world comes to showcase its thoughts on architecture during the Venice Architecture Biennale 2027.

Many of the national participations are still to be announced – it's early days for many countries, which are still conducting their internal competitions before they announce the curatorial teams and themes of their respective pavilions. The United Kingdom was among the first to reveal its plans.

The British Council held a competition to determine a UK-Malaysia team to curate next year's pavilion. The move signals the celebration of 70 years of diplomatic relations between the UK and Malaysia. Unveiled earlier this spring, the curatorial team will consist of Grymsdyke Farm's Dr Guan Lee and Mike Lim, director of IDK, alongside a team including Maria McLintock and Ben Swaby Selig. The participation will also include Penang-based artisans Ng Chi Wang, Lee Shao Chin and Koh Eng Keat.

Places, dates and tickets

Opening to the public on 8 May 2027, the Venice Architecture Biennale 2027 will run, as always, for a little over six months, closing on 21 November of the same year. The public opening is typically preceded by two vernissage days – this year, those are expected to be the 6 and 7 May.

Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu's main themed show will take place in two locations - Venice's famed Arsenale and Giardini, the latter occupying the newly reopened Central Pavilion, which underwent extensive restoration for the past year.

Giardini is also the ground for many of the national participations, with countries from around the world presenting their shows and responses to the theme in their respective, dedicated pavilions. Tickets for the main sites are available at the entrance of both sites. Opening hours are 11 am - 7 pm (last admission 6:45 pm), with the venue closed on Mondays.

Do expect a wealth of further events to be spread across Venice. This includes both independent programmes and official programme collateral events, and national participations that may not be accommodated at the Giardini site. There is never enough space for everyone within the two official biennale sites, but what a great problem to have, navigating one's way to the next display or event in the wonderful backdrop of Venice.

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2027 will run 8 May to 21 November 2027 at Venice's Giardini and Arsenale sites.

Just a 14-minute water taxi from the chaos of Venice Biennale’s epicentre, 27-year-old designer Chiara Angelica Gandini is finalising the launch exhibition for her fashion-label-cum studio, Haus Nuller. Clad in a crimson Issey Miyake plissé dress and fishnet flats, the Central Saint Martins-educated textile designer is tall with slicked back hair and an Italian lilt that reveals her Brescian upbringing. We’re stood inside the shell of a classic Venetian building, her family’s home in the quieter locale of Dorsoduro, which has been repurposed for the occasion.

Spread across palazzo-style rooms, her signature textiles – woollens hand-woven with stainless steel chains – are displayed at various stages in the painstaking design process, spanning digital patterns (each pixel corresponds to one thread) through to double-loom swatches framed as singular artworks. Design duo Formafantasma have curated the layout as a pared-back series of plinths, LED lighting and partitions tiled with the studio’s inaugural campaign, art directed by Stefanie Barth.

‘Haus Nuller: Breaking the Chain’ at the Venice Biennale

Entitled ‘Breaking the Chain’, the collection in question is a tight capsule of long coats, dresses, separates and capes – distressed just so on the outside. Gandini pores over a clothes rail, gesturing as she weighs up why a satellite event during the most prestigious art expo of the year was the right place and the right time to share her work – and not, say, fashion week. ‘Venice, it’s very interesting,’ she says, smiling. ‘The engineering of the city is super complicated, but it's also very fragile, right? I saw a connection with my practice.’ An assistant models one of the made-to-order designs, deliberately revealing its underside where the sparkling threadwork appears like a lining.

A longstanding interior design buff and Anni Albers fanatic – Gandini also calls out Yohji Yamamoto and anyone ‘that creates their own system when there wasn’t one that fit’ – takes visible joy in demonstrating the technical process behind her work, prompting me with snapshots from her phone. She takes me to another room to watch a process video. The footage shows merino and alpaca wool threads spread on the loom while a weaver’s hand applies metal chains across the weft. ‘It takes a while,’ she laughs. The weavers (all women, Gandini notes) behind the handiwork are spread across Europe: Barcelona, Prato, the UK and Finland. ‘We did a lot of research to find these machines and these women. It takes a lot of skill to weave something like that. You can’t just have a junior weaver.’

For Gandini, it’s worth the wait. After trialling various formulas over a two-year period for her knitwear – itself a feat at the intersection of mathematics and art – she landed on the golden ratio for her crack team. In fact, many weavers she trialled refused to work on the concept for fear of destroying their machines. There’s also issues that come with the crafty territory. Each weaver’s work comes out differently. ‘Everyone has a different hand,’ she says. ‘The weavers now know – after doing it and doing it – how much tension to apply, but if one day one of them is a bit tired, it’s going to come out wrong, and she has to start from scratch.’

The pieces – hand-wrought and one-of-a-kind – reflect the weaving process. Hold them in one hand, and they’re heavy; but wear them, and they’re effortless. ‘I like the idea of this weight, because it's making a political statement, in a certain sense, regarding gender,’ says Gandini, whose studio has intentionally blended a traditionally masculine industry (metalwork) with a historically undervalued and feminised one (textiles). Indeed, the name itself is a play on the Bauhaus movement and the German word, nuller, which translates to ‘of little value’.

The thinking first came to Gandini while in her studies when she clocked that CSM’s weaving studio was only used by women. ‘I started to study the history of textiles, and I noticed that even at the Bauhaus, even though women could finally enroll, they were confined to the weaving studio,’ says Gandini. ‘Threads were considered easier to work with, and women are [stereotypically considered] more gentle, so they can only work with things that are softer, you know – all that kind of narrative.’

Haus Nuller is a sincere and thoughtful proposition, both for the fashion market and a more textile-led one, artfully reevaluating craft in a way that doesn’t rush to quick-buck demands. It’s also more than just a clothing label, open to a wide spectrum of opportunities. Recently, the studio worked as the upholstery consultant for B&B Italia’s contemporary re-edition of the 1958 ‘Catilina’ chair by Luigi Caccia Dominioni.

‘For me, Dominioni’s architecture is really line-based,’ she says. ‘It made me think of an artist called Willem Cole, who works only with lines and the three primary colours.’ Cole produced a series of drawings, and Gandini translated them into textiles. ‘You know, I don’t only love fashion,’ she says. ‘But I do think fashion is more fun. Upholstery has a lot of rules.’

Of course, rules – including the one to not incorporate metalwork into weaving – have sown the seeds of this potentially game-changing studio practice. For now, the plan is to only produce one collection per year while consulting and working on special projects. ‘I don't think we need more clothes,’ says Gandini. ‘But we do need more ideas.’

Haus Nuller, ‘Breaking the Chain’, Sestiere Dorsoduro 3907 30123, Venezia, Italy.

The collection will be available for viewings and purchase at Via Ludovica Settala 45, Milano 20124 on 20-21 May, 2026.

Also read: What to see at the Venice Biennale

'I work very intuitively,' says Sanya Kantarovsky on the eve of the opening of his exhibition ‘Basic Failure' at Palazzo Loredan in Venice – one of Wallpaper’s must-sees during the Venice Art Biennale 2026. ‘I rarely start with a preconceived notion or an idea. I have some vague sense of an effect, or even maybe a theme, which is usually a reaction to the circumstances of the exhibition.'

Kantarovsky, who was born in Moscow before emigrating to New York when he was ten, studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. His instincts take shape in haunting works – mostly painting, but also drawing, sculpture, printmaking and animation. Drawn to the complexities and contrasts that make up the spectrum of human emotion, the only thing certain in Kantarovsky's eclectic subject matter, which criss-crosses religion, history, philosophy and spirituality, is an appeal to the raw intuitiveness of human nature.

It's natural to want to read into Kantarovsky's richly emotional figures, but he eschews traditional storytelling as we normally understand it. ‘I have a complicated relationship to narrative,' he says. ‘Of course, the paintings are representational, often figurative, and there is an implied narrative. I liken it to when you're walking down the street and you catch someone's eye, and you witness them for a second. You're aware that there was a moment before you witnessed them and a moment after, but you just have this fleeting second to see this fragment of their struggle or their existence.' These glimpses resist a linear narrative (‘For me, it's the way to make an interesting painting,' he adds), but they are sensitive and highly attuned to their surroundings.

The grand Palazzo Loredan is an appropriately atmospheric location for this new exhibition, running concurrently to the Venice Art Biennale, until November 2026. It unites a series of Kantarovsky's paintings, as well as ceramic work and a glass sculpture created in collaboration with a Murano studio.

‘It's an ancient, historical and extravagant space, and it's filled with ancient books. Those things have their own energy. This show questions what that means, and tries to engage in a generative conversation with the space. I try not to get attached to anything within each painting, and then I try not to get attached to any particular painting, and keep the exhibition itself as the priority. Once the paintings start happening, and they all start talking to one another, and I start talking to them, it becomes like you're writing out a kind of poem composed of fragments or stanzas.'

In the works, the figures are caught in heightened states, contorted or cringing, intimately revealing and yet elusive. ‘The narrative and subject matter are very slippery, and so things could be read in a number of different ways. It is very important to keep that dimension of the painting open. There are innocuous and banal ways to interpret something, and then there are very dark ways to interpret something. And sometimes it's even unclear whether a subject is in distress or ecstasy, and what exactly is at stake.'

It is also unclear where or when these very real moments are taking place. The scenes are slippery in both narrative and time – often, scenes could be medieval, mythical or biblical, but modern detailing stops us short. ‘I'm pulling from just existing in the world,' Kantarovsky says. ‘I'm pulling from my lived experience and those of my friends, from art history. Everything's game. Everything is up for grabs. And I think that's a really exciting part of it.'

Featured in the show is a dying centaur, a favourite motif of artists in ancient Greece, but also popular in the 19th century as a symbol of the end of ancient, spiritual regimes. ‘It is also this kind of basic failure – the name of the show – of integration between our animal selves and our socialised selves,' says Kantarovsky. Caught, helpless, we are reduced to the essential. Witnessing this in the works makes them deeply empathetic.

This vulnerability runs throughout in powerful symbols, which are separated from their source of power, whether it is in a dying classical era or in a painting of a submissive without his dominant. ‘You go grandiose into this poetic narrative, and then you fall down into this mundane, indescript bedroom with the overweight older man and his little white dog, and the viewer has to make those shifts. I'm interested in these sorts of juxtapositions. I think with paintings, it's really interesting, because you can shift a viewer from one place to another.'

The works aren't about him, Kantarovsky says. ‘I can't avoid them representing something specific about myself, because they come from my mind. But at the same time, I'm utterly uninterested in my uniqueness or my specificity. What I think is so interesting is when good art can splinter off the subjective and find its way into somebody else's identification. It's part of the reason I'm interested in figurative painting, because there is this empathy or over-identification that it tends to produce in the viewer. You start to feel that certain pictures touch you in a way, and it's extremely powerful, despite seeming somewhat anachronistic.'

‘Basic Failure' runs 6 May – 22 November 2026 at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, Palazzo Loredan, istitutoveneto.it

This article appears in the June 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 7 May in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

‘I wanted to do something else with my life. So we started the foundation to be about arts and crafts, and [to] show the importance of craftsmanship – things that are made with your hand, heart and brain. We have named our first presentation “The Only True Protest is Beauty”, a [line] from the activist Phil Ochs, who wrote [it] during the Vietnam War. It resonated with me. But we dropped the first part – “In such ugly times” – I think we are reminded enough,’ says Belgian fashion designer Dries Van Noten, who exited his eponymous label in 2024. ‘I hope the show helps you think about the importance of beauty.’

The scope and scale of the show, which animates the Palazzo Pisani Moretta – home of the recently opened Fondazione Dries Van Noten – is beguiling, emotionally rich and often mind-boggling. Amid the grand stucco reception rooms, chambers (one in which Joséphine de Beauharnais, Empress of the French, slept), and up to a dressing room fitted with chinoiserie marquetry cabinets, one embarks on an expedition into the most exquisite forms of craft.

Located on the Grand Canal, the palazzo, in all its rococo splendour, offers up a generous and very well-kept environment for Van Noten’s endeavour, which he founded with partner Patrick Vangheluwe on purchasing the palazzo from the Sammartini family in 2025. He worked with Geert Bruloot on the curatorship and with a cohort of young Venetian writers and designers on the texts and graphics. The interventions surprise and make you think at every turn – from the brutal salvaged-metal and dust sculpture by Peter Buggenhout The Blind Leading the Blind that looms at the entrance to a virtuoso theatrical chess set meticulously made in stone, gold beadwork and silk embroidery entitled Le Violiniste. The artist, 23-year-old Joseph Arzoumanov, integrated AI to programme a robotic arm that moves the pieces.

The exhibition is curated in chapters starting with ‘Light and Darkness’, featuring architectural silhouettes by Comme des Garçons and Christian Lacroix – the latter Van Noten’s dear friend, with whom he collaborated on an acclaimed joint S/S 2020 collection. The juxtaposition is emotional, with Rei Kawakubo’s bizarre masses facing Lacroix’s romanticism. Indeed, there are 14 Comme des Garçons designs and some incredible Lacroix gowns situated throughout. The artefacts tease in their boldness and in their intricacy, and one starts to question the push and pull of beauty, the fight for its making and the wonder in its realisation.

Giant portrait photos of sleeping youth, on street corners or in urban cityscapes, by Steven Shearer, create intense encounters, while microscopically beautiful ceramics, like the hybrid botanical forms by Kaori Kurihara in the ‘Nature Morte’ salon, embrace the wild corners of the imagination. ‘Bending Light’ is devoted to glasswork where original 18th-century carafes and goblets make friends with Murano-made wonky chandeliers by Alexander Kirkeby that suggest there’s delight in imperfection.

How is beauty created? Lionel Jadot makes sculptural forms from found wood, baskets and beads that are majestic despite the humble salvaged origins. ‘I use creativity to transform leftovers – I re-use and often don’t know where the piece is going,’ says the Belgian artist. Beauty often finds its expression in nature and in flora that will inevitably fade and droop. In the salon ‘Language of Flowers’ is the work of maker Lilla Tabasso. Her delicate glass sculptures of flowers and grass are ‘planted’ in earth chunks as if encountered on a rewilded patch. The pieces are offset by luminous geometric totems by Ettore Sottsass. There are vanitas motifs throughout, from skull jewellery by Venetian brand Codognato to a gilded porcelain ‘brain’ by Katsuyo Aoki.

The ‘True Protest’ in this show is profound, with Van Noten and Bruloort traversing myriad expressions to engage with mankind’s ongoing quest to capture the fleeting, transitory nature of beauty itself.

READ: Dries Van Noten on why he's building a new home for craft in Venice

‘The Only True Protest Is Beauty’ runs until 4 October 2026 at Fondazione Dries Van Noten, Venice, fondazionedriesvannoten.org

Pope Leo XIV may be feuding with a certain world leader this week, but his taste remains divine, as the Vatican’s pavilion at the 2026 Venice Art Biennale will show.

Today the Holy See – the governing body that represents Vatican City and the Catholic church – announced the 24 artists that will be participating in this year’s Biennale presentation, an all-star roster that includes musicians like Brian Eno, FKA Twigs, Dev Hynes, Patti Smith and many more.

The exhibition, titled ‘The Ear is the Eye of the Soul,’ honours the 12th-century Saint Hildegard of Bingen, a German Benedictine abbess, who in addition to authoring scientific works and experiencing heavenly visions, was a prolific musician.

According to a press release from the Holy See, the theme responds to Koyo Kouoh’s broader Biennale theme, ‘In Minor Keys,’ and will offer up a ‘sonic prayer’ for visitors to quietly contemplate. Holy See Commissioner Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça enlisted curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers to assemble the group of creatives.

The showing will take place across two venues in Venice, The Mystical Garden in the Cannaregio neighbourhood, and the Complex of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice in Castello. In the garden, visitors will be able to listen to specially-commissioned compositions via headphones as they wander through the secluded garden’s vegetable plots and arbours, first planted by Catholic Carmelites in the 17th-century. The works were created in collaboration with the Berlin and New York-based experimental music group Soundwalk Collective, which has also created a site-specific instrument that creates music by ‘listening’ to the verdant space.

The curators conceived the Complex of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, meanwhile, as a ‘contemporary scriptorium’ and archive, where visitors will be able to view the last work of filmmaker Alexander Kluge, who died earlier this year; books by Portuguese painter Ilda David; an installation by Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao; and a library of texts by Saint Hildegard herself.

It’s all designed to encourage Biennale-goers to savour a moment of solitude amid a busy festival and an ever-chaotic world. To quote Pope Leo: ‘Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is above all an invocation.’

Read the full list of participants below.

• Alexander Kluge
• Benedictine Nuns of the Abbey of St. Hildegard Eibingen
• Bhanu Kapil
• Brian Eno
• Carminho
• Caterina Barbieri
• Devonté Hynes
• FKA Twigs
• Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst
• Ilda David
• Jim Jarmusch
• Kali Malone
• Kazu Makino
• Laraaji
• Meredith Monk
• Moor Mother
• Otobong Nkanga
• Patti Smith
• Precious Okoyomon
• Raúl Zurita
• Soundwalk Collective
• Suzanne Ciani
• Tatiana Bilbao
• Terry Riley

The Venice Art Biennale is upon us, and this time, it’s the turn of the art world to flock to the city’s squares, get lost in the labyrinth walkways and drink endless Aperol spritzes with a side of gossip. The Venice Art Biennale and collateral exhibitions take place concurrently around the city, from 9 May to 22 November 2026, and are open to all.

It is a big year for the biennale, which this year marks the 61st International Art Exhibition with a newly designed central pavilion, which opens its doors following an extensive restoration. For this year’s theme, titled ‘In Minor Keys,’ curator Koyo Kouoh is dialling down on the dramatic moments, choosing to celebrate the small undercurrents that impact daily life, from our moods to our planet. Artists – those in the Central Pavilion, and those representing their country in the national pavilions – have provided an enthusiastic response.

There is a lot to see at the Giardini and the Arsenale, which house the pavilions, and at satellite events in churches, galleries and museums around the city. The programme, while exciting, can be overwhelming – keep an eye on this frequently updated guide to make the most of your visit to Venice.

Where to stay: The St Regis, Venice

There is, indisputably, nowhere more magical to stay in Venice than the St. Regis. A stroll away from tourist hotspot Piazza San Marco, it's a truly indulgent haven with panoramic views, gorgeous food - particularly at Gio's Restaurant, with a terrace overlooking the Grand Canal - and service which is second to none.

Now, a contemporary art project also makes it a natural stop when in town for the Biennale. Komorebi - named after the Japanese word for the way sunlight filters through the leaves - unites six artists, whose work will be exhibited at the hotel until April 2027. The work of Nina Carini, Gaia De Megni, Marco De Sanctis, Joan Jonas, Jure Kastelic and Marinella Senatore is displayed alongside bespoke Murano glass pieces from the Berengo Studio throughout public spaces, in a celebration of the essential nature of art in the city.

Curator Marta Cereda worked closely with St Regis, in collaboration with Artelier Art Consultancy, on the project, with each work considering and uniting themes of space, light and perception. From Marco De Sanctis' epic, living bronzes, to Joan Jonas' intimate drawings and Gaia De Megni's impactful photography, works run the spectrum of medium and theme. A focus on materiality, particularly in Nina Carina's glass and aluminium works, Jure Kastelic's gorgeously-rendered paintings and Marinella Senatore's neon, lends an evocative edge.

'In Komorebi, light operates as a condition that alters perception,' says curator Marta Cereda. 'Each work introduces a moment of suspension in which space, matter and image are continuously reconfigured, in direct dialogue with the layered architecture of The St. Regis Venice.'

marriott.com

Andreas Angelidakis at the Greek Pavillion

Artist Andreas Angelidakis, who is representing Greece this year, is interested in the distortion of our accepted narratives. His work isn’t easy to define, drawing from the fields of performance, architecture and theory, a mish-mash of influences we expect to see referenced in Venice. His installation in the Greek Pavillion, Escape Room, explores the phenomenon of escaping as a commercial sell through the allegory of Plato’s cave, bringing Plato’s text to life as an immersive, atmospheric space. Through a bathroom selfie, visitors will be drawn into a mirror set to Year Zero, or 1934, the year the Greek and Austrian pavilions began, Hitler and Mussolini met in Venice and the Nazis began to persecute homosexuals.

labiennale.org

Chiara Camoni for the Italian Pavilion, curated by Cecilia Canziani

How do we move through the world? It is a question considered by artist Chiara Camoni at the Italian Pavillion, who explores the forms of life and transformation in a moving show. It is a natural project for main sponsor Zegna, who draw on a historical precedent of supporting arts and culture with this latest initiative. 'With Chiara Camoni, we share a dialogue that has lasted for more than ten years,' says Gildo Zegna, executive chairman of the Ermenegildo Zegna Group. 'Her work reflects this attention to material, landscape, and evolving tradition. Seeing her today, together with Cecilia Canziani, at the Italian Pavilion represents an important recognition of their journey and the coherence of their research - one we are proud to support.'

Hernan Bas at Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice

Running concurrently to the Biennale, at the International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice, is Hernan Bas's exhibition, The Visitors. Presenting over 30 new artworks by the American artist, work here is sharply observed and often punctuated by moments of humour. There will be a strong narrative throughout, as Bas looks to Venice’s thriving tourism industry to create a world populated by figures hovering, ridiculously, at spots from the Trevi Fountain to Chernobyl.

