COP30 | AquaPraça: a special project at Biennale Architettura 2025

COP30 | AquaPraça, a special project at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., curated by Carlo Ratti, will be presented in the Venice Arsenal basin on 4 September 2025. Conceived as a gathering space for global climate dialogue, the floating platform will explore a new symbiosis between architecture and the environment, harnessing natural intelligence and responsive technologies to adapt to rising water levels.

AquaPraça will be presented in Venice by CRA - Carlo Ratti Associati and Höweler + Yoon, in partnership with Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Italy’s Ministry of Environment and Energy Security, and in collaboration with Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brazil, CIHEAM Bari, the World Bank Group’s Connect4Climate program and Bloomberg Philantropies.

After its debut at Biennale Architettura 2025, the platform will embark on a transatlantic journey to South America, where it will be an integral part of the Italian Pavilion at COP30 (Belém, Brazil, November 10 - 21, 2025), Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, addressing Italy's reflections on architecture and climate action to a global audience. After COP30, Italy will donate the AquaPraça installation to the Brazilian government, which will be transformed into a community space for promoting social engagement on climate.

Carlo Ratti explains: “In 1979 Aldo Rossi presented the Teatro del Mondo, a floating architecture that was poetically inserted in the Venetian lagoon. The work was created on the occasion of the exhibition Venezia e lo spazio scenico, promoted by the Theater and Architecture sectors, then directed by Paolo Portoghesi, which was preparing to inaugurate the first Architecture Biennale in 1980. With Teatro del Mondo, Rossi asserted that architecture could and should dialogue with the past, in a play of memories, quotations and continuity. Today, more than forty years later, AquaPraça ideally picks up that baton, showing how architecture can go further: not only in dialogue with history, but also capable of measuring itself against the challenges of the future”.