Albert-László Barabási and Paolo Ciuccarelli are designing “Constructing the Biennale,” which portrays the past and present of the Venice Biennale Architettura, the world’s preeminent gathering of architectural minds.
In 2022, the Venice Biennale welcomed over 800,000 guests, with nearly 700,000 attending in 2024.
This year, a massive project led by two Northeastern University labs will welcome guests to the Biennale Architettura 2025.
The Venice Biennale is really two events, held in alternating years. In even years, an arts-focused Biennale takes center stage; in odd years, focus turns to the architectural.
Most of the event takes place in the Venice Giardini (Italian for “gardens”), a large park that hosts the nearly 30 national pavilions as well as “one major exhibition space” called the Central Pavilion, which is like “a large museum,” according to Albert-László Barabási, university distinguished professor of physics and network science at Northeastern.
During the 2025 architecture Biennale, the Central Pavilion will be under renovations — and will also become a surprising canvas for a sweeping data art project that will welcome guests to the exhibition.
The project, which incorporates two laboratories from Northeastern and a third group from the Politecnico di Torino, is called Constructing the Biennale, and will portray the historical sweep of the architecture Biennale’s participants since its beginning 45 years ago.
The Barabási Lab is designing what will be “the most visible work of the Biennale,” Barabási says, a 30-meter by 8-meter (about 98 by 26 feet) image displaying a visualization of all the architects who have participated in the Biennale over the decades.
“We ended up exploring the full history of the Biennale,” Barabási says, “mapping out the 12,000 architects that were exhibited since 1974 and their 3,800 projects — and identifying the network that connects them all.”
“Mapping out every single project and every architect from the history of the Biennale was a massive data science project,” he continues. “We had to find out who was there every year, who helped the project and in what capacity.”
The Barabási Lab visualization shows just how quickly the architecture Biennale grew in complexity, with a few nodes for individual architects and their projects in the early years quickly expanding into hundreds — and then thousands — of touchpoints.
Being under construction, the Central Pavilion will have scaffolding surrounding it, says Paolo Ciuccarelli, professor of design and director of the Center for Design at Northeastern. “We are basically wrapping this scaffolding with our visualizations, and hence also the title, ‘Constructing the Biennale,’” he says.
Ciuccarelli is leading another element of the project — whereas the Barabási Lab is focused on the history of the Biennale, “we are working with the present, meaning the construction of the current Biennale,” Ciuccarelli says.
Ciuccarelli’s team is in charge of visualizing “one by one, all of the applications that the Biennale received, processed and accepted, represented by different dimensions such as geography, personal perspectives, affiliation types, topics and themes, types of intelligence” and more, he says.
They wanted to highlight the “reasoning behind the curatorial process, and what is the result,” Ciuccarelli says.
The visualization they’ve developed shares some graphical similarities with the Barabási Lab’s. “It’s like a stream of all these applications as they move towards Venice,” highlighting the flow of applications that begins outside Venice, coming “from the world to Venice, and that brings there all the applications that have been selected by this curatorial process.”
The third element of the Constructing the Biennale project comes from architectural ethnographer Albena Yaneva of the Politecnico di Torino, who is providing a qualitative experience through interviews and films with this year’s curatorial team that will be integrated into Ciuccarelli’s Center for Design visualization.
“The actor-network,” he says, which includes the curators involved in the decision making process, “works like a gate, a door that opens on the visualization — then you see the flow, and then you get into the Biennale.”
Michele Bonino, also of the Politecnico di Torino, is coordinating the project as a whole.
“The Biennale is meant to represent the ‘architectural intelligence,’” Ciuccarelli says, “that produces the most interesting and relevant projects, to celebrate and bring together the top minds in the field.
“Our project in turn represents the curatorial intelligence behind the production of this year’s representation” and convening.
Highlighting this theme, they’ve called their area of the project “Curatorial Synapses,” as it’s meant to represent “some of the sparks that led to the curatorial decision of accepting those applications.”
“Our main reference,” he continues, are contemporary representations of neural networks, and the activations of the neurons inside them.
The Biennale is “supposed to bring together the best projects in their domains,” Barabási says.
And Northeastern University will be there to welcome them.
The 2025 Biennale Architettura will open May 10 and run until Nov. 23.
Both Barabási and Ciuccarelli are adamant about how these are collaborative efforts, both between and within their two teams. Ciuccarelli notes that the Torino team has even hired someone whose specific responsibility is to ensure both projects feel of a piece, have a “family feeling.”
For the Barabási Lab, design and data visualization artists Alice Grishchenko, Csaba Both and Daria Koshkina are contributing, with data analysis by Yixuan Liu, Rodrigo Dorantes Gilardi and Ábel Elekes.
For the Center for Design, Todd Linkner and Matthew Blanco are both contributing for information design and data visualization, with Lindsey Henriques collaborating.