How plant intelligence, biospheric architecture, and ecological storytelling are reshaping our future
In the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, landscape architect Bas Smets unveiled a radical prototype: a living architecture where plants, equipped with sensors and AI, regulate their own microclimate. This is more than an installation — it’s a glimpse into a future where cities are co-authored by non-human intelligence.
But transforming our built environment also requires a transformation in thought. What does it mean to design with life, rather than around it? Can architects relinquish control and let plants become agents of cooling, purification, and adaptation? And what kind of cultural narratives — poetic, scientific, or mythic — can sustain this shift?
To explore these questions, Smets will be joined by Lucia Pietroiusti, one of today’s leading curators working at the intersection of art, ecology, and systems thinking. Drawing on her groundbreaking projects — from the Golden Lion–winning opera Sun & Sea at the Venice Biennale to the General Ecology program at London’s Serpentine — Pietroiusti brings a unique perspective on how culture, storytelling, and art can reframe our relationship with the living world.
Together, Smets and Pietroiusti will move between design and philosophy, material systems and cultural narratives, to imagine biospheric cities where buildings and ecosystems form one evolving whole.
speaker
Bas Smets is an internationally acclaimed landscape architect whose work blurs the boundaries between ecology, architecture, and engineering. Trained in both architecture and landscape design, he founded Bureau Bas Smets in Brussels in 2007, and has since completed more than 50 projects across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
Known for designing living systems that respond to climate and urban stress, Smets is particularly focused on how landscapes can shape microclimates and mitigate the effects of climate change. His major projects include the transformation of the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, the reimagining of the Notre-Dame surroundings in Paris, and now, the groundbreaking Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale — the first ever to be led by a landscape architect.
Smets is also Professor in Practice at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where he explores what he calls biospheric urbanism: a new way of thinking about cities as evolving ecosystems. His work integrates technology, biology, and design to propose radical new futures — not just for public space, but for how we coexist with other forms of intelligence on Earth.
moderator
Lucia Pietroiusti is a curator and writer whose work explores the intersection of art, ecology, and systems thinking. As Head of Ecologies at the Serpentine in London, she founded the influential General Ecology project, which integrates ecological principles across artistic practice, institutional culture, and public engagement.
Pietroiusti is best known internationally for curating the Golden Lion–winning opera Sun & Sea at the 2019 Venice Biennale, a haunting meditation on climate anxiety set on an artificial beach. Her curatorial work often defies traditional formats, extending into performance, sound, fieldwork, and storytelling across disciplines.
She has co-initiated major projects including Back to Earth and The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, and has curated international biennales in Gherdëina and Shanghai. Her practice is grounded in a deep inquiry into how culture can transform our ways of living, sensing, and thinking in the face of planetary change.