Held at Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice Dom Pérignon Galleries, from 7 May – 30 August 2026

capesaro.visitmuve.it

Barry Ball at Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore

American artist Barry Ball looks at the historicity of his Venetian surroundings through a contemporary lens for his exhibition, The Shape of Time. Encompassing 23 works, the exhibition builds on Ball’s interest in the possibilities inherent in materials, particularly in marble and metal, which will feature here. A series of figurative sculptures, rethinking historical and religious motifs in modern forms, is consistent with Ball’s practice of bringing an avant-garde technicality to the ancient art of sculpture.

Held in Venice, Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, from 9 May to 22 November 2026

abbaziasangiorgio.it

Sanya Kantarovsky at Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arte, Palazzo Loredan

We’re looking forward to Moscow-born, New York based artist Sanya Kantarovsky’s exhibition, which promises to unite paintings and ceramic works alongside a sculpture made together with a Murano glass studio. The vulnerability in Kantarovsky’s works, which brings a dark and wry humour to his distinctively-rendered figurative style, will be best experienced in the atmospheric surroundings of the beautiful Palazzo Loredan.

Sanya Kantarovsky, Basic Failure, from 6 May – 22 November 2026 at Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere et Arti, Palazzo Loredan, San Marco 2

Lubaina Himid at the British Pavillion

It was a treat to catch up with Lubaina Himid last year, who will be unveiling her British Council commission for the British Pavilion at this year’s Biennale, an exhibition titled Predicting History: Testing Translation. In the Pavillion’s neo-classical architecture, Himid will explore what it takes for a place to become home in large, surreal and boldly-coloured paintings.

labiennale.org/en/art/2026

Fondazione Prada at Ca’ Corner della Regina

At Fondazione Prada, curator Nancy Spector places American artists Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince in conversation through photographs, installations, sculptures and paintings - a move, she says, which isn’t as incongruous as it may first appear. ‘They are both image scavengers. Seeking no prior permission, they dip into the overflowing reservoir of visual culture to take whatever they want and convert it into art by choice alone.What comes into focus through the refracting lens of Jafa’s and Prince’s appropriation-based practices is an unflinching exposé on America.’ We are looking forward to the results.

'Helter Skelter' will be presented at Ca' Corner della Regina, Fondazione Prada's Venice venue, from 9 May - 23 November

Maja Malou Lyse at the Danish Pavilion

Are images powerful enough to affect our fertility, asks the youngest artist to represent the Danish Paviliion, Maja Malou Lyse. Reflecting on the global decline in male fertility, and drawing on scientific resources which point to the benefits of sexual stimuli on sperm mobility, Lyse underlines the jarring benefits and toxicity of pornogaphy. Expect a large-scale video work featuring porn star Nicolette Shea as a laboratory scientist working in a sperm bank in the year 2045.

labiennale.org/en/art/2026

Nalini Malani at the Magazzini del Sale

In a large-scale, multi-medium installation, Nalini Malani considers women and myth with 67 animations and soundscapes. Malani rewrites the Greek myth of Orestes - who avenged his father’s death by murdering his mother and her lover - in a contemporary consideration of today’s culture around accountability and women’s experience of patriarchal violence. The resulting soundscape will make for an immersive, fluid and poignant experience.

'Nalini Malani – Of Woman Born' at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Magazzini del Sale n. 5, from 9 May through 22 November 2026

Venice's famed Central Pavilion, one of the key landmarks within the Giardini della Biennale, which hosts several of the Venice Biennale events every year, is about to reopen, following an extensive restoration. The building, a beloved destination during the world's seminal art and architecture festivals that alternate on site every other year, was in need of a refresh back when works began in December 2024. Now, the revamped structure is about to throw open its doors again, just in time for the unveiling of the 2026 Venice Art Biennale.

Tour the thoroughly refreshed Central Pavilion at Venice's Giardini

The sensitive 16-month-long process, which cost Italy's Ministry of Culture a €31 million investment as part of the country's PNC-PNRR, ‘Great Cultural Heritage Attractors’ programme, aimed at both protecting the building and enhancing the biennale's infrastructure and future potential.

The original structure, named Palazzo Pro Arte when it was first created between 1894 and 1895, was the product of the transformation and repurposing of existing buildings on site, including the Cavallerizza, designed by Tommaso Meduna, and the Palazzo dei Concerti (inaugurated at the 1887 exhibition). The Central Pavilion was developed by Venice's city engineer Enrico Trevisanato and features a façade design by the painter Marius De Maria.

The project was overseen by the biennale's Special Projects department (headed by architect Arianna Laurenzi with engineer Cristiano Frizzele). The team worked with a range of specialist professionals to complete the works to the desired high quality, among them BuroMilan - Milan Ingegneria (lead firm), Labics and architect Fabio Fumagalli for the architectural design; ia2 Studio Associato for MEP systems engineering and fire prevention; and geologist Francesco Aucone. Site supervision was entrusted to engineer Massimiliano Milan.

The Central Pavilion's restoration included a series of interventions which will bring spatial clarity and enhance functionality in the interior. Sala Chini becomes the building's main distribution core. From here, a series of clean, white and flexible exhibition areas fan out, ready to be used as needed by curators during the annual shows. Special attention was paid to details, such as the pavilion's window fixtures, which were designed by Carlo Scarpa – they have now been refurbished and reinstalled.

More key restoration points include the project's goal to obtain the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certification sustainable architecture standard; a clever integration of technical and architectural systems throughout; the creation of additional space for the café and multipurpose use in the shape of two new outdoor structures, inspired by Venetian roof terraces, called altane; and the aim to maintain the continiuty of the spirit of the building and its original intention, without compromising 21st-century needs in both use and building performance.

The restored Central Pavilion's debut will involve hosting an exhibition titled ‘In Minor Keys’, curated by Koyo Kouoh. The show and building will open to the public on 9 May, following the 2026 Venice Art Biennale vernissage, and will remain open till 22 November 2026.

As 2025 draws to a close, Wallpaper* begins to plan next year’s adventures. From landmark restorations and adaptive re-use projects to remote wilderness lodges and long-awaited brand debuts, these are the new hotel openings that have caught our eye: places designed to relax, retreat and explore, and destinations around which to plan your next travels. Spanning Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia, the year ahead signals a particularly rich chapter for global hospitality, where thoughtful design, cultural context and a renewed emphasis on experience sit at the heart of the world’s most compelling new stays.

The hotel openings to know for 2026

Amanvari (Baja Peninsula, Mexico)

Next year, Aman will bring its laid-back lifestyle to the East Cape of Baja California, Mexico, with the opening of Amanvari: an 18-key retreat and collection of branded residences. Elastic Architects has designed thoughtfully considered villas that blur the boundary between indoors and out, showcasing Aman’s signature tranquil aesthetic through sandy-hued interiors, layers of natural stone and tropical woods, and bespoke Mexican ceramics and artworks. The Aman Spa will continue the brand’s focus on longevity, while multiple dining venues will celebrate Italian, Japanese and local cuisine.

aman.com

Black Sand Hotel (Ölfus, Iceland)

Sitting on a peninsula in the Ölfus region, Black Sand Hotel will be the first and only beachfront boutique hotel in Iceland, offering uninterrupted ocean views and interiors shaped by the country’s raw, elemental landscape. The 70 minimalist guest rooms and nine suites feature a restrained palette and layers of natural materials, with large windows framing sweeping views of the black volcanic beach, nearby mountains, and the North Atlantic, alongside the Ölfusá River. An expansive spa will share the same outlook across the black sands, while signature restaurant ÓMUR will celebrate seasonal Nordic cuisine.

blacksandhotel.is

Capella Kyoto (Japan)

Capella has tapped Kengo Kuma and Associates alongside Singapore-based Brewin Design Office to transform a former elementary school site into its next opening, Capella Kyoto. Located in Kyoto’s historic Miyagawa-chō district, the 89-room hotel draws its design cues from the city’s traditional wooden townhouses, known as machiya, unfolding as a series of inner courtyards and pared-back spaces that weave together classical Japanese elements such as shoji screens and tokonoma alcoves, anchored by a dramatic karahafu roof in the central courtyard. Three restaurants follow the rhythm of the seasons, while the spa is rooted in Japanese bathing rituals.

capellahotels.com

Chesa Marchetta (Sils Maria, Switzerland)

Chesa Marchetta will mark one of the first openings of 2026, and the second address from Swiss gallerists Iwan and Manuela Wirth, following the opening of Scotland’s much-loved Fife Arms. Formerly a celebrated restaurant in the heart of the Swiss cultural enclave of Sils Maria, the 13-key hotel has been reimagined by Argentinian, Paris-based architect Luis Laplace, while remaining firmly rooted in gastronomy through its seasonal restaurant. Next door, a three-bedroom house will be available for those seeking a more exclusive stay.

chesamarchetta.ch

Delano Miami Beach (USA)

An icon will be reborn next year with the reopening of the Delano Miami Beach. The South Beach landmark will emerge from an extensive renovation that restores its Art Deco glamour, preserving historic features while introducing a fresh, contemporary sensibility across the 171 rooms and suites. The hotel’s famed Delano Pool remains, joined by a new wellness studio and four new restaurants and bars, including a revival of Miami’s Rose Bar: the former epicentre of Hollywood royalty and the city’s high society.

delanohotels.com

Eha (Hiiumaa Island, Estonia)

Set within a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve on the remote Estonian island of Hiiumaa, Eha is a boutique wellness retreat nestled between verdant pine forests and the Baltic Sea. Eight suites and three forest cabins are designed to blend seamlessly into the surrounding landscape, featuring minimalist interiors in soothing neutral tones. The wellness programme follows the island’s unique five-season calendar, with activities, treatments and ancient Estonian healing rituals guided by sustainable practices and the energy of each season.

eharetreat.com

Hoshinoya Nara Prison (Japan)

A former prison is an unlikely setting for a hotel, yet Nara Prison is regarded as an architectural masterpiece in Nara Prefecture and is officially recognised as an Important Cultural Property of Japan. Next year will see it reborn as Hoshinoya Nara Prison, following a sensitive restoration that respectfully fuses its Meiji-era architecture with contemporary interiors. The hotel will also house a Japanese tea salon, restaurant and dining lounge, while the neighbouring Nara Prison Museum will preserve the site’s history, bridging past and present.

hoshinoresorts.com

Nihi Rote (Rote Island, Indonesia)

The founders of Nihi Sumba will deepen their commitment to sustainable, community-led development in Indonesia next year with the opening of Nihi Rote, the brand’s second hotel, located on Rote Island in Indonesia’s Nusa Tenggara Timur province. The retreat will feature 21 handcrafted villas that blend traditional Rotenese architecture with modern comforts, continuing Nihi’s Wild Wellness philosophy through outdoor adventure programmes, organic gardens and children’s initiatives that encourage learning through discovery. The hotel will open alongside the Namo Beach Club, as well as an academy dedicated to training the next generation of hospitality professionals.

nihi.com

Orient Express Venezia (Italy)

After breathing new life into the landmark Roman hotel La Minerva, Orient Express will open its second hotel in Venice within a 15th-century noble palace. Architect Aline Asmar d’Amman has overseen the eight-year restoration, reviving the mansion’s Neo-Gothic and Baroque grandeur while creating 47 guestrooms and suites luxuriously dressed in marble, Murano glass, rich velvets and Art Deco-inspired furnishings. The most spectacular suites elevate the experience further, featuring 19th-century frescoes of the goddess Minerva, gilded salons and sweeping canal views.

orient-express.com

Public West Hollywood (USA)

After launching his latest hotel brand, Public Hotels, in New York, legendary hotelier Ian Schrager will head to the West Coast to open his second address, Public West Hollywood. Set within a landmark building on the famed Sunset Strip, the 137-key hotel has been conceived by Schrager in collaboration with British architect John Pawson. Guest rooms make a deliberately understated statement, dressed in neutral tones, while furnishings in saturated hues inject a vivid counterpoint into the all-white lobby. Facilities will include three food, beverage and entertainment destinations, a pool, and a 16,000-square-foot open-air rooftop terrace with 360-degree views across Los Angeles.

publichotels.com

Singita Elela (Okavango Delta, Botswana)

Singita will embark on a new adventure next year with its first venture into the pristine wilderness of Botswana’s Okavango Delta. Named Elela, from the Setswana word meaning ‘to flow’, the new safari retreat will comprise eight circular camps that open in all directions, blurring the boundary between indoors and out to form a respectful extension of the natural surroundings. Inside, organic materials and handcrafted furnishings celebrate local craftsmanship. Each camp will be supported by its own dedicated team – a guide, tracker and host – leading guests through the Delta and its extraordinary wildlife, including more than 400 species of birds.

singita.com

Six Senses London (UK)

Six Senses will make its UK debut next year within the former Art Deco department store The Whiteley, in the heart of London’s Bayswater. Interiors will draw on the building’s heritage, blending classical detailing and new age elements with a contemporary sensibility, including a curated collection of modern British artworks. The expansive Six Senses Spa will be a highlight, while the opening will also mark the launch of the brand’s new private members’ club, Six Senses Place.

sixsenses.com

The Standard, Lisbon (Portgual)

The Standard has tapped architect Samuel Torres de Carvalho to oversee the design of its next European address, set atop the historic College of St Francis Xavier, formerly home to the Portuguese Royal Navy Hospital for more than 200 years. The 170 guestrooms and 24 long-stay apartments are finished in a palette of calming, earthy tones, while the lobby lounge, bar and all-day dining restaurant are imbued with The Standard’s signature boldness through sculptural forms and saturated hues. Upstairs, a rooftop bar shaded by striped parasols will offer sweeping views across the terracotta rooftops of the surrounding Alfama neighbourhood.

standardhotels.com

Vestige Namibia

Vestige will venture beyond Spain for the first time next year with the launch of Xaudum, one of four planned lodges in northern Namibia. Perched atop a prehistoric sand dune within the untouched wilderness of Khaudum National Park, Xaudum’s minimalist architecture is set to make a striking impression, with daily safari drives offering sightings of elephants, antelopes and African wild dogs. Three additional lodges will follow in 2027, each conceived with an equally bold – at times futuristic – design inspired by its natural surroundings.

vestigecollection.com

Waldorf Astoria Admiralty Arch (London, UK)

Waldorf Astoria will make a grand entrance onto London’s hotel scene next year with the highly anticipated opening of Waldorf Astoria London Admiralty Arch, housed within the historic landmark originally commissioned by King Edward VII in memory of Queen Victoria. Positioned at the end of The Mall, directly opposite Buckingham Palace, the storied property has been sensitively restored and will offer 100 guest rooms and suites, restaurants overseen by celebrated chefs Clare Smyth MBE and Daniel Boulud, a state-of-the-art spa, and a presidential suite with views across Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square.

hilton.com

The word ‘retirement’ does not sit well with Dries van Noten. It’s over a year since the designer stepped back from his his eponymous label – a 38–year tenure that put Belgian design squarely on the fashion map and made him one of the most influential members of the Antwerp Six. 'I got very nervous when people would say, "you’ll have more time for your garden now",' he says, looking exasperated. ‘The garden for me was always a very good balance with fashion – you know because fashion is fast, but in the garden, you’re slowing down.’

Quite the opposite of going quietly into retirement, Van Noten is plotting an ambitious new chapter. The 67-year-old designer has spent 2025 laying the groundwork for his new role as a cultural custodian, with the opening of his own foundation in Venice – a non-profit institution devoted to celebrating, sustaining, and platforming endangered crafts.

Earlier this year, when it was revealed that Van Noten and his partner, Patrick Vangheluwe, had purchased a 15th century Venetian palazzo from the Sammartini family, it was known that it would be used for cultural purposes (honouring the former owners’ wish not to see it turned into another luxury hotel). Today he formally announces its true purpose: the Fondazione Dries Van Noten, opening in April 2026.

Sitting in a beautifully patinated eggshell-blue room inside the Palazzo Pisani Moretta, reflections from the Grand Canal dancing across the frescoed ceiling, Van Noten tells Wallpaper* that he was drawn to Venice as a place that ‘is not just a weekend destination, but a living city… there’s a lot of young people coming back now to Venice, and something is bubbling here.’ It's this sense of continual creative renewal that he hopes to tap into.

In a city built on craft – and now host to global events such as Homo Faber, Venice Glass Week and the Venice Biennale – the Fondazione will present exhibitions, residencies, talks and cross-disciplinary projects spanning everything from food to fashion. For Van Noten, a third generation of a family of tailors, craftsmanship is not a narrow or nostalgic category. ‘Craftsmanship, for me, is a lot of different things. It’s things that you do with your hands, yes, but also with your soul… Some people express themselves with their hands, some with their voice; cooking, glass, jewellery, fashion – even music. For me, food and wine are also part of that creative freedom.’

He is equally keen that the programme looks ahead, rather than backwards. ‘We’re not living in the 18th century. 3D printing, AI – they can also be tools for creativity. I want to open it all up.’

Architect Alberto Torsello is working with Van Noten on the palazzo’s restoration – mostly interventions that visitors will never see. Venice’s planning laws are notoriously slow and meticulous, so dramatic alterations are neither possible nor desired. As Van Noten points out, ‘The Palazzo is unique because it was redecorated [in Rococò style] by Chiara Pisani in the 1730s, and everything is still intact – an incredible ensemble of craftsmanship of that period. The last thing we want to do is put our stamp on it.’

Instead, the Fondazione’s more visible experimentation will unfold at its second site, Studio San Polo – a gallery-like, industrial space redesigned by architect Giulia Foscari. It will host the first presentation in April 2026 while restoration begins at the palazzo. Details of the April opening are not yet announced, though Van Noten says it will introduce the full breadth of the Fondazione’s programme.

The idea for a foundation, Van Noten reveals, has been quietly brewing over the past decade, around the time he began looking for a buyer for his business (which he eventually sold to conglomerate Puig in 2018). ‘I always knew I wanted to do something else in my life – fashion is very full on, you can’t do anything else. I wanted to give back, to show people the beauty of craftsmanship. And maybe young people will want to learn it, continue it, appreciate it.’ Creating something for the future generations is a key driver for him; he remembers fondly his talks with fashion students at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp: ‘I hope they learned something from me, but the truth is I learned even more from them.’

If anything prepared him for this new role, it was his life in fashion – particularly curatorial projects such as the Inspirations exhibition he curated at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 2015. It was there – where he brought together historical garments, Balenciaga pieces, artworks from Damien Hirst to Van Dyck, films, objects – that the breadth of his creative world became clear: ‘As a fashion designer you are surrounded by set designers, craftsmen, people working in music, lighting, decor. You’re spoiled – you can do so many different things.’

The timing of the Fondazione also overlaps with a cultural pivot toward slower, more elemental ways of living and making. Van Noten traces the shift through food. ‘Ten years ago, a good restaurant was three stars, twelve waiters, and a wine list of fifty pages. Now luxury is when the chef decides what you eat, natural wine, homegrown food. The same is happening with objects – beauty can be in everyday things, in a dish or a glass you use daily.’

It’s a sentiment echoed elsewhere in the industry – Scottish gallery Bard’s recent Bardware show being one example – and it underpins Van Noten’s wish to bring craft back to ground level. He wants the Fondazione to remove craft from the lofty pedestal and place it into people’s hands, showing that it can be woven into the fabric of everyday life.

And is this, ultimately, about legacy? Van Noten pauses. ‘Maybe yes, but that’s not the purpose. It’s not about my name on a building. I just felt too young to retire and work only in my garden – please don’t do that to me,’ he laughs. ‘I think I still can do something that makes sense. We can’t be too ambitious and say we’re going to change everything. But if we can help shift the mentality a little bit… that would be fantastic.’

As for fashion, he insists he doesn’t miss it. ‘Not really,’ he says, smiling. ‘The fashion, I think we had a lot of it. And I think we’ve found the perfect replacement.’

fondazionedriesvannoten.org

Chinese architecture duo Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, founders of Hangzhou-based Amateur Architecture Studio, have just been appointed the curators of the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale. Running their joint practice since 1997, as well as teaching, the two architects are no strangers to the biennale, having taken part in the main show in 2006, 2010 (when they received the Special Mention for their project 'Decay of a Dome') and 2016.

Now, the pair will have the opportunity to form their own iteration of the world's biggest architecture show – following up on the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Lesley Lokko, and just as the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Carlo Ratti drew to a close.

Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu: the next 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale curators

Amateur Architecture Studio is prolific. Past works include the Ningbo Historic Museum, the Xiangshan Campus of China Academy of Art, the Tiles Hill in Hangzhou, the renovation of Wencun Village, the National Archives of Publications and Culture in Hangzhou, the Preservation and Renovation of Southern Song Imperial Street, the Lin’An Historic Museum, and the Xi'an Opera House and Concert Hall. Wang Shu also won the Pritzker Prize in 2012 and served as a judge for the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2013.

Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu said: 'We are very honoured to be the artistic directors of the Architecture Department and Curators of the 20th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2027 at the invitation of president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. And thanks to the board of directors of La Biennale di Venezia for the trust in us. We will try our best to meet this big challenge.

