Biennale Architettura 2025

Titled (Fr)Agile Systems, the Pavilion of Pakistan is not only a reminder of the stark inequity of a crisis that continues to weigh down hardest on regions that have historically had the least to do with causing it, but also a reiteration of the imperative to rethink climate resilience as an adaptation process atuned to the asymmetries and imbalances of an interconnected world.

At the heart of the Pavilion is rock salt — a material deeply rooted in Pakistan’s geological and cultural heritage. By constantly dissolving, rehardening, and reshaping itself in the ambient humidity of Venice, it becomes a powerful metaphor, held in place by a suspended structure that through its asymmetry and imbalance recalls the paradoxes, precarities, and inequities of the climate crisis, thereby urging a more proactive and equitable approach.

This phenomenon, where an indigenous material is brought into an unfamiliar environment and subjected to conditions that alter its very nature, also suggests that climate resilience might not rest in universal solutions dictated by regions most responsible for the climate crisis, but in localized and nature-based acts of adaptation. At once a reflection and a call to action, the Pavilion also envisions a future in which architecture once again becomes deeply rooted in cultural and ecological specificities of place.