The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale has unveiled eight groundbreaking projects that demonstrate how architectural regeneration can transform cities through intelligent adaptation of existing structures. These carefully curated works explore regeneration as a deliberate process rooted in the specific conditions of each location, moving beyond simple replacement to embrace preservation of embedded knowledge and careful integration of contemporary needs.
For decades, the Venice Biennale has served as a testing ground for architecture's most pressing ideas, allowing designers, researchers, and institutions to present visionary solutions to evolving environmental, cultural, and social challenges. This year's featured projects reveal that successful regeneration requires precise understanding of existing contexts, whether addressing an entire coastal city, a disused industrial site, or a neglected public space.
The eight selected works demonstrate that regeneration can emerge from multiple starting points, including reactivating heritage through adaptive reuse, restoring ecological systems as part of urban planning, developing open and modular strategies for social housing renewal, and layering technological innovation onto historically rooted practices. While intervention scales vary dramatically, each project shows sensitivity to existing assets—material resources, urban patterns, or cultural memory—and willingness to use these elements as catalysts for transformation.
Among the standout projects is "The Reincarnated Grid" by Trung Mai in Hanoi, Vietnam, which transforms the abandoned Gia Lam Train Factory through adaptive reuse intervention. Rather than imposing a new design, the project excavates the latent spatial intelligence of the site, treating it as an archaeological imprint of Vietnam's industrial past and recontextualizing the country's industrial legacy while foregrounding the potential of collective knowledge in spatial transformation.
In Copenhagen, Denmark, "Thoravej 29 – Repurposing Itself" by Hampus Berndtson and Pihlmann Architects showcases the three-year transformation of a former industrial building. This yellow-brick structure from the 1960s represents a typology often seen as undesirable yet found in abundance, demonstrating acts of preservation, repurposing, and highlighting the potential of overlooked architectural elements.
Canada's contribution, "Boucaneries" by Atelier Pierre Thibault on Île Verte in Quebec, explores how twelve traditional smokehouses testify to local ingenuity and collective resilience amidst Quebec's harsh climate. Using a participatory design process, the project examines how adaptive reuse of smokehouse-inspired structures can promote the island's food self-sufficiency, cultural development, and traditions.
Spain presents "Open Regeneration of Housing Estates in Barcelona," a collaborative effort exploring the design of an open system for large-scale adaptation of housing estates in the Barcelona metropolitan area. The project features efficient infrastructure that can be attached to existing buildings to upgrade, protect, repair, reequip, and expand homes and shared spaces through a modular, self-supporting wooden structure that accommodates various needs and future transformations.
"Acapulco: Selective Memories" represents Mexico's approach to coastal regeneration following recent climate events that exposed the city's vulnerabilities. Created by a911, Cadena Concepts, and Esrawe, the project explores design's role in the city's revival, reclaiming historical, material, and natural knowledge to rethink coastal cities and tourism. The installation features a double celosia (latticework) that intertwines an archive of urban histories with construction exercises where tradition and innovation converge.
Japan's ACROS Fukuoka Prefectural International Hall by Emilio Ambasz & Associates demonstrates successful reconciliation of opposing goals—maintaining urban green space while providing a powerful symbolic municipal structure. The building utilizes garden terraces stepping up the facade, giving back virtually all the land that its footprint covers and eliminating community opposition through thoughtful design integration.
Italy's "Rome is a Comet" by Umberto Vattani, Giampaolo Nuvolati, María Margarita Segarra Lagunes, Cristiana Collu, and Giuseppe D'Acunzo examines Rome's morphology as resembling a comet shape, with the Contemporary District as its beating heart uniting the Flaminio, Foro Italico, and Farnesina neighborhoods. The project explores whether this represents Rome's genius loci or the product of contemporary transformations, revealing how open spaces and interstices weave overlooked meanings that resurface in moments of reflection.
China's "The Langtou Experiment" by Yung Ho Chang (Atelier FCJZ) and Shen Min showcases recent efforts in revitalizing the ancient village of Langtou through large-scale models and documentaries about its built and natural context, including stakeholder interviews. Everything is housed within two plywood cases serving both as safety measures during transportation and deployment platforms for presentation, embodying ideas of motivation, diversity, and sustainability.
These projects collectively suggest that successful regeneration must balance innovation with the intelligence of existing structures and contexts. They demonstrate that transformation can begin from various points but requires deep understanding of place-specific conditions, cultural memory, and community needs. The diversity of approaches—from Vietnam's industrial archaeology to Mexico's coastal revival and Spain's modular housing systems—illustrates architecture's potential to address contemporary challenges while honoring historical and cultural foundations.
The featured works at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale ultimately argue that regeneration is not merely about replacing old with new, but about creating dynamic processes of reinvention that preserve valuable knowledge while accommodating future needs. These projects serve as models for how architects and planners worldwide can approach urban transformation with sensitivity, intelligence, and respect for existing contexts.