‘In the current world, the rapid and multiple changes in architecture are more a phenomenon of appearance, the result of excessive conceptualisation or marked commercialisation,’ the architects continued.

'Conceptual experiments driven to extremes are often divorced from reality, and over-commercialisation tends to [make for] merely popular and short-lived [projects]. [There is a] breaking away from the connection with the real place. It will lead to the death of architecture. Architecture becomes a kind of delusional expression about the future.

'For this reason, in the face of the real crisis of this world, insisting on a simple and true concept and method of architecture has a special value. We will strive to present this value and exploration with the greatest sincerity for a better reality and future.'

The 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale will take place at the Giardini and Arsenale sites from 8 May to 21 November 2027

labiennale.org

The summer may be drawing to a close but for the film industry, things are just starting to heat up. Venice Film Festival, now in its 82nd year, is in full swing with a slate of international premieres, including work from renowned directors such as Noah Baumbach, Park Chan-Wook and Guillermo del Toro. As many of the most anticipated films of the Biennale’s lineup have already promised cinematic releases before the year is out, here’s a look at the films coming out of Venice worthy of your attention.

Although the Venice Film Festival has a dark political past, as it was initially created and controlled by the National Fascist Party, today it is home to cinema committed to exploring issues of injustice, even as political motivations vary amongst filmmakers – a fact equally evident in both documentary and fictional programming.

Earlier this year news circulated about Werner Herzog’s next fiction feature, but few were aware that his return to festivals would come this year with a new documentary. Premiering at Venice, Ghost Elephants follows conversationalist Dr. Steve Boyes as he continues his 10 year search for an elusive herd of elephants. While the cinematography exudes mysticism, Herzog’s immediately recognisable accent and frank interview style cuts through, as man and nature are once again in less than harmonious contact.

Herzog is not the only surprise documentary in the lineup as Sofia Coppola, debuts her first in the format. She may be veering from her well trodden territory in feature filmmaking, but Coppola maintains her sense of style and a unique aesthetic eye by choosing fashion designer Marc Jacobs as her focus in biographical documentary Marc.

Documentary is also key for Laura Poitras, who continues to favour the medium that exposes corruption. Since the critical success of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Poitras has turned her gaze from art world activism to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s coverage of the Vietnam, Iraq War and uncovering further atrocities being committed by Israeli forces in Gaza. Through Hersch's incredible career, audiences are reminded of the barbaric torture habits of American military, while the documentary explores the failings of the US Press and those that would rather Hersch’s many damning findings never see the light.

As the festival has expanded over the years, it has become a home for many of the world’s renowned auteurs. This summer American society's posturing of individualism and optimisation is under direct scrutiny from many angles this year at Venice, beyond the documentary format. From Yorgos Lanthimos’ comes Bugonia, an absurdist science fiction film focusing on a vengeful beekeeper (Jesse Plemons) who becomes convinced a prominent CEO (Emma Stone) is in fact an alien, questioning the hive mind and the deep disparities in the working world.

Meanwhile Benny Safdie’s first solo-foray into cinema, The Smashing Machine, is a biography on UFC fighter Mark Kerr (played by Dwayne Johnson), prioritising the brutality of the scene over the hagiographic tendencies of the sports drama. And of course Kathryn Bigelow continues her career-long, somewhat controversial, focus on the American military, with her latest political thriller House of Dynamite. As Bigelow returns to the director’s seat after a decade, attendees are curious about her long awaited comeback and what she plans to do with it.

Alongside bold political voices, this year’s Venice film festival offers many recognisable names in the industry making pivotal creative choices, such as Coppola, or branching out on their own like Safdie. With this incredible line-up from contemporary cinema’s leading auteurs, as well as some returning titans at Venice Festival, and the welcome news that there will be no superheroes taking up programming space in cinemas for six months, there is much contextually rich and beautiful filmmaking for cinephiles to look forward to in the coming months.

This summer, the runway leads to the Riviera. Primarily across Europe, luxury hotels are quietly slipping into their seasonal roles as extensions of major fashion and lifestyle brands. Behemoths such as Burberry and Dolce & Gabbana are migrating from urban fashion capitals to the coast in the coming months, trading marble flagships for fresh ocean air and beachfront real estate. The formula is straightforward: exclusive pop-up boutiques flanked by monogrammed loungers and umbrellas, and occasionally, chef-led restaurants. Here are some of the hotel takeovers making a splash this summer – where you too can pop up in style.

Fashion hotel takeovers happening this summer

Burberry at The Standard Ibiza

Hot on the heels of its takeover at The Newt in Somerset, Burberry is off to embrace the Mediterranean sunshine, landing at The Standard, Ibiza, until October. The hotel’s seasonal rooftop bar and restaurant, Up, has been Burberry-ified with a bespoke check pattern in bright yellow. This energising design adorns the site’s loungers, parasols, and seating, as well as a photo booth in the lobby. Starting in mid-July, weekly DJ nights, featuring guests such as Phil Mison, Eric Duncan, and Nicolas Matar, will be accompanied by a curated cocktail menu. For those who can’t get enough of the partnership, Burberry and The Standard also propose a summer capsule collection ‘for warm days and balmy nights’, with swimwear, sunglasses, and hats available for purchase.

The Standard, Ibiza is located at Carrer de Bartomeu Vicent Ramon, 9, 07800 Ibiza, Balearic Islands, Spain.

Dior at Jumeirah Capri Palace

For the fifth time, Jumeirah Capri Palace, which recently unveiled new suites by Patricia Urquiola, welcomes the return of Dioriviera to its seafood restaurant, Il Riccio. The breezy setting, surrounded by Anacapri’s rocky cliffs and adjacent to the island’s magical Blue Grotto, is now decorated with Dior’s Toile de Jouy pattern and animal statues. Guests can choose to sip limoncello spritzes on the beach club terrace or dine at the restaurant, on dishes such as spaghettino with sea urchins. Meanwhile, a Dior boutique pop-up features a summer-ready wardrobe.

Il Riccio is located at Via Gradola, 4, 80071 Anacapri, Italy.

Dolce & Gabbana at Four Seasons Hotel Taormina

Despite occupying its privileged hilltop position for centuries, San Domenico Palace, Taormina, entered the modern zeitgeist in 2022 after serving as the fictional ‘The White Lotus’ hotel. The property, which was acquired by Four Seasons in 2020, is also a beloved part of the Dolce & Gabbana universe, as the Italian brand has taken over its pool area for a couple of years in a row. The now familiar bespoke Blu Mediterraneo theme, seen across parasols, cushions and towels, seeks to reflect the region’s vibrant seaside blues and celebrates the artistry of handmade Sicilian ceramics. Wallpaper’s fashion features editor Jack Moss visited the activation last month to celebrate Dolce & Gabbana’s ninth collaboration with Mytheresa, describing the experience as ‘a day of sunshine, food and spritzes’. Until the end of the season, guests will also be able to browse an exclusive pop-up boutique offering a selection of clothing and accessories, including some location exclusives.

San Domenico Palace, Taormina, A Four Seasons Hotel is located at Via S. Domenico, 5, 98039 Taormina, Italy.

Herno at Phi Beach

The rugged granite landscape of Baja Sardinia provides the perfect backdrop for Herno’s sophisticated take on exploration, travel, and outdoor living. In collaboration with Phi Beach, the Italian brand is showcasing its vision of seaside leisure for the second consecutive summer, lasting through the first week of September. Alongside dressing the exclusive club’s cabanas and deckchairs in sandy, deep brown tones, Herno has also introduced its first fully designed restaurant, Herno Suite. Here, chef Claudio Marenzi presents culinary delights on ceramics inspired by the Erno River, paying tribute to the brand’s roots. With a focus on natural aesthetics and sustainability, bill holders, menus, and coasters are made from natural cork sourced from Sardinia. A selection of ‘open-air accessories’ is available for purchase, including beach towels, tote bags, water bottles, baskets, and hats.

Phi Beach is located at Via Forte Cappellini, 07021 Arzachena, Italy.

Jacquemus at Monte-Carlo Beach Club

As part of a strategic transformation of the area, Monte-Carlo’s emblematic beach club has reopened for the season with a complete redesign of its deck and pool area by French interior designer Dorothée Delaye. Adding a burst of Provençal panache, a sun-kissed collaboration with Jacquemus is underway until 7 October. Inspired by ‘La Croisière’ collection unveiled in Paris in January, the takeover dresses sunbeds, towels, and parasols in banana-yellow, coconut milk, and black stripes. This theme extends to the adjacent Pool Café, which features speciality brews and an Olympic-sized pool, as well as two newly opened Jacquemus boutiques, featuring sketches by Renoir and Matisse on their walls.

Monte-Carlo Beach Club is located at Av. Princesse Grâce, 98000 Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, Monaco.

Louis Vuitton at White 1921 Hotel

For the third consecutive year, the Arnaud Donckele & Maxime Frédéric at Louis Vuitton restaurant has returned to the White 1921 Saint-Tropez hotel for the season. Michelin-starred chef Arnaud Donckele and chef pâtissier Maxime Frédéric present a bountiful menu, available for lunch, tea time, and dinner, spotlighting local, seasonal produce and creative twists. Think dishes such as grilled blue lobster enriched by a shiso-infused sauce, or Wagyu beef served in a fragrant bouillon. The restaurant’s interior features natural macramé touches paired with rattan furnishings and tables dressed in seasonal Louis Vuitton tableware. Crockery is adorned with interpretations of the maison’s signature Monogram Flower.

The Arnaud Donckele & Maxime Frédéric at Louis Vuitton restaurant is located at Hotel White 1921, Trav. des Lices, 83990 Saint-Tropez, France.

Missoni at JW Marriott Venice Resort & Spa

Nothing embodies summer quite like Missoni’s signature zig-zag motif, a warm-weather staple cherished by many for its cheerful, multicoloured hues and light texture. On the private Isola delle Rose in Venice, the Italian label has established a bijou pop-up store at the JW Marriott Venice Resort & Spa, making it convenient for guests to stock up on its beachwear essentials. A serene blend of blue and azure, combined with warm ochres and beige, dominates an exclusive collection of men’s and womenswear, ranging from swim trunks and bowling shirts to bikinis and long cover-ups. This same pattern features in the shop’s sofas and pouffes, as well as the large-scale bunny welcoming visitors. The pop-up is open at JW Marriott Venice Resort & Spa until 15 September, with another Missoni Resort Club takeover occurring in Oku Ibiza in the form of a branded poolside lounge.

JW Marriott Venice Resort & Spa is located at Isola delle Rose, Laguna Di San Marco, 30133 Venice, Italy.

Alo at Mandarin Oriental, Bodrum

Turkey is familiar territory for Alo Yoga, which launched its first Istanbul brick-and-mortar store last year. This summer, the lifestyle brand has set its sights on the Aegean coast – in particular, Mandarin Oriental Bodrum’s private shoreline, to debut a second boutique, an immersive beach club experience, and wellness workshops. Complementing the oak and pine beach umbrellas are branded cotton towels and seating in an earthy hue, while a customised cart offers refreshments served in coconut cups. Until September, international Alo instructors will lead a wellness programme for hotel guests, including sunrise yoga and pilates alongside sound healing and meditation sessions.

Mandarin Oriental, Bodrum is located at Gölköy, 314 Sokak No.10, 48483 Muğla, Turkey.

As part of the inaugural Venice Climate Week last week, a striking new space for contemporary art and creativity was unveiled to the public: Casa Sanlorenzo, home of Sanlorenzo Arts. Conceived by luxury yachting leader Sanlorenzo as a place of dialogue between the worlds of art, culture, and sustainability, this innovative venue was designed by architect Piero Lissoni and his firm, Lissoni & Partners, to foster a dynamic exchange with a city that uniquely embodies both a deep maritime soul and a rich artistic tradition.

Tucked away in the Dorsoduro sestiere, it’s just a stone’s throw from cultural institutions such as Punta della Dogana and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Its windows open onto a stunning view of the domes of the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute – a Baroque masterpiece, recently restored to new splendour. Locals who used to pass by this spot will surely recall the quiet charm of the ivy-covered villa, hidden behind a veil of greenery and rendered completely inaccessible for years. Its wooden bridge, broken and blocked off by red-and-white warning signs, only added to its air of mystery after being abandoned for over a decade.

Now, spread across two exhibition floors (plus a private apartment), Casa Sanlorenzo offers over 1,000 sq m dedicated to art and culture – complemented by an exquisite 600 sq m open space and garden that adds an unexpected touch of serenity to this corner of the city. The first surprise? Unlike many recent projects that lean heavily on a nostalgic Venetian aesthetic, architect Piero Lissoni and his studio opted for a boldly minimalist approach. The original brick façade and white balconies have been carefully preserved, but step inside and you’re met with soaring glass walls overlooking a garden with a sleek lounge area, sliding spotlights, and mobile panels – every detail clearly designed with exhibitions in mind.

The sense of contrast between the exterior and the interior was very much intentional, Lissoni confirms: ‘This project began four years ago,’ he explains. ‘After visiting 12 different sites in Venice, it was here that I finally heard the project’s “voice”. Back then, the building had no windows, the hallways were narrow and dark, the rooms small and oppressive. Today, everything is white – an homage to the original structure, which had good bones, like a rough, uncut stone.’ Lissoni makes one thing clear: there was never any intention to ‘rescue’ a traditional Venetian home. ‘This was a modern house, built between 1942 and 1948. I wanted it to live beyond its past, to tell an entirely new story.’

‘The essence of the project is cultural – a hub where art, architecture, design, research, and poetry can connect,’ Massimo Perotti, executive chairman of Sanlorenzo, emphasises. For its grand opening, Casa Sanlorenzo showcased works by Alighiero Boetti, Lucio Fontana, and Emil Michael Klein – pieces drawn from Sanlorenzo’s private collection. Perotti’s vision is rooted in the brand’s previous collaborations with the Venice Art Biennale and its presence at Art Basel. It reflects a clear commitment to cultural responsibility, with the aim of becoming a catalyst for fresh perspectives.

The goal, Perotti continues, is to create a bridge between Sanlorenzo’s core work – engineering, research, and development and the wider worlds of art, science, technology, and philosophy. This metaphorical bridge is echoed in a very real one: the new footbridge designed by Lissoni. Made entirely of prefabricated metal and already fully assembled, it features a surface of traditional Istrian stone, typical of Venice, and a handrail carved to resemble an oar – an homage to the city’s deep bond with the water. ‘No one had dared to build a new bridge in Venice since Calatrava’s,’ Perotti laughs. ‘The local ladies who walk by with their shopping trolleys – the true custodians of Venetian taste – have immediately taken out their phones and snapped pictures. So far, the ones I’ve spoken to say they approve.’ For Lissoni, the bridge had to be reimagined: ‘It needed to reflect outward, toward the city, what’s happening inside the house. It was conceived as a pure technological gesture – almost a mathematical equation crystallised into form.’

But the real showstopper lies inside: one of the project’s most innovative features is the glass staircase. Inspired by the building’s original geometry and reinterpreted with steel and, naturally, glass, it’s a striking centerpiece. ‘Everyone knows – I love staircases. I’m obsessed with them,’ Lissoni admits. ‘And in Venice, there had to be one in glass. A transparent, solid structure that doesn’t shake, doesn’t sway, doesn’t move – and above all, doesn’t slip.’

Sustainability was key to the transformation: the building now operates at net-zero energy, with tailor-made solutions for windows, glazing, ceilings, flooring, and the management of both energy and water. This achievement, Lissoni notes, is the result of embracing Venice’s genius loci – its unique spirit – alongside the craftsmanship of local artisans, companies, engineers, and architects.

‘In an increasingly virtual world, we wanted to invest in presence, in meaningful encounters, and in shared experiences,’ says Perotti. ‘Because we believe that authenticity requires substance, time, and human connection. And Venice is the perfect place for this project.’

That Venice is slowly sinking into the lagoon is well known. Each year, the water laps a little higher up the historic buildings and technological solutions are proposed to slow the impact of climate breakdown on one of the world’s most important cultural sites. Culture, especially that across the city’s biennales, is often used to discuss the importance of recognising climate issues or to ‘raise awareness’ of crises we collectively face (as if most of the planet wasn’t already acutely aware), but not many organisations actively enmesh their cultural offer with direct action.

TBA21, established by philanthropist and art patron Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza in 2002, is based in Madrid with an experimental exhibition space in the basement of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. From the outset intended as a platform for advocacy, education, and outreach as well as art, it presents projects across the world, including in one of Venice’s grandest spaces for exhibition.

Ocean Space is TBA21’s Venetian offer, located within the Chiesa di San Lorenzo, a 16th-century church with such immense internal height that upon entering, visitors immediately whiplash their heads back to look upwards. With the quality of light and sense of depth within, the feeling has something of the sense of looking up to the surface from an ocean bed, a quality built on by A shipwreck is not a wreck, Nadia Huggins’ sculpture, sound and video work that invites visitors to recline on the floor under an upended hull skeleton, amongst coral, rocks, sea creatures, and bodies. 'We're on the sea floor, and the ceiling projection looks at these people swimming overhead – it gives a 360 view of being underwater,' Huggins says of a work both disorientating but also deeply relaxing.

Huggins’ work speaks to colonial and oceanic histories and how the ocean may inform not only how humans may respect subaquatic ecologies, but also offer lessons for how we could work better in our own world. Ocean Space is split by a double-sided altar with openings that allow sight and sound to travel between, with sculptural paintings by Tessa Mars standing in the other side of the chasmal space. Mars’ A call to the ocean is a series of theatre-style flats onto which the artist has painted mountain landscapes, perhaps landscapes submerged under oceans, unseen by human eyes. Characters seem to melt into the scenes, a compression of life and nature, again inviting future relationships between us and the world we are in.

Both installations were curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel as part of her three-year research project as Curatorial Fellow with  TBA21—Academy, the research arm of the organisation that seeks to not only use art as a creative tool to consider the oceanic world, but as a methodology that intersects with science, politics, activism, policy, and conservation in quite unique ways. It is part of several intersecting strands of the TBA21 programme, all centring art as a process more than an outcome.

It's all overseen by co-directors Rosa Ferré and Markus Reymann, the pair responsible for overseeing the teams based at the two TBA21 sites where multisensory, exploratory exhibitions such as that by Jiménez Suriel, which Reymann says can be ‘a kind of interface to transmit ideas but also lure [the visitor] into research processes and bodies’. They also connect the institutions and team to a wider network of experts and advisors across the world, which the co-director explains as the second critical strand: ‘By giving artists access to such networks, to decision making processes, to policy and political fora, where the act of making becomes a space for experimentation, disruption, and profound questioning of the inevitability of things.’

Wallpaper* was speaking to Reymann on the steps of Chiesa di San Lorenzo that open onto a public square. A short walk away, the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale was opening, a major component of the city’s identity as a place of culture and tourism. The church has two ways in: the main entrance behind where we are sitting, facing a public piazza and within sight of tourist restaurants, a gondolier station, and the main drag to San Marco; then another to the rear, a small door from the cloistered courtyard that connects to the northeastern parts of the island, an area with far fewer tourists but real housing, workplaces, local bars, and schools. It’s the bit of Venice most visitors won’t see, but it’s a social and public ecosystem as under threat as that of the lagoon waters.

TBA21 doesn't separate the human and natural world. If we want nature to heal, we will be central to that, the lives that inhabit oceanic and watery places include us, and while humanity may have caused all of the crises facing the seas, we are well placed to also provide knowledge and solutions to repair – including communities as well as the scientists and experts. 'You need to meet people’s needs,' Reymann says, 'one model that we want to test out and experiment with here is to address the people that live here, who have to deal with the fact that sea levels are rising, that water is coming for the city, and how do we live with that?' That back door is open, Ocean Space is for the local communities to that side, just as it is for the international communities who visit through the front.

Ocean Space opened to the public in 2019. While the organisation took over the management of the church from the city authorities a few years earlier, it needed renovations and to be made fully accessible. The founder of TBA21, Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, had experience in this arena, having already spent two decades restoring a Franciscan monastery on the Croatian island of Lopud with Dubrovnik architect Rujana Bergam Marković. Shortly after the Chiesa di San Lorenzo restoration was completed, and the first exhibition had opened – a Joan Jonas exploration of aquariums comprising video, sculpture, drawing, and sound – Covid struck the world. While far from ideal for a new cultural institution, Reymann speaks of the benefits it brought.

'We were one of the very few organisations in Venice that were still here, and we opened the first moment when people were able to start moving around,' Reymann says. 'We put a light installation into the piazza to signal that we're here and we're going to do something for you, then we started organising walks with specialists.' It was perhaps the first time in decades that Venice was only populated by residents, so to see that this new institution was open, despite the absence of tourists, encouraged locals to explore and TBA21 to develop new relationships. Walks around the city with oceanographers and architects helped the local community not only read their city afresh, but also feed back situated knowledge and experiences to experts involved in the recovery of the city and lagoon.

