The Role of Technology in Future Design: Insights from SCI-Arc at La Biennale di Venezia
The 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia features a notable presence from the SCI-Arc community, including students, alumni, and faculty. Their work appears across a range of contexts—from national pavilions to independent installations and research projects—engaging critically with this year’s theme, Intelligens. The exhibition offers a compelling platform for exploring questions central to SCI-Arc’s pedagogy: the future of design, the role of technology, and the possibilities of architectural experimentation.
Majeda Alhinai Curates Oman’s First National Pavilion
SCI-Arc alumna Majeda Alhinai (M.Arch ’16 and a M.S Design Theory and Pedagogy in ’17) has been selected as the curator of Oman’s first-ever national pavilion at the Biennale. Her exhibition, Traces, reimagines the traditional Omani sablah as a spatial and cultural model for future communal life. Alhinai’s work—developed with her studio partner William Virgil—offers a profound example of the leadership SCI-Arc alumni bring to global discourse around space, memory, and belonging.
Vertical Studio Showcased in the French Pavilion
Titled Atlas of Risks, this vertical studio taught by Elena Manferdini explored wildfire as an architectural and environmental condition, using Los Angeles as a testing ground. Responding to the Atlas of Risks concept proposed by the French Pavilion’s curators, students proposed site-specific design strategies to address the intensifying threats of climate-driven disaster in the urban landscape—melding research, speculation, and performance-based design.
The French Pavilion is curated by architects Dominique Jakob and Brendan MacFarlane (B.Arch ’83), in collaboration with Martin Duplantier and Éric Daniel-Lacombe. Their project, titled Vivre avec / Living with, addresses the challenges of ecological, climatic, and social transformations through architectural innovation.
Undergraduate Studio “Sway Me” Investigates Air and Energy
Also featured in Vivre Avec is the 2B undergraduate studio Sway Me, led by Jennifer Chen (coordinator) with faculty David Eskenazi, David Freeland, and Kordae Henry. The studio focused on Downtown Los Angeles and examined air quality, Santa Ana winds, and pollution as both risk and resource. Through proposals for an Athletic Center using wind turbines and natural ventilation strategies, students questioned conventional environmental systems and proposed new relationships between architecture and atmosphere.
Off-Grid Strategies for a Dry Future
Projects developed by SCI-Arc’s 2GAX graduate architecture studio, co-taught by William Virgil and Florencia Pita in Fall 2024, are featured in the Vivre Avec / Living With exhibition at the French Pavilion. Strategically sited along the LA River, the work addresses the urgent issue of drought in a region long marked by water scarcity. With extended periods of low precipitation and high aridity, Los Angeles faces mounting challenges in water availability. These innovative proposals transform buildings into functional reservoirs—designed to collect, filter, and redistribute the LA River’s slow-moving water. By integrating infrastructure and architecture, the projects offer a compelling vision for sustainable urban resilience in the face of climate change.
Eric Owen Moss Revisits the 708 House in the Arsenale
In the central Arsenale exhibition Intelligens, faculty member Eric Owen Moss presents reflections on The 708 House—a project lost to wildfire in January 2025. Through drawings and critical writing, Moss revisits the house as an experimental, open-ended gesture from the 1980s—now reframed through the lens of loss, transformation, and temporality in architecture.
Liam Young’s New Film Premieres After the End at the Arsenale
SCI-Arc faculty member and Fiction & Entertainment coordinator Liam Young debuts the European premiere of his new film After the End at this year’s Venice Biennale as part of the Intelligens exhibition in the Arsenale.
Spanning 50,000 years, After the End is a speculative timelapse film that imagines a creation story for a post-fossil fuel future. Set in Australia—one of the world’s largest producers of coal and gas—the film moves from First Nations histories through colonization and extraction, to a future of renewable energy and Indigenous reclamation. Oil rigs become artificial reefs, gas plants launch a speculative space industry, and First Peoples reclaim their land and sovereignty.
The film was written in collaboration with Australian First Nations actor and writer Meyne Wyatt, with VFX supervision by SCI-Arc faculty Alexey Marfin.
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