Just as water is not geographically tied to a place, but travels the world through the hydrological cycle, so too TBA21 takes its inquiry and expertise to oceans and beyond. In 2023, as part of the work that includes the current exhibitions, TBA21 spent time in the Dominican Republic’s Silver Bank underwater coral platform, covering over 1,500 sq km and a breeding and calving area for humpback whales. Alongside British sound recordist Chis Watson and Norwegian artist Jana Winderen, TBA21 took along whale researcher and two coral reef specialists.

'One of the specialists, Dr Ruben Torres, showed us a project he was doing with kids in the neighbourhood where he taught them how to dive and build micro fragment corals in nurseries; they would go out to plant them,' recalls Reymann of one project. TBA21 invited him to Jamaica, a place where Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza had property and also first-hand experience of reef collapse. A similar restoration project could take place there, Dr Torres said, though with no marine laboratory in the local university, TBA21 supported a PhD residency and establishment of local partner initiative, Alligator Head Foundation, similarly sited at the intersection of science, art, and community.

'There is tourism development in the same region,' says Reymann, 'and local people see an obvious series of events: conservation, then displacement, then sudden tourism. That’s the tricky part we've been working very hard in, similar to here in Venice; it's a question of trust-building, not going into a place and telling people what they have to do, but asking questions, listening, and seeing where this goes.' He adds that 'sometimes those questions don’t just come through conversation, but through art, cooking, or growing.'

This diffusion of agency is welcome in an art world where institutions often like to keep control and gatekeep access and outcomes. In a cultural landscape where ecologies and climate are often an ingredient or precursor to spectacular art objects, but only to the end of ‘raising awareness’ that TBA21 is dedicated to solutions and hard work is welcome. Reymann and Ferré oversee a complex web of projects, activations, and events, all of which incorporate culture but none of which sees art as the final outcome.

This is the case with the recent United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC) in Nice, where TBA21 was invited as a leading cultural partner. 'We have a colleague on the team that specifically worked on advocacy questions, and he was able to weave incredible networks of people together,' Reymann explains. TBA21’s UNOC work sits publicly as an exhibition, ‘Becoming Ocean’, co-organised with the Tara Ocean Foundation and with the participation of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, but goes much further than simply adding colour and culture to a political talking shop.

A long series of discussions, workshops, conferences, symposia, partner networking, and round tables saw that the research and ideas developed in the process of making art fed into the discussions and outcomes for saving oceans. 'We made an enormous effort that art and culture find their way into the language of the declaration,' Reymann says, 'because the UN system is based on precedent – so if it makes it into UNOC 2025, it's there in perpetuity, and people can build on it.'

Ocean Space feels older than its relatively young existence. In only six years, it has created offshoots and partnerships across the world, organised conferences and dialogues, and fought to centre artists and culture at the heart of conversations, decisions, and policy approach related to oceans and all their aquatic life – human or otherwise. It has also created some stunning and memorable exhibitions, but with culture that – like the worlds they are focused on exploring and supporting – goes far, far deeper than surface level.

The Ocean Space exhibition runs until 2 November 2025

When Luc Tuymans was invited to temporarily replace two paintings by Renaissance master Jacopo Tintoretto at Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore Basilica, the Belgian artist agreed on the basis that, 'they would never be religious.' Working with a speed reminiscent of Tintoretto – nicknamed il Furioso for the urgency with which he applied paint to canvas – Tuymans completed his largest ever paintings, each measuring nearly twenty foot in length, in just one month.

For decades, San Giorgio has been commissioning contemporary artists to present work within its celebrated architecture, but unlike the imposing standalone works by previous artists, including Anish Kapoor, Sean Scully or Berlinde de Bruyckere, Tuymans’ intervention feels more subtle and site specific. As he himself remarks of the new paintings: 'they're not in an unexpected place, but they are unexpected in their place.'

With his characteristically understated and enigmatic figurative style, Tuymans is no stranger to engaging with historical narrative, albeit through an indirect, often allegorical approach. In Venice, his aversion to the 'megalomania' and 'bombast' of the 16th century Palladian church has generated two paintings which, in their quiet and secular style, offer a visual respite to their imposing surroundings.

Located on opposite sides of the Basilica’s presbytery, Tuymans’ paintings take the place of Tintoretto’s The Last Supper, and The People of Israel in the Desert, while both undergo conservation on-site. In Heat (both works 2025), Tuymans has filled the canvas with glowing red orbs, taken from an advertisement for heat lamps that he found online. The fiery incandescence of the painting is juxtaposed by Musicians, in which two distorted figures emerge like spectres from an enveloping gloom. Taken from a photograph Tuymans took while travelling in Korea last year, the scene alludes to the fragmentary nature of memory and the delicate balance between presence and absence.

'What interested me is that one painting obliterates the other,' says Tuymans. 'So when asked if there would be a religious connotation, I did say purgatory and hell. In churches there's also an element of temperature which I find interesting. When they are lit, a lot of paintings in this church are visible but otherwise you virtually don't see them, so I wanted to create a real contradiction within this framework.'

By his own admission, Tuymans shares a 'very difficult relationship with Italy and the Renaissance', in part due to his veneration of early Flemish painting, especially Jan Van Eyck, and the Gothic architecture seen in the cathedral of his hometown of Antwerp. Unlike that cathedral, which Tuymans refers to as a 'bendable structure' owing to the bent wood used in its construction, 'the Renaissance is absolute in its take on reality and on dogma within a religious framework.'

At San Giorgio Maggiore, Tuymans’ paintings embody this juxtaposition, simultaneously exuding an understated aura that refuses to fully reveal itself on first viewing and a moody ambiguity that feels conspicuous in the context of the church’s absolutism. Like the two Tintoretto’s, these works are concerned with destabilising the gaze - albeit in a more minimalist language. And like Tintoretto, Tuymans engages with the sublime, but from a distinctly non-religious approach that nonetheless evokes comparable feelings of transcendence.

Luc Tuymans, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore Venice until 23 November 2025

The sun shone brightly last week as an American curatorial team inaugurated the 2025 US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. A who’s who of American architects and design journalists mingled beneath a zig-zagging timber roof that was purpose-built for the pavilion, titled PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity. There were celebratory speeches, music and a dance performance. Even Diane von Furstenberg swung by.

Making a Venice pavilion happen

But the spritzes and the sunshine belie the financial and logistical feat it takes for architecture curators and co-commissioners to get to Venice in the first place. Organisers work on an extraordinarily compressed time frame, with less than eight months between the announcement of their appointment and the Biennale’s official opening. This year, proposals for displays were due by mid-January, leaving just 73 days for the organisers to select the top participants, get them built and ship them overseas.

The most pressing logistical challenge for US architecture pavilion commissioners, though, is fundraising. While the Architecture Biennale’s more glamorous sister event, the Biennale Arte, can rely on deep-pocketed patrons and galleries, pulling together funding for an architecture biennale is a more hardscrabble undertaking.

Historically, US pavilions receive a small grant from the United States Department of State. Records show that $375,000 was allocated for the 2025 architecture pavilion. That money only goes so far; there is work to ship, structures to build and staff to accommodate – an enterprise whose costs can mount to as much as $2 million. And to make it all happen, the most ambitious pavilion curatorial teams have to know how to find the cash.

‘It is important to know how to fundraise,’ says Peter MacKeith, dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas. ‘It's important to know that this is an entirely public, private enterprise from the get-go.’

MacKeith was one of three co-commissioners for this year’s US Pavilion, an Arkansas-based team representing the University of Arkansas’s architecture school, DesignConnects and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, an institution founded by Alice Walton, the Wal-Mart heiress and philanthropist.

‘Part of the advantage we had going into this was [we had] three experienced organisations, each with their own depth and each with their own capacity,’ says MacKeith, who has been curating exhibitions in Venice since 1991. His team was advised to budget at least a $2 million for the project.

‘There is, as yet, no guidebook for this work,’ he adds.

Niall Atkinson, who was one of the co-curators for the 2018 US Pavilion, themed ‘Dimensions of Citizenship,’ concurs. That edition’s co-commissioners included the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. ‘We were two educational institutions coming together,’ he tells us. ‘I mean, those already come with fundraising machines.’

If you’re a small organisation, though, the story’s more complicated. In summer 2022, Tizziana Baldenebro got a call from the State Department letting her know that she would be the curator and co-commissioner for the 2023 US pavilion. ‘I got off the call, and I just remember crying, because our organisation had never fundraised that much money,’ she tells us.

At the time, Baldenebro was the director of SPACES, a Cleveland-based arts and culture organisation with an operating budget under $500,000 a year. ‘Our organisation was probably the smallest to do it,’ she says. ‘We weren't affiliated with a major institution– like, it was me knocking down everyone's door.’

What ensued was a flurry of fundraising to pull off her exhibition, ‘Everlasting Plastics.’

'Of the $375,000 [awarded by the State Department], $125,000 is like a pass-through grant for the Guggenheim Foundation [which owns the US pavilion]. They manage the pavilion, and they have a liaison. So effectively, you have $250,000 that's directly apportioned to your project, and that becomes seed money,' Baldenebro explains.

'It's also a hell of a lot more money than other countries get sometimes,' she adds.

In addition to the State Department award, Baldenebro found funding through the Ford Foundation as well as local nonprofit organisations, including the George Gund Foundation and the Cleveland Foundation.

‘One of the things that was very tricky for us was that SPACES was an arts organisation, and we were fundraising for architecture,' she says. 'Architecture doesn't have the same philanthropic backing that art does.’

In the end, the budget for ‘Everlasting Plastics’ wound up being around $1.3 million, according to Baldenebro. (By comparison, the 2024 Biennale Arte needed to raise $5 million, according to the New York Times) ‘It was a really intense effort,’ she says. ‘You’re working on your pitch in different ways, and sometimes reapplying [for grants], and it was all within a six-month span.’

Though Baldenebro collaborated with Lauren Leving, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, and relied on the advice of past commissioners, she still feels like there is room for more support for smaller, independent teams.

‘One of my goals is to create a wiki,’ she says. 'I would love to see more alternative art and small art organisations do this program. They have something to say. They don't have the same resources, so maybe the polish isn't there in the same way, but it's almost more radical and more interesting.’

Radical ideas, though, will be taking a backseat at Biennales for the foreseeable future.

While the US government will maintain its $375,000 grant for the 2026 Biennale Arte, participants must adhere to guidelines established by the Trump administration. According to the official grant opportunity posted earlier this month, the US pavilion must ‘promote American values’ and applicants must certify that they may ‘not operate any programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that violate any applicable anti-discrimination laws.’

‘[The administration] is getting rid of the whole critical aspect of the fine arts,’ says Atkinson, the 2018 curator. ‘I can't imagine how the US [architecture] pavilion would not fall under that purview and suddenly have an agenda which is quite different in terms of representing architecture and the United States.’

(Wallpaper* has reached out to the State Department for comment, but did not hear back by the time of publication).

For MacKeith and the organisers of this year’s pavilion, it’s important to keep the greater mission in mind. ‘It’s in the national interest, so to speak – it's to a greater good,’ he says. MacKeith is inspired by the individual supporters who made this year’s pavilion, PORCH, come to life. ‘Sometimes it’s $250, sometimes it’s $1,000, sometimes it’s many more times that, but it’s been truly rewarding to have these conversations.’

How can you make an object greater than the sum of its parts? How can you make something that will resonate, that will sing to an audience? These are just some of the questions posed by Ben Dobbin, senior partner at Foster + Partners, when conceiving his latest project – the third edition of The Dalmore’s Luminary Series, unveiled on the eve of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025.

In an appealing triumvirate of architecture, whisky, and sculpture, co-curated with V&A Dundee and following collaborations with Kengo Kuma in 2022 and Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) in 2024, this edition sees Dobbin explore the tension between creative precision and fluid artistry, both in liquid and in form.

Meet the Dalmore Luminary Series sculpture No.3

The result is two highly collectable whisky releases: The Rare – an exceptionally rare 52-year-old Single Malt; and The Collectable, a remarkable 17-year-old Single Malt Whisky inspired by The Rare and available in a limited edition of just 20,000 bottles. The former is housed in a sculptural bronze structure by Dobbin. Bold, asymmetrical, and improbably but beautifully suspended through a technique known as tensegrity, it’s a piece that pays homage to both natural forces and structural finesse.

'There’s something magical about creating a form that seems to defy gravity,' says Dobbin, who, as head of the firm’s San Francisco office, counts Apple Park in Cupertino and the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco among his completed works.

As with every architectural project, translating The Dalmore’s illustrious history, narrative and artistry into a sculptural artwork began with a full immersion into the revered whisky maker’s world. Working alongside Master Distiller Richard Paterson OBE and Master Whisky Maker Gregg Glass, Dobbin was immediately drawn to what he describes as a 'choreography' of taste. 'They design flavour the way we design buildings,' he says. 'There is an understanding of flow, layers and deliberate tension.' They quickly found a shared language. 'We spoke about high notes, low notes, rhythm and composition – in whisky, in music, in painting. It’s all connected.'

Composed of smooth curves and intersecting bronze rods, the housing for The Rare echoes both the flowing topography of the Scottish Highlands and the layered complexity of the whisky itself. 'Whisky making is so deeply tied to place. The river, the loch, the Highlands feed the distillery, and the distillery creates the whisky. That entire cycle shaped my concept and the sculpture became a kind of landscape in itself – a curvilinear expression of the cradling of the centrepiece whisky, just as the Highlands cradle the loch.'

Time was of the essence, though not in terms of deadlines. Both whisky making and architecture share a need to create outcomes that will at once evolve from history and endure for many years to come. Every sense must be considered, something that also led Dobbin to consider musical instruments. 'The harp is something that has been refined and perfected over time,' he explains. 'It’s beautiful to hear and a feat of engineering, but no one can say who designed it. It’s evolved. That’s true of great design – it endures beyond its authorship. The violin is another example: a humble object that fills a space many times its size. It’s greater than the sum of its parts.'

Dobbins has always been fascinated by how one discipline can influence another. 'Like a helicopter blade made of laminated timber informing the design of a dining chair, there’s beauty in that cross-pollination. At Foster + Partners, there’s an obsession with the refinement of engineering – economy, lightness, and precision. That thinking is very much in my DNA.'

The whisky itself, The Rare, was finished in an array of casks, from Vintage 1980 Calvados and 1940 Colheita Port to 40-year-old Pedro Ximénez Sherry and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. 'The dialogue with Ben inspired us to revisit casks we’d set aside years ago, including Calvados barrels we had the foresight to lay down before they were even officially approved for Scotch finishing,' says Gregg Glass, The Dalmore’s master whisky maker. 'It was a creative process of tension and release.'

The Dalmore Luminary 2025 Edition – The Rare is available via Sotheby’s Hong Kong until 16 May, with all proceeds benefiting V&A Dundee. Leonie Bell, the museum’s director, sees the Luminary Series as a natural extension of design’s power to move across disciplines. 'The beauty of this project lies in its synthesis,' she notes. 'Whisky, architecture, sculpture – each element elevates the others.' Dobbin would agree: 'The Dalmore makers have spent decades refining their art. I’ve spent decades refining mine. But when you step outside your discipline and create something new together – something that neither one of you could have made alone – that’s when things get interesting.'

fosterandpartners.com

thedalmore.com

You will look long and hard for any OMA/AMO drawings at ‘Diagrams’, the new show at the Fondazione Prada event in Venice, even though it is curated by Rem Koolhaas, the practice’s lead partner. The foundation’s show, which coincides with the Venice Architectural Biennale 2025, does feature one image, amongst nearly 200, of the Scalo Farini masterplan for Milan by the Dutch studio. Other than that small moment, its work is absent from this wide-ranging, frequently stunning, always fascinating exhibition. One might have expected more.

Explore OMA/AMO’s ‘Diagrams’ at the Prada Foundation in Venice

At OMA in the 1980s, Rem Koolhaas and his early colleagues, such as Elia Zenghelis, incorporated the diagram into the wealth of drawing types used by architects to create work. Added to the repertoire of the section, plan and perspective, the diagram puts the focus on the building’s use or programme and how this might suit the user first and create form second. The Seattle Public Library’s wonky stack, for example, emerges from layers of different uses: public spaces on the lower floors, the book stack above, and the building’s admin capping it all. The De Rotterdam resulted from separating out multiple uses in a diagram and then bringing them together in a dramatic aggregated form.

The ‘Diagrams’ show, however, is a wider cultural history of the diagram, beginning in the early Renaissance and coming up to the present day, an expression of OMA’s affinity for the diagram rather than examples of the firm's use of it. An arrangement of troops in Machiavelli’s book, the Libro della arte della guerra (first published in 1521), is probably the oldest work in the exhibition; images of photovoltaic cell efficiency are perhaps the most recent. Koolhaas and fellow curator Giulio Margheri have arranged the historical documents into nine different 'urgencies' – the vital concerns of humanity, such as health, migration, inequality and resources. These themes are given an overview in identical vitrines in the central space on the first floor of the palazzo, with each room off that central space exploring the subject in more varied hangs. The war room, for example, has banked vitrines redolent of, well, a war room.

In previous exhibitions, such as the interesting but uneven ‘Countryside’ at the New York Guggenheim in 2020, Koolhaas included a series of awkward, unpalatable or banal images to prove a wider point. In ‘Diagrams’, these moments are kept to a minimum – interestingly, the ugliest diagrams are in the built environment section – providing not only an engrossing insight into the way humans communicate collective needs to each other, but also exemplars of panache, style and in some cases, beauty.

One of the most striking moments in the show is a series of 16 images by the Black activist and sociologist WEB Du Bois for the Paris Exposition in 1900. Not only do they convey the enormity of the massive social progress made after the abolition of slavery, but they are also remarkably clear and simple, proto-modernist somehow.

There is a longer history to the aesthetic of the diagram, however. Koolhaas also suggests that modernism (and, presumably, modernist architecture) was the rise to aesthetic preeminence of an already existing way of thinking. The diagram, he explains in the catalogue, is 'a form of thinking that almost transcends aesthetic style or period'.

Often, there is a strange combination of absolute bathos to the clarity. In 1869, Charles-Joseph Minard depicted the losses of the French army during Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812–13 as a thick black line leaving Paris. As men die on the road to Moscow, the line thins and narrows until it returns to Paris a mere thread. Designers use beauty to convey often ugly things.

There is much to unpack in this wonderful show, curated with sensitivity but also clear admiration for the work selected, born from OMA/AMO’s internal understanding of the power of a good diagram. The thematic organisation highlights the hidden purposes behind the apparently neutral arrangement and display of material in the diagram, as does the focus on authorship. There are clusters of work by Minard and Du Bois, but also others: the economist William Playfair and the cartographer Philippe Rekacewicz, for example. Together, though, this is an absolute must-see if you are visiting Venice for the 2025 biennale.

fondazioneprada.org

A new intervention by the Norman Foster Foundation in collaboration with Porsche appeared along the waterfront of the Arsenale at the opening of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. Gateway to Venice’s Waterway is part installation, part platform for dialogue around infrastructure and the future of movement in Venice. Created as part of Porsche’s The Art of Dreams cultural programme, the project explores sustainable transportation in a place defined by its relationship to water, rather than roads.

Step through Norman Foster's ‘Gateway to Venice's Waterway'

'[We wanted] to provoke a discussion about mobility,' says Foster of the project, which takes the form of a floating pontoon that extends across the water from the banks of the Arsenale, one of the Venice Biennale’s two main locations. According to Foster, himself an avid collector of vintage automobiles, the 37-metre long aluminium structure took cues from 'the tubular frame of old racing cars,' he said. Composed of a curving, diagrid frame inset with diamond-shaped aluminium panels of varying sizes, the structure was envisioned to catch the light like the rippling water in the canal.

'The idea was to use very simple materials with a high degree of engineering sophistication,' Foster explains, 'to create something that would respond to nature – to the wind, the light, the shadows – and would move with the waves.'

Though it might seem counterintuitive for a car brand to make a statement in a city with no roads, Porsche’s vice president of style, Michael Mauer, sees it as an inquiry into the nature of movement – even in the most unexpected of environments. 'If you’re in the car industry, you talk about mobility,' he says. 'This gateway is a symbol of how mobility in a city like Venice could work.' Indeed, the bridge allows access to a fleet of Schiller bicycles, pedal-powered watercrafts that combine the form of a traditional bicycle with lightweight pontoons, enabling riders to cycle across water.

Porsche and the Norman Foster Foundation see the project as highlighting Venice’s myriad transportation challenges. Aside from traditional hand-powered gondolas that have been entirely usurped by the tourism industry, there are no electric or renewable-powered boats operating in the city. With the introduction of the Schiller bikes, as well as a fleet of Frauscher x Porsche 850 Fantom Air boats powered by electric propulsion, which were present during the Biennale opening days, they hope to spark a conversation about new and sustainable ways of traversing the ancient floating city.

The project is just the latest instalment in Porsche’s The Art of Dreams program, which explores the intersection of art, design, and urban innovation. Previous editions have seen the artist Thomas Trum install large-scale artworks in southern France and the art collective Numen/For Use build a massive interactive sculpture formed of climbable nets in the centre of a Milanese palazzo.

But for Mauer, the collaboration embodies, above all, the spirit of multidisciplinary exchange. 'It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with Norman Foster,' he says. 'The car industry is a very streamlined process, so exchanging opinions with a creative community is so important to us. Norman Foster is a car collector and very much interested in the history of cars, so hearing his ideas on car design was a very exciting moment for us. Though the creative process of car design and architecture can be very similar, the outcome is vastly different. We really understood each other.'

The 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Carlo Ratti and titled Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., is open to the public from 10 May to 23 November 2025.

fosterandpartners.com

Featuring a whopping 750 participants, ‘Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.’, the main show at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, opened this weekend in the historic city of Venice. The world’s biggest global festival of design for the built environment was curated this year by Italian architect Carlo Ratti, who opened his statement for the official launch, highlighting how ‘architecture has always been a response to a hostile climate.’ He continues: ‘Adaptation demands a fundamental shift in architectural practice.’

In response to this, Ratti set out to find common ground, adjustments, and planned or impromptu collaborations between us and our surroundings, the natural and the artificial. The goal? To find inspiration in order to carve a way forward and out of the climate crisis, yes, but beyond that, to also envision ways of coexisting with our context in a more harmonious, meaningful way for all.

Stepping inside ‘Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.’

The result – over 300 projects – takes up, as always, the biggest part of the Arsenale’s vast halls, spilling out to its surrounding grounds and gardens. It would also have been in the Giardini’s Central Pavilion, which, until now, also played host to a good part of the main show, however, this is now closed for restoration, which left the existing Arsenale spaces (an old rope factory) to pick up the largest part of the contributions.

Invited contributions included architects from across the globe, lots of academics and researchers, as well as those selected from an open call for the first time in the show's history. Ratti described his approach as seeing the biennale as a platform to converse with the entire world of architecture. ‘The central curatorial exercise for Biennale Architettura 2025 was the Space for Ideas,' he said.

Seeing as the show brings together nature and technology, built space and innovation, Wallpaper* transport & technology editor Jonathan Bell and architecture & environment director Ellie Stathaki were dispatched to attend the preview days in May, ahead of the highly anticipated show’s public opening on the 10th May 2025. Here is what they made out of it all.

Two Wallpaper* editors discuss the 19th Architecture Biennale in Venice

Ellie Stathaki: I found the entrance to the biennale show very powerful. The first room, especially as the opening day followed a downpour of rain which made temperatures outside cooler, was a bit of a shock. The room, prefaced by Ratti’s thoughts that architecture has always been a response to the climate, was about walking into a thick, hot, dark room. Somewhat stifling and jarring. But I imagine that was the point, and it definitely made me sit up and take notice.

Jonathan Bell: Absolutely. I'd go so far as to say it was the most powerful Arsenale opener ever. Imagine an oppressively hot path through curved reflecting ponds that evoke Richard Wilson’s seminal 20:50, a reflection pool of sump oil installed at the original Saatchi Gallery in 1991. Above this is a hanging garden of whirring, wheezing bolt-on aircon units, of the type found attached to hundreds of thousands of building façades across the hotter hemispheres. Navigate this and you’re confronted with your own reflection: you, the person who just flew into this sinking, crumbling and waterlogged city, right on the frontlines of the fight between architecture and climate.

ES: Agreed. This immersion was just what was needed to get you focused, as you walked in, presumably unawares, from Venice’s magical, historical context. It also set the mood for the parts of the exhibition just beyond, where nature's ever-presence is discussed. Several projects were wrapped in nature in some shape or form, and highlighted plants and animals also caught my attention – such as Jeanne Gang’s focus on non-human inhabitants of Venice, eco-diversity in cities and citizen science.

There was also the plant-powered air and water purifying ideas – one of them, ‘Canal Café’ by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Natural Systems Utilities, SODAI, Aaron Betsky and Davide Oldani, which makes coffee using the city’s canal water, won this year’s Golden Lion for the best participation. Additionally, there was some architecture using bamboo canopies for cooling (a concept by architects Coldefy).

JB: Yes, it was definitely an approach that cast its net far and wide. Some of the technology felt a little forced – unhappy-looking robots – and I still think that the interface between architecture and nature is still waiting for its killer app moment. It's hard to fault the ambition, though.

ES: There were quite a few clear groupings within the displays overall, if I’d try and categorise things – projects centred on materials (natural, or bio-scientific); mapping and statistics (I am thinking, for instance, MIT’s Senseable City Lab and Journey’s interesting research on Brazil’s favelas – or Limbo Accra’s contribution which continues its work on documenting abandoned buildings); a lot of AI, robotics and technology; and even a few projects venturing beyond the capacity of the Earth’s atmosphere.

JB: There was a lot of that old Biennale standby – create an unusual material, form it into odd-shaped blocks and build a pavilion out of it. There were also beautiful examples of information design, a vision of circularity rendered in a paper cut, or a dense tapestry of the process and scale of banana palm cultivation. But does taking heartbreakingly intensive and destructive processes and rendering them in a beautiful abstract way help or hinder our understanding?

ES: I think the open call, as well as the invited submission aspect, meant that Carlo had a wealth of great projects and ideas to work with. It must have been really tempting to include as many of them as possible, and celebrate the diversity of the ideas and also the backgrounds of the exhibitors. And the fact that space was more limited this year, with the Central Pavilion out of commission, meant that the rooms were pretty packed, a rich selection, which, however, required a lot of attention to get through. 750 exhibitors and 300 displays are quite a lot more than past biennales offered. I remember feeling Alejandro Aravena’s in 2016 was pretty packed, and that was only 88 contributions.

JB: More participants equals greater inclusivity, which is a very valid approach. There's a corresponding sense of urgency around climate, war, injustic, etc., as well as a feeling that architecture itself feels under threat – from AI, from rising costs, from regimes that don't value creative culture. I couldn't help but think that the Biennale showed architects making more work for themselves in the face of some imagined mass extinction event for the profession. Embracing technology for technology's sake. For example, LiDAR scanning Brazilian favelas to explore their structural integrity.

ES: Back to the displayed projects, at the same time, there were quite a few which spoke to me. The project by Cristina Parreño Alonso, J.Roc Jih (of Studio J.Jih), and Skylar Tibbits, which worked with volcanoes, creating a structure that guides and cools down lava, surprised me. I always enjoy encountering something unexpected, and this definitely was in that world for me. And in the volume of works, I almost missed Tosin Oshinowo's beautifully shot, large-scale, immersive videos 'Alternative Urbanism: The Self-Organized Markets of Lagos' – which also got a special mention by the biennale jury – in my first sweep. I am so glad I didn't, in my second.

JB: Scanning ad-hoc housing was also unexpected and strangely beautiful, but it ticked another classic Biennale box, i.e. making a dramatic rendering of a marginalised space that was hard to connect to real life and real needs.

ES: There was also a section of the works that discussed working with traditional skills and/or knowledge and adapting it to our world today. A touch of retrofuturism in some, perhaps too? Would you agree?

JB: I did enjoy watching the bored robot ‘sweep’ up after the traditional Bhutanese wood carvers. That robot looked like it was deliberately skiving off doing any real work. Apparently, these little metal guys are going to learn new skills throughout the duration of the exhibition. I wonder if anyone will check up on that?

ES: I wonder! Speaking of new technologies that are learning from us. What did you make out of the AI-generated captions? For those who haven't been to the Biennale yet: there was a longer version of the caption texts, offering a fuller picture of each presented project, and then there was an AI-generated summary of it, over a sentence or two, beneath it. My initial thought was that I didn't need the condensed version, and I was worried that nuances and important points would be missed this way, but after a few rooms full of projects, my eye did end up going to the short version. Maybe these versions served as a comment about AI-condensing and processing, of which you read more and more these days.

JB: I felt the AI texts mocked our already faltering attention spans and ever-increasing reliance on the machine. Could we cross-check? Fact check? Sense check? It added to the crisis of confidence in the validity of creativity. How can we make sense of data when data has already made up its mind about us?

ES: It is exactly the sort of thing that raises worries in the industry and beyond - about how to use AI in architecture, and writing, for that matter, in a fruitful and safe way. So it's a good thing to bring it to the forefront and inspire more discussion around it.

JB: I also felt there were conflicting themes running through the Arsenale, the intersection of technological determinism – which architects have always loved – versus the embrace of a new analogue sensibility. Yet the end result wasn’t an elegant hybrid but the cyberpunk-y world of ad-hoc accretions and adaptations. You couldn’t criticise the sentiment – that we need to adapt and evolve failing systems of production and longstanding structural inequalities. I think the presentation could have been a bit less scattergun though – I liked the point Olly Wainwright made in his review in the Guardian that a two-day visit to the Arsenale would give you about 72 seconds to spend on each contributor.

ES: Many of the entries this year were about research or theoretical ideas. They could of course become reality, and there were some great analyses and reflections on existing work, structures already built and cities and our experience of them. But also, likely drawing on Carlo's own links to academia [Ratti teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the Senseable City Lab], a bit part of the biennale discussed the future - innovation and what's to come. Whether these are projects that will be realised or are there to hint at a potential future reality, we will have to see.

The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale will run 10 May till 23 November 2025

labiennale.org

If you are missing the celebrated Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain home at Boulevard Raspail, then head to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, and the foundation's collateral event at Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the majestic Island of San Giorgio Maggiore. There, a sneak preview exhibition of what's to come at the next Jean Nouvel structure for Fondation Cartier, which is set to open later in the year, might quench your thirst until the public opening of the new structure on 25 October 2025.

What's to come at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris

When it was announced that the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris is moving homes from its well-known, existing 1994-designed space on Boulevard Raspail by Jean Nouvel to a new building at the 19th-century Place du Palais-Royal, it took audiences by surprise. Not only because of the change itself, but also as the new home, also designed by Nouvel (in an existing historic building), promises an immersive, kinetic and fully 21st-century experience.

'Moving into such an impressive site, in terms of location and history, entails a form of invention. And what is invented is not automatically seen in the steel or stone. The space is marked by a different way of doing: a way of conceiving how artists can have maximum power of expression,' Jean Nouvel told us at the time.

'A site such as this one calls for boldness, courage that artists might not necessarily demonstrate in other institutional spaces. The Fondation Cartier will likely be the institution offering the greatest differentiation of its spaces, the most diverse exhibition forms and viewpoints. Here, it is possible to do what cannot be done elsewhere, by shifting the system of the act of showing.'

The new building will be inaugurated this coming autumn, and the newly opened show in Venice offers glimpses of what's to come, in the shape of large scale, immersive renders, photos and film; drawings providing detail into the construction and feel of different areas within the building, including its movable platforms and adaptable nature; and a generous model, arranged in a way that allows the visitor to walk in it and take in the building's interior and kinetic potential.

The show, no doubt, will whet appetites to explore the new space once available; and in the meantime, inspire conversations around the future of art exhibitions, cultural architecture and cross-disciplinary creation. A public programme including participants such as Jean Nouvel, Cecilia Puga, Andrés Jaque, Lina Ghotmeh, Manuel Segade and Antoine Picon, will accompany the exhibition.

The exhibition 'The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain by Jean Nouvel' will be on show until 14 September 2025 on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice

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fondationcartier.com

In partnership with Rolex

Precision, design vision and sustainability form an integral part in all Rolex projects – from the brand’s finely crafted watches to its discerning architectural endeavours. The latter, with a list of collaborators that reads like a who’s who of the field’s contemporary scene, include the Rolex Learning Center for EPFL in Lausanne by SANAA, and the Rolex USA headquarters in New York by David Chipperfield. In the same spirit, Rolex, a long-standing supporter of the Venice Architecture Biennale, has announced that it is launching a new pavilion in the Giardini for this year’s event, which is open from 10 May to 23 November 2025.

The building, designed by architect Mariam Issoufou, was conceived to represent the brand’s commitment to long-lasting, quality design with a sustainability-minded soul. Drawing on Issoufou’s architecture practice and experience (her studio, Mariam Issoufou Architects, has bases in Niamey, Zurich and New York), the pavilion is composed of natural materials – it features a recycled timber exterior; a translucent, coloured glass ceiling composed of elements made by Murano craftspeople; and terrazzo flooring, comprising an aggregate that includes recycled crushed ‘Cotisso’ glass (a leftover from the glassmaking process).

This palette not only brings texture and an artisanal, handmade approach to the forefront, but it also connects the building to its location, nodding to Venice’s rich cultural tapestry, as well as its fragile, precious historical context and ecological vulnerability.

Within the new space, a multi-layered exhibit is set to hone in further on these themes through film-led displays. A piece on the making of the pavilion itself will take the visitor on a journey through its different stages, telling the story of its creation.

A second film, a documentary titled Bourj Hammoud: The Value of the Existing, broadens the lens of exploration. Through the 2023-2024 Rolex mentoring programme, French architect Anne Lacaton, a firm proponent of building reuse and redesign in architecture, worked with young Lebanese-Armenian architect Arine Aprahamian. The results of their two-year collaboration, Aprahamian’s research project, are captured in this piece, which ‘explores how small and targeted interventions are the right strategy to improve daily life in Bourj Hammoud, a dense neighbourhood of Beirut where [the architect] grew up’.

Two slide shows examine the traditions and processes behind the careful refurbishment of two Rolex boutiques – in Milan, within the prestigious Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, and in Tokyo, occupying four floors in the Rolex Tower. ACPV Architects spearheaded the former, and Gwenael Nicolas of Tokyo-based design studio Curiosity was behind the latter, each author working closely with local artisans to achieve an interior that both nods to the past and looks to the future.

Drawing on themes that feel current and urgent, such as sustainability and a striving to preserve tradition while fostering innovation (which also gently echoes the 2025 biennale curator Carlo Ratti’s theme ‘Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective’, underlining our connection with nature), the new Rolex Pavilion in Venice will be unveiled to the public on the biennale’s launch day on 10 May.

rolex.com

When Swiss construction giant Holcim created a way to blend carbon-guzzling biochar with cement and mortar, it turned to Chilean architects Elemental to create a project for the Venice Biennale; concrete can be a hard sell in the West these days, but in developing countries it’s often the affordable, reliable material of choice, and therefore, it's important to improve its sustainable architecture potential. The result is the Basic Services Unit (USB) – a slice of a house – on show in Marinaressa Gardens and at Palazzo Mora in Venice, launching during the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025.

Explore Holcim and Alejandro Aravena’s collaboration: Basic Services Unit

Biochar is a charcoal-like material, formed from any organic waste, from food to sewage. Normally, this end-of-life matter releases CO2, but when it is burned through a process of pyrolysis, the emissions are halted (one kilogramme of biochar absorbs three kilos of CO2). The Basic Services Unit, made wholly from biochar mixed with regular cement and recycled aggregates, is a net-zero structure that is as strong, durable and fire-resistant as a regular concrete building.

As such, it offers a sustainable alternative to monotonous, unecological, low-cost housing. ‘In Latin America, houses are built by people, so they need to be part of the process,’ explains Elemental founder Alejandro Aravena, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2016 for his innovative social housing. ‘Holcim’s new decarbonising technology allows us to address the speed and scale of the housing crisis without putting any more strain on the environment.’

It's a continuation of Aravena’s 20-year development of incremental housing, whereby owners start with a safe, fire-resistant, architect-designed framework and build from there as and when they can afford to. More than 4,000 low-cost Elemental houses have been built this way in Chile. At the two-storey house in Venice, furniture, sanitaryware and a kitchen are painted in chalk next to the solid walls to show viewers how the dwelling would likely evolve. ‘Even if the authorities don’t want people to build, they will,’ says Araveno, ‘and what they create is usually more beautiful.’

Holcim CEO Miljan Gutovic adds: ‘We need to build faster and deliver innovative and sustainable solutions, and Latin America is a key area of interest.’ With a staff of 65,000 and operations in more than 50 markets, Holcim is trialling its biochar technology in 11 countries, among them Spain, where it has used biochar mortar; and London’s Wood Wharf, where cement has been mixed with biochar made from coffee grounds and wood. Elemental’s Basic Services Unit in Venice is the most high-profile application of the mat so far.

'The unit combines science, technology, sustainability, security and safety,’ says Aravena. 'When combined with common sense, local knowledge and community empowerment, people can take over and avoid repetitive, dull, anodyne solutions. It can solve historical issues of social housing.’

holcim.com

elementalchile.cl

A voyage through the quaint canals of Venice, followed by a quick car journey along the city’s industrial outskirts, led guests of Golden Goose to Marghera yesterday evening (7 May 2025), the portside suburb where the Italian footwear brand was founded by Francesca Rinaldo and Alessandro Gallo in 2000.

The area is now home to a gleaming cultural space in a converted former warehouse, ‘Golden Goose Haus’. This is where our journey led us, to see ‘Altered Space’, an immersive exhibition that's part of an ongoing series of events which invite international talents to create genre-spanning installations under the ‘Haus’ name (so far, the ‘Haus’ project has coincided with the arrival of the biennale in the city, with the 2025 Architecture Biennale opening for previews today, 8 May).

Golden Goose presents ‘Altered States’ by Marco Brambilla

This year ‘Haus’ passes the baton to Italian-Canadian artist and film director Marco Brambilla – best known for his 1993 film Demolition Man and his 2023 King Size installation for the opening of the Sphere in Las Vegas – who through his unique lens converges culture, art and film with the hypnotic ‘Altered States’.

The visual installation, which was curated by Jérôme Sans, co-founder of Palais de Tokyo in Paris, took place in Golden Goose’s ‘Manovia’ which is split into different areas including an archive, a library, a ‘playground’ – which is an auditorium – and a ‘hangar’, a large exhibition area. Brambilla’s inspiration for the exhibition was drawn entirely from film imagery and sound. The show invites guests to be connected to a dream-like state with the collective subconscious, where hypnotic visuals and soundscapes are designed to guide viewers through layered realms of memory, fantasy and desire.

‘You’re meant to feel conflicting emotions,’ Brambilla tells Wallpaper*. ‘Some pieces are more inclusive and others more aggressive. It’s a show about one idea. We connect through the subconscious. Through dreams.’

Upon entrance, visitors are greeted with the first installation, titled Ovation. A large screen above an expansive water feature showcases famous characters from films spanning the 1950s to the present day, all of which played an important role in shaping Brambilla’s outlook on life and cinematography. The individual clips are processed and slowed, with the characters experiencing seemingly endless waves of human emotion in this continuous loop.

Another section, Anthology, saw Brambilla create a ‘memory timeline’, which highlights cinema across different genres and eras with photographic wallpaper. Other installations include a Celluloid Dorothy, a continuous video loop of a doe-eyed Dorothy in the 1939 classic, The Wizard of Oz, played by Judy Garland as she enters a dream-like state, and an immersive tunnel titled Desire, which is a hypnotic soundscape of continuous voices saying ‘I love you’.

The grand reveal, though, takes place in the hangar. Titled Heaven’s Gate, a five-minute-long series of video collages presents an auditory and visual takeover of the vast space, evoking a kaleidoscopic landscape which journeys from the birth to the death of the universe, based on Dante’s seven levels of purgatory. Accompanied with booming audio, it is hard not to physically feel the artwork as it echoes around the hangar space.

‘The new age and era which is happening right now is fantastic,’ said Golden Goose CEO Silvio Campara of the ‘Haus’ projects, which give participants free creative rein. ‘It is encouraging people to become more humble and less arrogant. So many people have something to say, and nobody listens. Let’s listen. This is what we want to achieve. It gives space for people to express themselves, as culture is happening now.

‘Haus is coming from the need of people to become culture and not only to read about or buy culture,’ he continues. ‘Culture is not about artworks or history, it’s about exchanging points of view.’

Haus will be open to the public from 10-11 May 2025. Sign up for the event here.

haus.goldengoose.com

Cave Bureau is a Nairobi-based group of architects and researchers whose work examines the post-colonial African condition through the lens of landscape. Central to their exploration is a strong anthropological and geological thread that both underscores the origin and informs the future trajectory of the practice.

The studio, founded in 2014, owes its name to its geographic origins in Kenya. 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. The site in question - a series of subterranean limestone caves that proved instrumental in informing human evolutionary theories – continues to be a rich metaphor for a body of work that is grounded in place and topography. This historical narrative is balanced by studio co-founder Kabage Karanja’s childhood experience of inhabiting some of the caves native to his hometown of Nairobi. ‘I have memories, from the age of 12 or 13, of sleeping in caves. Incidentally, [the cave] has become the main site of our research - for all of our Anthropocene projects, culminating with Anthropocene 10 - it has come full circle,’ he says.

Meet Kenyan architecture studio Cave Bureau

One of Cave Bureau’s early projects, completed for the 17^th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2021, exemplifies this root origin. Invited to contribute a piece within the Giardini Galileo Chini, the studio created Obsidian Rain, a 1:1 installation of the Mau Mau Freedom Fighters’ hideout caves. The aim was to recreate the visceral topographic interior of the space by hanging 1,680 pieces of obsidian stone. This, alongside myriad other projects, contributes to a growing catalogue of work referred to as The Anthropocene Museum - which they explain on their website as ‘a living, roaming institution of imagination and community-based action that began in the land of our collective ancestral origin in East Africa’.

In recent years, The Anthropocene Museum has become central to Cave Bureau’s ambition to interrogate the prevailing modern concept of the museum as an institution contained within a building. In Africa, the storage and transmission of cultural knowledge was historically an oral tradition. Often rooted in nature, it integrated other experiential elements, such as poetry and dance, making for an embodied form of learning. ‘The traditional museum, as an institution where objects are stored to be looked at and engaged with, is a Western, post-Enlightenment concept we are trying to re-imagine. With the Anthropocene Museum, its use of a range of sensory media, as well as physically roaming around the world with several iterations in differing western museums, acts as a critique,’ explains Cave Bureau’s co-founder Stella Mutegi.

During the 2020 global pandemic, the practice noticed a marked deficiency in cultural provision due to the closing down of many larger institutions. With outdoor green spaces being the only public places people were allowed to visit at the time, this observation further strengthened their investigations into landscapes as natural harbingers of culture.

Importantly, the studio’s research underlines that site and geography are not only used as points of historical reference but constitute springboards from which projections about alternative futures can be envisaged. Much like the Mau Mau Freedom Fighters who re-imagined a better, future African State while hiding during the resistance, Cave Bureau’s work uses the specificity of place as a point of departure from which a future in dialogue with the past can be proposed. The centrality of geology and land as a contested space is vital towards this end. ‘A lot of what is happening today – conflict, climate and natural disasters – can be traced back to geology and human engagement with land, effectively back to the earth. Climatic changes go back to extraction from the earth, as do conflicts between people as a result of resource grabbing,’ explains Mutegi. ‘There is extraction of not only natural but also human resources.’

The common ground for these intersections highlights geology as a point of focus – a theme that Cave Bureau hopes to explore through its work at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. Titled Geology of Britannic Repair, the British pavilion will investigate how architecture can reverse the destructive impacts of colonial systems of geological extraction through emergent practices of architectural repair. Commissioned by the British Council, and 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 – a geological formation that runs from southern Turkey through Palestine, the Red Sea to Ethiopia, Kenya and Mozambique – as the basis for the exhibition’s geographical, geological and conceptual focus.

With an underlying partnership between Britain and Kenya the focus of this year’s British Pavilion, the curatorial team hopes to prompt reflection on architecture’s role in the geological afterlives of colonialism, as well as propose ideas of healing and repair through a showcase of earth practice that rebuilds connections between people, ecology and land.

For Cave Bureau, this has always been part of any decolonial exploration. Projects such as the Rift Valley in Mount Suswa – a site of traditional importance to the Indigenous Masai who relied on its increasingly depleting resources – explore extraction on a smaller scale, showcasing how communities harvest water here, while also prompting us to think holistically about existing ecosystems of plant and animal life. ‘For us, earth practices start with community but if expanded can have a planetary impact - this is the argument – a geologic consciousness. It is the small-scale practices that are vulnerable. If we protect the small scale, we have a chance to dismantle the big scale,’ says Mutegi.

The British Pavilion building itself is no exception. Describing its origin as ’the manifestation of empire', and with the 'entire Giardini complex an expression of European excellence, there is a desire to unravel this history and how the colonial project has led to immense climatic impacts,’ Karanja says. The building, no longer a vessel or backdrop for hosting work as has been the case in previous exhibitions, will be subverted to become the subject of a greater conversation around the physical and geological manifestations of colonial activity, drawing the attention of visitors to what has been in the background for so long.

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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 at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. Her rich, characterful work is aptly represented in this compact home, Summer House Strauss, which was completed in 1976 and is located on the shores of Lake Hallwil (Hallwilersee), a popular holiday destination in Aesch, close to Lucerne.

The cottage was commissioned by Dr. Frank Strauss in 1964. ‘He had a practice as a dentist in Affoltern am Albis, a village about 25km from Aesch and Zürich,’ says Martin Kehrer, who married the original client‘s daughter, Berti Strauss, and now looks after the house with her. ‘He loved sailing and that‘s why he was looking to buy a plot by a lake in the area. He owned two little sailing boats and wished for a weekend house not too far from his main home. Strauss knew Sachs and thought that the architect’s sensitive and emotional approach to architecture would fit the project well.’

Enter the world of Lisbeth Sachs

Sachs, who designed and built several high-quality projects in Switzerland starting in the 1950s, was also one of the first female architects practicing in the country. She graduated in 1939, taught by architect Otto Rudolf Salvisberg at ETH, Zürich, and was one of only five women in her class. Her career kicked off with a competition win to design the Kurtheater Baden, a large theatre complex for the Canton of Aargau. She completed this project in 1952, collaborating with Otto Dorer, who came second in the competition and was assigned to her as an advisor. The resulting structure features an elegant, circular glass pavilion and several original design elements, including lighting fixtures and furniture pieces. Following this project, Sachs worked predominantly on residential architecture, interiors and exhibition displays.

Sachs was also an important and keen writer in her field. She produced pieces for key Swiss journals in her field, including Werk, which allowed her to address the global architecture scene. In her writing, she explored the work of seminal figures of her era, such as Frei Otto, and Alvar and Aino Aalto. She developed a poetic and organic approach to architecture. She argued: ‘Architecture should be a new reference to nature, a reference in a large, comprehensive sense, in which human existence and transience are included, in the feeling of an all-encompassing relationship between plants, animals, humans and stone, also between the creations of humans and nature.’

Nature is an important element in Strauss Summer House, which was nicknamed ‘Im Schilf’ (In the Reeds). ‘Originally, my wife’s father purchased about 3,000 sq m of land here, hoping to eventually create two houses, one for each of his children. But a little after the construction of this house, the area was declared a nature and wildlife reserve and it was impossible to build any more structures there. We are particularly pleased that this extraordinary summer house was also declared as an object to preserve a few years ago,’ says Kehrer.

Sachs demonstrated her take on organic architecture in the house’s lyrical arrangement of materials and shapes. A concrete base supports an octagonal wooden structure with angled forms and a sloping roof. She worked with experienced carpenters who could address her complex geometries and was very involved in the construction progress, attending her building sites frequently and supervising the fabrication of different elements. ‘I admire her ability to build such complicated wooded structures without the help of 3D computers,’ says Kehrer.

The house contains two south-facing bedrooms upstairs for the children, while to the north are two more bedrooms for the parents. The first-floor living room, with its double-height ceiling and monumental fireplace, was the family’s main gathering place. The space’s colourful compositions, made of pieces of glass and ceramic embedded into concrete, as well as its sculptural, tile-covered concrete fireplaces, are reminiscent of the artistry in the work of Swiss painter Paul Klee. In fact, Klee‘s influences on Sachs were explored in a dedicated exhibition titled Architektur mit Klee at the Zentrum Paul Klee Bern last year.

Now, this lesser-known Swiss architect is about to have a moment. Curators and architects Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins and Myriam Uzor of the Annexe group were selected to represent Switzerland at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. In collaboration with artist Axelle Stiefel and graphic designer Emma Kouassi, they will recreate a site-specific, temporary art installation designed by Sachs for the 1958 Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA) in Zürich. With this gesture, 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?’ Their answer pays homage to Sachs’ life and work. The display will be accompanied by work by architecture historian Rahel Hartmann Schweizer, author of ‘Lisbeth Sachs – Architektin, Forscherin, Publizistin’ for gta Verlang in 2020. Thanks to this project, Sachs and her work will claim a deserved spot in the Swiss architecture discourse.

Though Prada is, understandably so, mainly known for its clothing since Miuccia Prada took the helm of her family company in 1978, it has always had a robust presence in the cultural sphere. Fondazione Prada, the brand’s art and cultural institution, was founded in 1993 and expanded in 2011 and 2015, with the openings of its Venice and Milan galleries. But more recently, Prada has begun to position itself as a patron of science and the environment, as evidenced by the opening of the Sea Beyond Ocean Literacy Centre in collaboration with UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission UNESCO (UNESCO-IOC), which was unveiled last week on the island of San Servolo in the Venetian lagoon.

Architect Carlo Ratti and creative studio Dotdotdot configure Prada’s new Ocean Literacy Centre

‘The opening of the Sea Beyond Ocean Centre here in San Servolo marks an important milestone in our journey towards restoring our relationship with the ocean,’ says Francesco Santoro, senior programme officer at UNESCO-IOC. ‘This centre is more than just the physical space for hands-on ocean education and awareness-raising activities. It's a symbol of the growing level of recognition of ocean literacy as a discipline and a practice.’

The ground floor space was designed by the architect Carlo Ratti, who is also the curator of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. The building, which looks out over Venice’s placid lagoon waters, incorporates reused timber and circular solutions in the design, including a closed-loop water filtration system to keep consumption to a minimum. Ratti chose a palette of blues throughout the interiors to evoke the feeling of ‘water entering inside,’ he says.

‘You might want to look at the ground in detail,’ he added. ‘Because the ground looks like concrete but is made with shells from the ocean.’

Arranged in an enfilade of rooms, each space is dedicated to the visualisation of different kinds of ocean-related data, conceived by the Milan-based creative studio Dotdotdot. The first two installations, which take the form of interactive maps – one depicting a Spilhaus Projection of global oceans and the other zoomed into the Venetian lagoon – illustrate scientific data via dynamic projections that include the change in water temperature, salinity levels and the flow of currents throughout the year. The final room is dedicated to an interactive game for children and school groups, who will be the centre’s main audience.

Venice as the site of the centre was a natural choice. The city, famously vulnerable to the threats of rising oceans, has long been a site of oceanic research – most notably, the MOSE system, a retractable barrier that shields the fragile city from incoming sea surges and was completed in 2020. It’s also a living laboratory for studying the delicate balance between human settlement and marine ecosystems – a tension that will only intensify in the coming decades.

‘It all started with the idea of having a positive impact on society and giving back to the environment,’ said Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada Group’s head of corporate social responsibility. ‘Which is why starting this journey with [UNESCO-IOC] was a natural choice. We have to speak to and educate future generations – and this is only the beginning of a very long journey.’

The Sea Beyond Ocean Literacy Centre is open to visitors on Tuesday and Friday from 10am to 12pm and from 3pm to 5pm

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An arched torso bows towards us from a slender, arrow-slit-sized canvas: the planetary outlines of breasts, taut white skin, the inner press of a belly button, down to the clam-like fray of labial lips. Imperfect Symmetry by London-based artist Saskia Colwell is one in a series of drawings that make up ‘Skin on Skin’, her solo exhibition at Victoria Miro, Venice.

The show’s title is a reference to the artworks' material (charcoal on vellum (animal skin) which has been stretched over board) and subject matter: Colwell’s own body, first photographed and then abstracted through the mark-marking process to variously resemble marble sculpture, anatomical drawings, retro erotic photography. Imperfect Symmetry is among the most explicit images: full frontal, viewed from below, a perspective that in another context might be considered pornographic. Yet the segmentation of the body, floating within black space, has a clinical rather than alluring effect. Colwell seems to draw our attention to skin itself – a continuous surface that wraps around and contains the body; a barrier as well as an erogenous zone.

Other works take up this playful approach to nudity by drawing on the irresistible draw of sexually explicit material. In Fingers Crossed, the crease of armpit skin purports to be a vagina; in Homemade, the squeezed edge of an elbow takes on the peachy roundness of a bottom being licked; and in Cookie Jar, two fingers plunge suggestively into the fold of skin behind a bent knee. The effect of these works is unsettling. On the one hand, the flawless, childlike aesthetic of the role-playing body parts (small, smooth, unshaven) is a disturbing reminder of the unrealistic imaging of women’s bodies in porn and wider media, even while we are aware that they are not what they appear to be. On the other hand, the soft imperfections of Colwell’s mark-making, the way in which the image seems to baulk at its own hyper-realism as you step towards it, sending out sprinkles of charcoal dust, feels like an invitation to rethink what makes an image erotic – in the true sense of the word, stemming from the Greek for love, passion and life force – rather than sexually explicit or pornographic.

Take, for instance, Praise the Lord, which depicts two feet pressed together in a prayer-like pose above a vagina. Here, Colwell makes the explicit part of the image secondary to the feet not just through the lower positioning of the vagina on the canvas but in the attention paid to the moment of tactile connection, where the two soles come together and arch away, the creases and the curves of the skin, the interplay of shadow and light. What’s ultimately being depicted here is a moment of intimacy with the self and while it has the potential to be erotic or arousing, that part is left to our imagination.

In this work, as in others, the veined surface of the vellum gives the body a mottled appearance, suggestive not only of stone (Colwell began these works during a residency in Venice) but also of transparency, as though revealing the intricate network of blood vessels beneath. The body becomes substance and matter but rather than being objectifying, it is a perspective that allows us to step out of the role of the voyeur and to appreciate the body for its artistic, expressive and sensual possibilities.

Saskia Colwell's solo exhibition, ‘Skin on Skin’, is at Victoria Miro, Venice until 15 March 2025

victoria-miro.comand vortic.art

There is something so elegant about the idea of travelling by train. It conjures visions of a bygone era, Old Hollywood glamour, and luggage in the form of trunks rather than backpacks. When it’s done right – and we are not talking about the daily commute – train travel can be a truly luxurious experience. Trains don’t require the faff that comes with catching a flight. And you don't miss a thing en route. Trains are a means of slow travel, allowing people to enjoy the journey rather than simply get to their destination.

Here, to help you escape in unhurried style and sophistication, we’ve put together our pick of the world’s most luxurious train journeys. So sit back, relax and enjoy the view.

Our pick of the world’s most luxurious train journeys

Andean Explorer, Peru

South America’s first luxury train, the Andean Explorer snakes its way through the stunning landscape of Peru. From the open-air observation car, discover Lake Titicaca and the floating island of Uros. The Andean Explorer’s design steps away from the vintage-style luxury we see with some high-end trains, and instead boasts a more contemporary aesthetic. Local cuisine is on the menu, with Peruvian dishes and Andean ingredients. There are also options for spa trips and excursions.

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Danube Express Golden Eagle, Eastern Europe

Visit the castles of Transylvania or Christmas markets of Austria – the Danube Express Golden Eagle explores the best of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The exclusive train carries just 50 passengers and offers decadent comfort in each carriage. Interiors nod to 1920s glamour, but carriages come with modern technology. Guests can enjoy regional cuisines and sightseeing at every stop.

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Eastern & Oriental Express, Malaysia

The sister train to The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, the Eastern & Oriental Express travels from Singapore into Malaysia. The carriages feature cream and jade-green exteriors, while polished wood-panelled corridors and silk and delicate detailing set an opulent mood inside. There’s a Dior spa on board, the Bar Car serves as an exclusive jazz club, with flowing cocktails and champagne, while the Piano Car offers gentler tunes, a perfect accompaniment to a quiet nightcap.

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The Ghan, Australia

The Ghan offers multiple routes through Australia but is most known for journeying from Darwin to Adelaide. Traversing the heart of the country, the route and its stops offer access to some of the people, places and stories that shape Australia. With elegant suites (the interiors were redesigned by Woods Bagot in 2024) and fine dining, The Ghan ticks all the luxury rail trip boxes. Its ‘off-train’ experiences span from a tranquil cruise down the Katherine River to exploring the desert habitats of Alice Springs.

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The Maharajas’ Express, India

Journeying through North-West and Central India, with a focus on Rajasthan’s rich heritage, The Maharajas Express is one of India’s (and the world’s) finest luxury trains. It features 23 carriages, including two dining cars, a private lounge with a bar called the Rajah Club, and even a souvenir shop.

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Royal Scotsman, Scotland

Scotland has abundant breathtaking scenery, and the Belmond Royal Scotsman is a journey that balances enchantment and tradition. This luxury train took its first journey in 1985 and was originally composed of sleeping cars and three dining carriages. Now, this has expanded (and includes a Dior spa car) but still exudes an Edwardian country house feel thanks to the warm interiors. The routes around Scotland include scope for everything from whisky tasting to wild swimming and visiting historic castles.

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Rovos Pride of Africa

Rovos Pride of Africa has multiple trains and routes across the continent, taking in Botswana, Zambia, Eswatini, Tanzania and Mozambique among other countries. The style of the carriages has an earthy, African safari feel, with traditional luxury (we are talking about soaking in a full-size bathtub on board). On the journey from Pretoria to Durban, as an example, take in sweeping views of the savannah, and learn about the cultural history and influence of the Zulu people.

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Seven Stars Kyushu

Old-world glamour takes on a new interpretation aboard the Seven Stars Kyushu, a luxurious sleeper train that travels across Japan’s third-largest island, making stops at Fukuoka, Oita, Miyazaki, Kagoshima, and Kumamoto. Seats on this train are highly sought after, requiring prospective guests to enter a lottery to secure a reservation. The train showcases the finest of Japanese artistry and craftsmanship across its suites and lounges, while its Jupiter Dining Car offers seasonal ingredients from the countryside and seas of Kyushu.

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The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, Europe

The Orient Express began its service in 1883, famously departing from Paris and journeying across Europe before arriving in Istanbul. With the original train no longer in service, Belmond’s Venice Simplon-Orient-Express (whose JR-designed suite won a Wallpaper* Design Award 2025) carries through the legacy honourably, travelling between Paris and Venice or Verona, as well as Prague, Budapest and Vienna. The journey remains the pinnacle of luxury and elegance, with a touch of sultry mystery. In 2026, the company will refurbish 17 original Orient Express cars, dating back to the 1920s and 1930s.

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It’s not exactly easy to pinpoint where the Wallpaper* editors will be. From design festivals to fashion weeks and OOO adventures, there’s always something exciting on our team’s calendars. Keep reading to find out where the magazine’s staff members will be heading in the new year.

Wallpaper* editors’ 2025 getaway plans

LA: Charlotte Gunn, Director of Digital Content

‘I will look forward to my annual trip to Los Angeles to visit friends and family. I spend the year diligently plotting all the new openings I want to try on a Google Map so I am fully prepped by the time we arrive. I’m already itching to try Camelia, a French fusion restaurant which opened in Echo Park at the end of the summer. I’m also keen to see how the development of Melrose Hill has progressed since my last visit – a couple of notable galleries had moved into the area and there was a pledge to redevelop a disused retail block with new independent shops and restaurants. To get me through the long British winter, I shall be dreaming of fresh seafood at sundown from The Jolly Oyster on Ventura beach.’

Venice & Helsinki: Ellie Stathaki, Architecture & Environment Director

‘The Venice Architecture Biennale always causes a stir of excitement at the architecture desk, so my biannual visit to the Italian city in May for the vernissage is at the top of my list for 2025. I am also dreaming of a winter trip to Helsinki. I’ve always felt there’s lots to see and enjoy in the Nordic capital, and I have only scratched the surface. I have only ever been for work, so going on a long weekend in a private capacity is also on my list. The reopening of Alvar Aalto’s Finlandia Hall in January just adds to the reasons why.’

Switzerland & Budapest: Hannah Tindle, Beauty & Grooming Editor

‘I’m hoping to travel to Clinique La Prairie in Switzerland in 2025, a spa and clinic that has been running since 1931. (Previous devotees to its ‘CLP method’ include Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo). I also want to visit the Omorovicza spa in Budapest, another institution with a storied past, built on the Rác Thermal Bath, which dates back to the 16th century.’

Naoshima: Jason Hughes, Creative Director

‘In 2025, I’m heading back to Japan, more specifically to visit the islands of Naoshima and Teshima, which sit in the Seto Inland Sea and are easily accessible by ferry from Osaka. Famous for their art and architecture, I look forward to exploring both islands on a bicycle and seeing the works of artists Yayoi Kusama, James Turrell, Walter De Maria and Lee Ufan. I’m planning to stay at Benesse House, a museum and hotel concept, designed by renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando.’

Australia, Uzbekistan and beyond: Lauren Ho, Travel Director

‘As I live my life constantly on the road, it’s important for me to plan my trips so that I make the most of each region or destination I am in. For 2025, I will be ringing in the new year in Sydney, followed by a few weeks of checking out new hotels in Australia. In late January, I will be heading to Beijing to see the newly opened Mandarin Oriental Qianmen, the group’s newest property, which unfolds within a 600-year-old hutong complex. This will be followed by a trip to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, which I am particularly excited about, and then, I will make my way to Europe, where I plan to explore Greece’s new hotel openings, and will head from Lisbon to the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe. While luxury hotels are my passion, at least once a year I like to visit a random destination I have never been to and that most people might not have access to. Finally, by June, I hope to make my annual pilgrimage to Africa to get my safari fix.’

Malaysia: Melina Keays, Entertaining Director

‘In February, I am travelling to The Datai beach resort in Langkawi - one of my favourite destinations in the world. Langkawi is the largest of a cluster of islands off the coast of northwestern Malaysia, separated from the mainland by the Strait of Malacca. I’ve been visiting this wonderful place for decades, and it never loses its allure. Langkawi is a proper tropical paradise; awarded Geopark status by UNESCO, it offers lush rainforests, stunning mountain ranges and white sand beaches.

There are fantastic things to see and do all over the island, which is rich in history and culture, but I could easily spend all my time at The Datai resort itself. It was designed by visionary architect Kerry Hill, who was determined to honour its environment, and set high over Datai Bay. The hotel is melded into its jungle setting, and its beautiful rooms and spaces float amidst the rainforest canopy, with breathtaking views of the Andaman Sea. The food at the Datai is superb, and I am particularly looking forward to the delicious Malaysian cuisine at The Gulai House, which is to be found at the end of a candle-lit jungle trail.’

Geneva: Tianna Williams, Editorial Executive

‘For the first week of spring, I will be heading to Geneva, Switzerland, to reunite with my cousin and sister. The location of this annual reunion varies from year to year, from the rolling hills of Shropshire, the coastline of the Gower Peninsula to London’s Hyde Park. I am excited to trade the London smog for crisp Mont Blanc mountain air, warm up with soothing mugs of hot chocolate, and, if feeling brave, take a plunge in Lake Geneva.’

Madrid, Rome, Paris: Sofia de la Cruz, Travel Editor

‘I tend to be quite spontaneous with the locations I travel to, often booking trips or accepting invitations at the last minute. That said, I will begin the new year in Madrid, and a few weeks later, I have a trip planned to Rome to explore the upcoming Hotel Romeo Roma, one of Zaha Hadid’s final projects before she died in 2016. I also have a weekend in Paris scheduled, which is something I make a point to do every year. As for the rest of the year, I hope to fulfil my lifelong dream of visiting Japan.’

Shanghai: Smilian Cibic, Editorial Assistant

‘I’m travelling to Shanghai to visit my dad, who has been working there for the past five years. I’m looking forward to seeing what he’s been up to. He’s designed his own micro home apartment, which has had quite a stir in the Chinese press. We will then travel together to Jingdezhen, the porcelain capital of China and then Shenzhen, the tech capital of the world.’

For more Travel content, visit Wallpaper*’s dedicated channel

Artist, poet, novelist, playwright, film-maker – Jean Cocteau was all of them and more. Perhaps, though, it was the poet’s dreamy nature that defined him, his unbounded approach to art forever propelling Cocteau towards the fringes of the modernist movement. Yet, he was at the heart of it, and it was Cocteau who invited Picasso to create the sets and costumes for his ballet, Parade, created with Erik Satie for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes in 1917.

‘Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge’

This staging of Italy’s most extensive retrospective of Cocteau, ‘Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge’, a carnival of 150 works, including drawings, posters, an incredible array of jewellery, tapestries and film excerpts, is a tender dedication. For it was with a collection of Cocteau’s drawings and furniture designs that Peggy Guggenheim launched her inaugural exhibition and career as a gallerist, at Guggenheim Jeune, London, in 1938.

The show caused an uproar with British customs because, as Guggenheim later recounted, ‘One [of the works was] an allegorical subject called La peur donnant ailes au Courage, which included a portrait of the actor Jean Marais. He and two decadent-looking figures appeared with pubic hairs.' Painted by Cocteau on a cotton sheet, this erotic tableau – Marais had become his lover the year before – is a star exhibit in an entire gallery of them.

The galleries are carefully defined, all the better to comprehend the scintillating scope of Cocteau's artistic output. As such, the order offers fresh insight. The collection of Cocteau's authored books, for instance, shines a light on lesser-known titles The Infernal Machine, The Difficulty of Being, and Profil-Opium. It also allows an overview of his book, magazine and poster design, and Cocteau's incisive approach to each medium

Then there's the jewellery design, which occupies the entire Gallery 10, and where we see Cocteau's recurring classical motifs rendered in gold, enamel and precious stones. A plastic, metal and faux pearl 'eye' brooch designed for Schiaparelli, however, is a highlight.

The exhibition also allows a rare opportunity to see the exquisite gold, silver and gem-set sword the Maisons-Laffitte-born artist designed for Cartier. Cocteau, whose film-making career flourished later in life, was invited to design the ‘Academician Sword for Jean Cocteau’ with its divine lyre, star and Orpheus outline, in 1955, when he was afforded membership to the Académie Française.

While this show is a passionately assembled love letter to a 20th-century cultural great, the clumsy ‘juggler’ label doesn’t do much to dispel the myth of the artist as the handyman creative. Nor does the exhibition organiser Kenneth E Silver’s argument for Cocteau as ‘a model for the kind of wide-ranging cultural fluidity we now expect of contemporary artists’ convince, considering Picasso, a close friend of Cocteau, also designed ceramics and jewellery.

So, let’s leave the last word to WH Auden: ‘The lasting feeling that his work leaves is one of happiness; not, of course, in the sense that it excludes suffering, but because, in it, nothing is rejected, resented, or regretted. Happiness is a surer sign of wisdom than we are apt to think, and perhaps Cocteau has more of it than some others.’

‘Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge’ is at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice until 16 September 2024

Guggenheim-venice.it

The 3rd edition of Homo Faber opened its gates at the weekend for the month of September 2024, taking over the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on San Maggiore. Across 11 spaces, visitors are introduced to ‘The Journey of Life’ where more than 800 crafted objects by around 400 individuals or studios from 75 countries around the world are on display. Beyond curation, creative direction was always going to be a vital part of bringing the experience alive in a coherent and compelling way. Hats off to the Michelangelo Foundation for selecting director Luca Guadagnino and architect Nicolò Rosmarini to oversee proceedings. Away from the late-summer, humid funk of the lagoon, Wallpaper* sat down with the two men to hear more.

Luca Guadagnino and Nicolò Rosmarin, the creative minds behind the 3rd Homo Faber biennale

Wallpaper*: Congratulations, first and foremost. It’s no easy task to bring such a wealth of different objects together and not make it feel like a jumble sale. How did you begin to draw a thread through the curation to tie everything together?

Nicolo Rosmarini: Hanneli Rupert brought the idea to us of ‘The Journey of Life’, and discussing this with her, it became apparent fairly quickly that we could divide the stages of life into themes for the different rooms that make sense for grouping objects with shared functions or materials together. Our challenge was to make the different spaces relate to the theme and the works, and the interiors together.

W*: Presumably you developed a concept before knowing what the works would be?

Luca Guadagnino: We started to design an idea that became a framework both for object curation and artistic direction. So with childhood, we would show toys and objects related to children in a soft environment that might feel like a playroom. For celebration, we would show objects for the table in a spectacular installation where the table anchors the space and elevates the objects too.

W*: Craft is by definition a broad and unwieldy subject – what have you learnt about craft through this process?

LG: One moment that will stay with me, was when we went to Paris to visit a jewellery house. There, they showed us how they create the jewellery they make. It is so detailed, so precise yet also so ephemeral. I found it very moving to witness the dedication. The art of making manually is something extraordinary. There is great beauty and richness embedded in the practice of craft, but it’s not only the act of manipulating precious materials. There is much to be learnt about life from seeing how things are made, by whom, where and why.

W*: I agree. There was a different energy in the areas of the rooms in the exhibition where the artisans were doing live demonstrations. Suddenly you see far beyond the object to understand embedded knowledge and humanity.

LG: This is why we wanted to design the tables on which the craftspeople are working for the show, so they feel integrated and embedded in the experience. For us it was a beautiful way to make love to one another: the artisans and the craft, the exhibition and the experience.

W*: For me this was one of the more successful interventions, helping bring the craft experience, not just the objects to life. Yet it also made me crave to see and learn more about the hundreds of works that didn’t have their artisans with them. Each piece is a human story of knowledge, time, material and place. What do you think people will take away from the exhibition as a learning about craft?

LG: As you say, craftsmanship deals with the need of form and expression (and sometimes function) through a material. It is such a human practice and so linked to humanity. From building your first sandcastle to becoming a jeweller in a Parisian maison, we harness the profound powers of action through materials, from fantasy to function, via time and skill. For me, the absence of the artist keeps the focus on the presence of the craft itself. The exhibition allows us to understand the depth of what craft means.

W*: There’s a school of thought that claims craft is nostalgic. What do you say to this?

LG: I think this is salacious. Just because craft deals in places with traditions does not make it nostalgic. Many objects in the exhibition demonstrate how alive craft is to new ideas, expressions and tools. I think of the Nature room where there is a table of basketry from Ghana, Japan and China among other countries – these forms are not classic at all. The skill and material might be classic, but the expression is definitely forward-looking.

NR: This is why we love the giant 3D-printed ribbon at the start of the exhibition in the Birth courtyard.

W*: It is a memorable start to the show. What will happen to this at the end of September when the show is finished?

LG: It will stay in your memory forever.

W*: Nicolo, how does craft inform your architecture practice?

NR: In several ways. I get close to craft working with materials of course, but also in thinking about details and how they come to life in spaces and buildings. Craft raises the quality of architecture, and it also helps people to connect to buildings and environments.

W*: What is one thing that has surprised you in the show?

NR: One of my favourite experiences is seeing the different techniques used in the Goose Game tapestries that line the Birth courtyard. Each artisan was given a design by Nigel Peake, who was responsible for the graphic identity and also for the basic design of the Goose Game tapestries, which were then sent to artisans all over the world to complete as they wished. Here you see different techniques to get to the same goal; different skills, materials, details and feelings. Despite tight parameters, they reveal the power of craft for individual expression. I also love our 13-metre papier maché trees that line the stairway up to the Celebration room.

W* They are fun. In fact what I enjoyed most in your design intervention is the lightness and whimsy you brought to the intensity of the scale show. Whether through colours, mirrors, fabric, rugs – your language lifted the atmosphere and stopped things becoming too earnest.

LG: We talked about the architecture of the Cini and how to frame each room respectfully but also to make them feel different; how to honour the architecture without hiding it was our challenge, and we looked to Carlo Scarpa’s exhibition in the 1950s of Antonella da Messina in Sicily, where he wrapped fabric around the rooms. This has a strengthening, rather than diminishing effect. We wanted to empower the objects and spaces through colour and light. Every room has daylight, apart from the Cini pool (Dreams room), and in most rooms we have incorporated mirrors to reflect and enliven the natural light.

W*: In the Dialogues room, where you have coated the interior architectural elements in gold leaf, I greatly enjoyed that you had even coated a cable cover in gold leaf on the floor.

LG: I’m so glad you noticed this. We love details!

W*: Luca, we are increasingly getting to know you as an interior designer these days. What are you learning about life through interior design?

LG: My experience of the past eight years in interiors has taught me about the personality of architects and architecture, and how space expresses itself to come alive. My goal in time is to find the essence of things and make places that are empowered by few strong ideas and elements, not disguised by too much.

W*: Design is often described as an editing process.

LG: I’m interested in minimalism through my lens. I am inspired by the great musician John Adams who created an incredible wall of sound – you feel the magnificence in such a powerful way. Here is a great minimalist at play, and I wonder how I might approach minimalism in my work? For me it’s about striving for the essence of form, light and colour to build an experience.

W*: Is there still room for playfulness?

LG: I like playfulness. You should not take yourself too seriously or you risk becoming boring.

Homo Faber's 'The Journey of Life' runs from 1 – 30 September 2024 at Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini homofaber.com

Following a four-year hiatus brought about by a combination of Covid-19 and an operations reset, the Eastern & Oriental Express, A Belmond Train was back on the tracks in February 2024, gently wending its way once again between Singapore and the dappled green interiors of Malaysia and Thailand.

Dior Spa on the Eastern & Oriental Express, A Belmond Train

Featuring 16 art deco-inspired carriages, eight of which are sleeper cars, the train’s offerings have been gently tweaked on at least two fronts. The first is the tapping of chef Andre Chiang, who’s taken to his new role as a culinary curator with gusto, serving up laksa bouillabaisse and spiced cacao ganache. The second is the transformation of the saloon car into the Dior Spa, which follows the French marque’s temporary residency on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, and its first permanent residence on another sister train, Royal Scotsman, in 2023.

The partnership is something of a no-brainer, with both Belmond and Dior betting that the union of two premier luxury brands will provide a very natural counterpoint to the train’s unapologetically romantic trail through the rarely travelled hinterland of the Malaysian Peninsula. Located between the Piano Bar and the restaurants at the front of the train, the spa is a delight; Belmond’s design team dressed the relaxation salon and twin treatment rooms with dark-stained tropical timber, and green and beige carpets embedded with rose emblems, alongside Dior’s signature cane work and swathes of Toile de Jouy print.

For indecisive passengers, the spa menu consists of five treatments, each blending traditional Asian techniques with Dior’s Prestige skincare line and Professional products. If the Kobi-Dior Facial Treatment, which incorporates Japanese Kobido massage techniques, doesn’t please, then perhaps the D-Jungle, a deeply relaxing head-to-toe stretch and facial, just might do the trick.

belmond.com

‘Personal Structures’ is on a bold mission. Embracing the theme ‘Beyond Boundaries’ for its seventh edition, and adopting a fluid curatorial approach, this biennial exhibition of contemporary art aims to foster diverse perspectives and contradictions, serving as a lens to contemplate the intricate narratives within our global community.

Staged at the historic Venetian palazzos Bembo and Mora, within the gorgeous Marinaressa Gardens, and running alongside but independent of the Venice Biennale 2024, ‘Personal Structures 2024’ showcases the work of more than 200 contributors, selected from 51 countries: included are artists at various career stages – from painters and sculptors to multimedia artists, photographers and performers – alongside art and academic institutions and galleries. Collectively they reveal a rich tapestry of perspectives on the pressing challenges of our time – from culture and gender identity to politics, existence and climate urgency.

‘Personal Structures’ was founded in 2002 by the artist René Rietmeyer as an independent project – an open platform of sorts for artists to exhibit and publish their work and thoughts. It started life initially as a reaction to non-subjective art, arguing instead that all artworks are made intrinsically with a part of the artist’s consciousness, and are thus personal. And it is this belief that remains pivotal to the organisation and all its exhibitions.

Critically, ‘Personal Structures’ gives a voice to the voiceless, underrepresented communities often overlooked by the Venice Biennale. And it refrains from being too didactic, allowing individual artistic circles curational autonomy to speak more fluidly individually, as a group and in response to Venice and its history.

We caught up with Sara Danieli, head of art at European Cultural Centre, the organisation that runs the exhibition, to gain more insight into ‘Personal Structures’.

‘Personal Structures’: art as dialogue, exchange and freedom

Wallpaper*: Art can be a powerful tool for storytelling, yet often the tendency with group shows is to be too didactic. How do you balance a vast exhibition like ‘Personal Structures’ to allow the artist to speak freely and, in the process, initiate unexpected narrative layers?

Sara Danieli: An appropriate context is necessary to trigger a better conversation, yet the dialogue needs to be as authentic and as sincere as possible to avoid becoming a dialogue for its own sake. It’s important that our artists have as much freedom as possible in expressing what’s most urgent for them, as a response to contemporary society, as well as reflecting on the human condition.

W*: Would you say this is fundamental to the ‘Personal Structures’ project?

SD: Yes, our main concept is to consider each artwork within the artist’s experience, influenced by the time and space in which they live and work. Our title ‘Personal Structures’ was chosen in response to the 1966 exhibition ‘Primary Structures’ by minimalist artists such as Donald Judd and Carl Andre, who claimed to create non-subjective art, art without the ‘touch’ of the artist – the non-personal.

We believe even the most minimalist works are subjective, personal, the result of the artist’s own conditions and circumstances. We conceive the ‘Personal Structures’ exhibition as a platform that values the diversity of artistic approaches and expressions, with the intention of documenting plurality.

W*: So, you’re saying a plurality of narratives comes naturally when you don’t dictate what is exhibited, nor the curational path. How involved are you in the artist selection and curational process?

SD: The exhibition organisation spans two years, during which conversations with artists commence at the planning phase and we continue to guide them through the entire process. The choice of space is also made with the artist, sometimes based on the project or their attraction to a specific location. Some artworks are exhibited alongside the work of other artists, and based on the nature, technical, formal, and conceptual needs of the artwork, we create a dialogue with the space and other projects.

W*: You deliberately moved away from the Venice Biennale a while ago. Do you feel the independence allows you to approach such a group exhibition with a much more open mind?

SD: Not being part of a governmental institution allows for choices that are not strictly political, thus moving away from such boundaries. This doesn’t mean that we don’t make choices, but there is certainly more freedom.

W*: There are plenty of powerful, moving exhibits throughout the show. Can you name a few that particularly speak to you and the overarching theme ‘Beyond Boundaries’?

SD: It’s been important to present the project by the Palestine Museum US, directed by Faisal Saleh. Particularly moving is presenting the drawings of the artist Maisara Baroud, who is currently in Gaza. He sent scans of his work from his phone, and we printed them on translucent material, hanging them in front of the window like a wall through which light passes as a way of symbolising hope.

Another significant project is ‘Roma Lepanto’, since it presents art as a catalyst for change, advocating for a permanent home for Roma art at the Venice Biennale, a demand that is still unmet. Artists of Romany background from across Europe emerge from invisibility, are given a platform to address the long history of Roma slavery and to confront the feelings of inferiority resulting from silenced history. By offering new perspectives on European events, Roma artists reclaim control of their narrative and present a self-image that showcases their talent, ideas, and positive contributions to society.

W*: What else can you highlight from the show?

SD: The group exhibition ‘Unapologetic WomXn’, which presents the work of 31 female artists exploring female sexuality through their own perspectives. Creating a safe community space, the exhibition humanises the subjects the artists focus on – their bodies, experiences, and how women navigate a constantly changing world – emphasising the importance of art and artists breaking free from societal constraints.

Another is a project presented by Faiza Butt, an artist with Pakistani roots and living in London, which draws from the Menagerie tradition of the Dutch Golden Age to depict contemporary society and its contradictions, stemming from her exploration of both private and public spheres. While Butt’s work portrays beautiful landscapes and animals, as well as her children, it is imbued with disturbing elements characteristic of contemporary society and the tragedies we face – war, hyper-consumerism and environmental pollution.

W*: What do you ultimately hope viewers and visitors will take from the exhibition?

SD: We hope audiences will take away a renewed sense of possibility and empowerment. By reflecting on the theme of ‘Beyond Boundaries’, we aim to inspire individuals to recognise their capacity to overcome challenges and limitations, both personally and collectively.

Through the diverse perspectives and contradictions presented in the exhibition, we encourage viewers to embrace complexity, question preconceptions, and foster a deeper understanding of the human condition and society as a whole.

‘Personal Structures: Beyond Boundaries’ is at Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora, and Marinaressa Gardens in Venice until 24 November 2024, personalstructures.com

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 is open; the festival's official launch to the public marks the culmination of months of excitement in the industry's global circles. This year's appointed curator, architect Carlo Ratti, and the team behind the world's largest architecture festival have been working non-stop towards this moment, having allowed only hints till now as to what to expect.

'The role of the biennale is to look at different challenges. Lesley's was a very important one,' said Ratti at the first global press conference around the event, acknowledging the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale's influential theme by 2024 RIBA Gold Medal winner Lesley Lokko – and hinting at the future and the next steps in the grand exhibition's global explorations.

Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 overall theme: ‘Intelligens’

La Biennale di Venezia 2025 focuses on the topic of 'Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective.' Ratti said of his theme: 'The title of the International Architecture Exhibition is usually announced both in English and in Italian. In 2025, it will be condensed into a single word for both languages via the common Latin precedent: intelligens. The title “Intelligens” is linked to the modern term “intelligence”, but it also evokes a wider set of associated meanings. In fact, the final syllable “gens” is Latin for “people”. A new, fictional root emerges, suggesting a future of intelligence that is inclusive, multiple, and imaginative beyond today’s limiting focus on AI.'

Exploring his topic through four sections, Ratti looks at four respective sub-themes: Transdisciplinarity, Living Lab, Space For Ideas, and Circularity Protocol. They are the key pillars in the way the main show is conceived. Speaking to us in an interview earlier in the year, he revealed that the natural world, its wisdom and engineering are key influences in his work - and bridging natural and artificial is an important element that is missing in architecture today. 'People talk a lot about biomimicry, which is when you're copying nature, but here, it's more than copying nature per se. It is about copying the logic of nature,' he said.

Collaboration across disciplines and fields of human knowledge is also highly important and an area Ratti has tapped into in his show. He explained: 'I think we need to work more collaboratively. I always try to have teams of different disciplines working together. I call this approach the 'choral' architect.'

Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: main show

'We would like the biennale to be a dynamic lab,' said Ratti at the biennale press conference, outlining his key goals, themes and participants of the main show. Bringing together diverse teams and pairing seemingly disparate disciplines help inspire unexpected and useful results, according to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 curator. 'Adaptation depends on inclusivity and collaboration and this is what I am experimenting with here,' he continued.

Case studies exhibited and project teams span the globe - even reaching one examining outer space. Climate change and sustainable architecture action will feature prominently in the various narrative threads. AI also makes an appearance, as part of the main show is a dialogue between creatives and artificial intelligence. The show is packed with displays - almost too many to navigate in one go, so a second visit might be in order. There is a whopping 750 participants and over 300 projects in the Arsenale’s vast halls, spilling out to its surrounding grounds and gardens. The Giardini’s Central Pavilion, which, until now, also played host to a good part of the main show, is closed this year for restoration.

Circularity and openness

Last year, Ratti also launched a circular economy manifesto for this Venice Architecture Biennale - inviting participants to tackle core challenges in exhibition design, in order to produce a truly circular festival. This goal is outlined in the manifesto, which was developed with guidance from Arup and input from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The team wrote at the time: 'Our goal is to demonstrate that architecture and the built environment can coexist harmoniously with our planet, by eliminating waste, circulating materials and regenerating natural systems. We commit to creating pavilions and spaces that are not just temporary showcases but offer examples of bold circular thinking and create lasting legacies.'

With all this in mind, the curator put an open call for proposals, for the first time ever in the festival's long history, 'no matter how audacious,' from both architects and non-architects. In fact, trans-disciplinarity seems to be the name of the game, with Ratti inviting the global community of practitioners, scientists, scholars, activists, and others to help him create a diverse, creative biennale. 'It was both thrilling and daunting. We got flooded with thousands of emails but at the same time, we were able to find voices in parts of the planet who we would have never discovered without this open call,' Ratti says.

Main show participants: Arsenale and beyond

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 showcases contributions that cast a net far and wide. There are architects and engineers, mathematicians and climate scientists, philosophers and artists, chefs and coders, writers and woodcarvers, farmers and fashion designers, and many more.

The exhibitors include names such as Lina Ghotmeh Architecture, Liam Young, Tosin Oshinowo, Bjarke Ingels Group, Winy Maas, Aaron Betsky, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, MAD Architects, Philip Youan, Foster + Partners (who collaborated with Porsche), Boonserm Premthada, Olalekan Jeyifous, Matteo Thun & Partners, Alejandro Aravena, EcoLogicStudio, Counterspace/Sumayya Vally, Studio Zhu Pei, Marina Tabassum Architects, Architectural Association/Ingrid Schroeder, 3XN GXN and CITA, Material Cultures, Studio Gang, Transsolar, Patricia Urquiola, and Mass Design Group.

Occupying sites outside the traditional grounds, the show aims to engage creatively with the entire city. 'With the venue of the Central Pavilion under renovation in 2025, Venice will not just host the Biennale Architettura—it will become a living laboratory. The city itself – one of the most imperilled on Earth in the face of a changing climate—will serve as the backdrop for a new kind of Exhibition, where installations, prototypes, and experiments are scattered across the Giardini, the Arsenale and other neighbourhoods,' Ratti explains.

Special Projects at the Biennale

Two main special projects accompany the main show and national participations. One is titled Margherissima and is exhibited inside the Austrian armoury (Polveriera austriaca), Forte Marghera in Mestre. It is a scheme focusing on its wider area and contributors include The Architectural Association (AA) and Nigel Coates, along with Michael Kevern, Guan Lee, John Maybury and Jan Bunge. The collaborative project, which was realised by AA students, imagines the transformation of this part of Venice's industrial hinterland into a city of the future, taking into account concerns around sustainability. It is set to be presented through a walk-through model. 'Could Marghera be a beacon for cities around the world, especially those in danger of being consumed by their own success?' asks Coates.

The second is the Biennale's ninth collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on the Applied Arts Pavilion Special Project. This year it will be titled 'On Storage' - hinting at the opening of the V&A East Storehouse, which opens in London later this month. Curated by Brendan Cormier in collaboration with Diller, Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), it explores the global architecture of storage.

Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement

This year, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement was jointly awarded to Italian architect Italo Rota (who recently died, on 6 April 2024) and American philosopher Donna Haraway. An honour awarded upon the recommendation of curator Carlo Ratti, the accolade was given to its recipients this year for their forward thinking and influence - in their field and beyond. Haraway was described by Ratti as a seminal voice 'in contemporary thought, straddling the social sciences, anthropology, feminist criticism, and the philosophy of technology,' while Rota 'a man of boundless culture, a passionate collector and researcher of both Wunderkammer objects and technological devices, and a generous teacher.'

Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: National Participations

Situated at their namesake pavilion across the Giardini park, as well as the Arsenale and further, selected sites across Venice, the national participations for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 are as rich and far-reaching as ever.

Announced on the opening day, the Golden Lion for Best National Participation went to the Kingdom of Bahrain and its exhibit, 'Heatwave', which clearly and concisely explored notions of climate change and local tradition in a display that was inviting, accessible and thoughtful. The Holy See pavilion 'Opera aperta' and the 2025 British pavilion 'GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair' received a special mention each. Meanwhile, more awards announced on the day included a Golden Lion for Participation to the 'Canal Café' by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Natural Systems Utilities, SODAI, Aaron Betsky and Davide Oldani; a Silver Lion for a promising participation 'Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500' by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler; and two special mentions to 'Alternative Urbanism: The Self-Organized Markets of Lagos' by Tosin Oshinowo, Oshinowo Studio, and 'Elephant Chapel' by Boonserm Premthada.

First-time exhibitors include the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Sultanate of Oman, Qatar, and Togo. Scroll down for more.

Bahrain pavilion

Winning the top gong for this year's best national contribution, the Bahrain pavilion focuses on climate change and a dialogue of old and new, the natural and the artificial - very much on the overall biennale theme. The festival's jury highlighted the country's participation in their citation: 'Golden Lion for best National Participation to the Kingdom of Bahrain: The Pavilion offers viable proposal for extreme heat conditions. As the designers explain, “Architecture must address the dual challenges of environmental resilience and sustainability. The ingenious solution can be deployed in public spaces and in locations where people must live and work outdoors in conditions of extreme heat. The pavilion uses traditional methods of passive cooling typical of the region and reminiscence of wind towers and shaded courtyards.' The pavilion was curated and designed by Andrea Faraguna, with engineering contributions by Mario Monotti and Alexander Puzrin.

Belgian Pavilion

Titled 'Building Biospheres', this year's Belgian contribution is curated by he team of Bas Smets and Stefano Mancuso. Commissioned by the Flanders Architecture Institute, the display is set to focus on the natural world and what it can offer us through its 'plant intelligence.' 'For too long, landscape has served as a backdrop for architecture. If we are to build a future that is truly sustainable, then natural intelligence must become the agent, shaping the way we live together. We must design with our biosphere, not against it, says Dennis Pohl, director of the institute.

Brazilian Pavilion

With their pavilion titled (RE)INVENTION, the Brazilians are zooming in on the communities and populations of the Amazon. Curated by the architects Luciana Saboia, Matheus Seco, and Eder Alencar, of the Plano Coletivo group, the exhibit looks at ancestral infrastructure in the region. 'Today, we know that the ancestral peoples of the Amazon were organized in much larger populations than previously thought. The region’s forests are largely the direct result of human action, the fruit of a balanced occupation and careful management of the vegetation, in contrast to the model that prevails in the Amazon today, which often reduces the landscape to a scenario of devastation.' says Seco.

Canada Pavilion

Canada is orchestrating a living installation, focusing on carbon-capturing cyanobacteria, 3D printed especially for the show. Working with the labs of ETH Zurich, the organisers aim to produce large scale, architecture pieces which will naturally evolve, grow and decay. The display, created by a group of artists and researchers is indeed a world premiere of an innovative type of technology developed by the Living Room Collective.

Danish Pavilion

Curated by architect Søren Pihlmann, the Danish pavilion addresses its offering as a construction site. Collaborating with experts from the Royal Danish Academy, the University of Copenhagen, the Technical University of Denmark, and ETH Zurich, the architect intends to create 1:1 builds discussing and displaying hyper local construction methods and materials. 'We've already created everything we need. That's why we must be better at understanding and finding value in what already exists,' he says.

Austrian Pavilion

Set in the green environs of the Giardini, the Austrian Pavilion this year is titled AGENCY FOR BETTER LIVING and it is looked after this year by a trio of curators: Sabine Pollak, Michael Obrist, and Lorenzo Romito. The display looks at the cities of Vienna and Rome as case studies, comparing them and discussing finds in terms of their social housing models - from official strategies to informal activist approaches. The idea is to share knowledge so everyone can benefit.

Japanese Pavilion

Curated by Jun Aoki, the Japanese Pavilion exhibition this year centres on the old Japanese language, this is expressed as ma, or the 'In-Between,' as the show is titled. The premise looks at humans in relation to the environment, rethinking it - instead of an us-and-it mentality of juxtaposition, to embracing a co-existence and interweaving which means a third realm emerges, where humans and nature form a single ecosystem. The organisers explain: 'This project takes the Japan Pavilion as the experimental grounds for pursuing this new kind of intelligence. The elements that make up the pavilion––the Hole, Wall Columns, Outer Walls, Brick Terrace, Pensilina, Tilted Loop Path, and Yew Tree–– with the human team of curators and two artist-architect pairs, engage in a dialogue, both fictionally and actually. Together, we imagine a future of the Japan Pavilion–– a near future, where things are just a little different.'

Kosovo Pavilion

The Republic of Kosovo is launching a display curated by architect Erzë Dinarama. Titled 'Lulebora nuk çel më. Emerging Assemblages', the show 'materializes these ecological tensions through sensory-material elements that resist capture by predictive models: the soils and smells of this uncertain landscape,' the team explains.

Oman Pavilion

Floral patterns and motifs provide inspiration for the inaugural Omani Pavilion. The country's very first official presence at the biennale is curated by Omani architect Majeda Alhinai. The exhibit will aim to weave age-old craft traditions with modernity. Alhinai says: 'As an architect and curator, I believe meaningful architectural solutions emerge when we truly understand the deep connections between place, people, and collective memory. Traces highlights the importance of social cohesion, dialogue, and communal spaces in shaping the built environment. Architecture is not just about structure, but about creating spaces that foster connection and shared experience. I wanted to create a space that could be redefined and reshaped over time, much like the conversations, meetings, and encounters that naturally unfold within a traditional Sablah.'

Dutch Pavilion

'How can architecture resist exclusionary social norms to create spaces that nurture different ways of coexisting in everyday life?' ask the Dutch. Their answer is SIDELINED, curated by Amanda Pinatih, Curator of Design & Contemporary Art at the Stedelijk Museum, and social designer Gabriel Fontana. The pavilion proposes an alternative sports bar that continues Fontana’s 'investigation of social dynamics through the lens of sport.'

Irish Pavilion

Appointing Cotter & Naessens Architects as the curators of the Irish Pavilion, the country presents in its 2025 showcase a an interdisciplinary collaboration between the architecture team, sound artist David Stalling, poet Michelle Delea, and curator Luke Naessens. The resulting multisensory installation was inspired 'by the innovative political model of the Citizens’ Assembly, introduced by the Irish government in 2016,' the team writes.

Luxembourg Pavilion

Luxembourg's Sonic Investigation aims to shift the focus from the visual to the aural. The pavilion nods to John Cage’s silent song 4’33’’ and is curated by a team composed by Valentin Bansac, Mike Fritsch and Alice Loumeau, who together celebrate through their displays the multisensorial aspects of architecture.

Finnish Pavilion

Curators Ella Kaira and Matti Jänkälä have joined forces to curate the Finnish pavilion. The space, in a building by modernist architecture master Alvar Aalto and Elissa Aalto, celebrates the Architecture of Stewardship - all the different workers and collaborators that are involved in making a building happen. 'From design contributions by architectural workers and engineers to the efforts of construction workers, restoration architects, maintenance staff and cleaners,' they all play a vital role in the life of a building, the team says.

Qatar Pavilion

While traditionally Qatar has not had a dedicated space in the Giardini, this year the country has announced its plans to build one on-site. Its display in the 2025 festival is a two-pronged action offering a taste of what's to come and set on two different sites - one of which is the grounds of where the future pavilion will lie. The site will be 'activated' with an installation, Community Centre, by Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari and offers a look into her humanitarian models through a temporary, immersive bamboo structure. Meanwhile, titled Beyti Beytak. My Home is Your Home. La mia casa è la tua casa a second exhibition at ACP-Palazzo Franchetti, focuses on notions of hospitality in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia regions and how this is reflected in traditional and contemporary architecture through the work of some 30 studios. Meanwhile, architect Lina Ghotmeh has been revealed as the architect to design the permanent pavilion within the Giardini in the future.

Saudi Arabia Pavilion

For its fourth-ever participation at the biennale of architecture, Saudi Arabia presents work by Riyadh-based practice Syn Architects, led by Sara Alissa and Nojoud Alsudairi. Reflecting contemporary practice in the country, the installation will be titled The Um Slaim School: An Architecture of Connection, and is curated by Beatrice Leanza, assisted by Sara Almutlaq.

Swiss Pavilion

Co-curators Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel and Myriam Uzor of collaborative group Annex ask for their 2025 contribution: 'What if Lisbeth Sachs had designed the Swiss Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale di Venezia instead of Bruno Giacometti?' The display revisits an old, temporary work by Sachs (1914-2002), who was one of the country's first female architects.

Singapore Pavilion

Singapore takes the opportunity to celebrate its 60 years of independence with its pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. Titled ‘RASA-TABULA-SINGAPURA’, the exhibit 'reimagines the city as a communal dining table,' creating an immersive experience that highlights the country's 'superdiversity.'

UAE pavilion

The UAE's participation is titled 'Pressure Cooker.' The installation is curated by Emirati architect and Assistant Professor at the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University and Co-founder of Holesum Studio Azza Aboualam, who looks at the country's food growing infrastructure. Looking at local communities and lots of archival research, the contribution explores challenges arising from issues of food security.

USA Pavilion

The 2025 US Pavilion's exhibition, PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity, draws on and celebrates the ubiquitous in the country and beloved architecture feature: the humble porch. 'The exhibitor contributions to the U.S. Pavilion, achieved through the Open Call, lie at the heart of the collective PORCH project,” said Peter MacKeith, Dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, University of Arkansas, who is one of the commissioning bodies. 'Framed by the constructions and installations of our design team, the exhibitor contributions will animate an understanding of contemporary architecture and design in the United States as a source of civic engagement and community building, a resource for social and environmental resiliency and as fundamentally committed to the greater good of society.'

Nordic Pavilion

The Nordic countries join forces once more contributing to the biennale this year with Industry Muscle - a body of work that 'examines architecture using the trans body as a lens, establishing a dialogue with Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Countries Pavilion.' Main exhibitor Teo Ala-Ruona, whose work combines performance art, theatre, and choreography, leads the way, bringing along a variety of different collaborators.

UK Pavilion

Co-curated by Nairobi based architecture studio Cave Bureau co-founders Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi with writer and curator Owen Hopkins and Queen Mary University professor Kathryn Yusoff, the 2025 British Pavilion (sponsored in part by The Dalmore, which launched The Dalmore Luminary Series sculpture No.3 by Ben Dobbin of Foster + Partners, co-curated by V&A Dundee during the opening) is this year a collaboration between Britain and Kenya. Part of the British Council's 2025 UK-Kenya Season of Culture, the contribution will focus on 'architecture of repair.'

Latvia Pavilion

In their national pavilion, the Latvians are exploring what it means to live on 'NATO's external border in times of geopolitical conflict.' Curated by Liene Jākobsone and Ilka Ruby, and designed by Sampling and Nomad architects, the installation looks at both spatial and social aspects of this context - and what it signifies for the country and its neighbours.

German Pavilion

Germany looks at its pavilion as a call to urgent action. The installation, curated by Nicola Borgmann, Elisabeth Endres, Gabriele G. Kiefer and Daniele Santucci, is an examination of what climate change does to urban life and a city's ecosystems. Titled 'Stresstest', the display zooms in on the rising heat levels in our urban spaces. 'This endangers not only the social life and productivity of the city, but also the health and survival of its residents. Currently, the urban population is already exposed to higher risks of dehydration and cardiovascular diseases; the number of heat deaths is growing,' writes the team.

Uzbekistan Pavilion

Architecture studio GRACE coordinates this year's pavilion of Uzbekistan and reflects on the country's, and Tashkent's, modernist legacy. A focus on the The Sun Institute of Material Science, which is also known as the Sun Heliocomplex and was built in 1987 near Tashkent, makes a case study for an installation that looks at narratives of sustainability, heritage and preservation, and the duality of old and new.

Iceland Pavilion

Iceland is entering a new eruptive era. Since 2021, heightened volcanic activity around the Reykjanes Peninsula, just 22 miles from Reykjavík, has captured global attention. For local architect Arnhildur Pálmadóttir, it represents untapped potential - and a fresh take on making the most of hyper local, natural materials that can be used in novel and exciting ways in construction. This year, Pálmadóttir’s Lavaforming project will take centre stage at Iceland’s national pavilion during the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. Set in a former fire station building owned by pioneering glass makers Berengo Studio, the pavilion will transport visitors to the year 2150, when Icelanders have harnessed the power of lava—just as they did geothermal energy 200 years earlier—to construct cities without harmful mining or reliance on non-renewable energy.

Romanian Pavilion

The Romanian participation is titled Human Scale. The exhibition curated by Cosmina Goagea is connected to a research project by artist Vlad Nancă and Bucharest-based architecture studio Muromuro, and is conceived to highlight notions of 'intelligence' in all its forms - natural and artificial, human and not. Nancă said on the subject of the installation: 'Humans are the unifying element in architectural drawings, transcending time. By looking at how people are drawn throughout the 20th century, we hope to underline their relevance and centrality to architecture in the 21st century, challenging visitors to look at our built environment in a different way and think about how architecture works for the people.'

Togo Pavilion

This year marks the very first participation of the Republic of Togo at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The display, titled Considering Togo’s Architectural Heritage, is commissioned by Sonia Lawson, Founding Director of Palais de Lomé and curated by Studio NEiDA (the studio is headed by architect Jeanne Autran-Edorh and curator Fabiola Büchele). Traditional construction techniques and external influences of all kinds collide in the country's rich architectural tapestry, which the pavilion hopes to explore. NEiDA's founders say: 'Togo’s architectural heritage, which spans ancient clay structures to complex histories and outlandish modernist experiments, is an incredible source of inspiration for our work. This built legacy—at times ingenious, at times eccentric—is a powerful guide for future architectural approaches that are contextual and climate compatible.'

Ukraine Pavilion

Designed by architect Bogdana Kosmina together with curators Michał Murawski, and Kateryna Rusetska, the Ukrainian pavilion is titled DAKH (ДАХ): Vernacular Hardcore, and zooms in on the concept of DAKH, which means “roof” in Ukrainian - symbolising a shelter, symbol of care, but also the first point of contact during an airstrike.

Albanian Pavilion

Portuguese firm OODA is particularly active in Albania - a country currently undergoing huge transformation - with eight current projects in development. There and more will be featured in the Albanian Pavilion this year. 'This is architecture as cultural diplomacy,' explains Blendi Gonxhja, Albania’s Minister of Economy, Culture and Innovation, who commissioned the pavilion. 'Our buildings aren’t just structures - they’re negotiations between individualism and collective memory, between rapid development and our stunning natural landscapes.'

Chilean Pavilion

Titled Reflexive Intelligences and curated by architects Serena Dambrosio, Nicolás Díaz Bejarano, and Linda Schilling Cuellar, the Chilean Pavilion puts the spotlight on what is often overlooked. The installation, a large, open 'working table,' looks at materials and territorial practices, as well as ecological impact and the use of AI, especially within Latin American contexts.

Holy See Pavilion

'Opera Aperta' is the title of the Holy See Pavilion, which received a special mention at the 19th biennale awards. The judges praised it in their citation: 'Recalling a book by Umberto Eco 1962, the pavilion Opera aperta invites the visitor to participate in the production of meaning. This special mention recognizes the creation of a space for exchange, negotiation, restoration. Opera aperta will revitalize an existing deconsecrated church with repair occurring at different levels involving a big range of skills of labour. As the team calls it, “a living practice of good care and collective care”. Opera aperta creates space for cultural exchange.'

Mexico Pavilion

Architecture studio Pedro y Juana's work exists not only in architecture’s arguably most traditional form – building design – but also in everything this touches: the spaces in-between scales and the dynamics between all its aspects. Their participation in Venice Architecture Biennale 2025’s Mexico Pavilion, which will be shown in the Corderia del Arsenale, is a case in point. Forming 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, the exhibit will explore Mexico’s chinampas – an ancient agroforestry system of growing crops on small plots within wetlands. It was first developed by the Nahua people, in particular the Xochimilicas (probably 900-1200 bc). Examples still operate today, even within the urban fabric of Mexico City.

Lebanese Pavilion

The Lebanese participation is curated by Collective for Architecture Lebanon (CAL), a non-profit organisation co-founded in 2019 by Shereen Doummar, Edouard Souhaid, Elias Tamer and Lynn Chamoun. Titled 'The Land Remembers', the display is more than an exhibition, but also a call to action: 'how can we heal the land to build for future generations?' the team asks.

Turkiye Pavilion

The Turkish exhibition, Grounded, is curated by Ceren Erdem and Bilge Kalfa. Looking at our ground - literally the soil around us - the team seeks to explore how the matter serves as a 'carrier of ecological and cultural memory, presenting it as an ecosystem that embodies natural intelligence and serves as a living archive and supportive model. The exhibition emphasises how this often- overlooked element provides crucial insights into past civilisations and ecological systems, and highlights the potential for coexistence with nature.'

Serbian Pavilion

The Serbian Pavilion in Venice presents 'Unravelling', an installation made of pure wool. 'Unravelling weaves common threads between the delicate Serbian knitting tradition and the discipline of architecture in a contemporary expression. Hanging from the roof in catenary curves, the knitted segments—1.2 x 5 meters each—are suspended in a textile landscape without a fixed shape or state,' the organisers explain. Ephemeral and unexpected, the fabric of this display is a multidisciplinary effort aimed at offering a poetic note.

Estonian Pavilion