AA Architectural and Urbanism (DRL) Course Tutor Pierandrea Angius recently curated and moderated the symposium, Adaptive Habitats and Meteorological Intelligence, at La Biennale di Venezia 2025, curated by Carlo Ratti, at the Arsenale Speaker’s Corner Auditorium. The symposium explored adaptive architectural systems for collective living, with a focus on self-sufficiency, responsiveness and ecological intelligence. Through lectures, discussions and design presentations, it investigated how architecture can foster symbiotic relationships between human life and the ecosystems it inhabits, transforms and depends on.

The event critiqued the dichotomy between nature and artifice. Recognising that in a context shaped by ecological crisis and technological integration, the built environment is understood as a hybrid field – where materials, climate, infrastructures and biological systems interact continuously. From this perspective, architecture becomes a dynamic and permeable system, part of Earth’s broader metabolic processes. Structures are no longer isolated objects but active agents within complex feedback loops, capable of absorbing, regulating and returning energy, matter and behaviour. Design in this sense, becomes an ecological act, one that contributes to, rather than extracts from, the systems it engages with.

The symposium invited participants to explore how spatial systems can evolve over time, respond to change, and support the entangled existence of species, technologies and environments.

With contributions from researchers, practitioners and students from Angius’s DRL design studio and other institutions, the event served as a platform for critical exchange on the role of architecture in an age when every design gesture is simultaneously environmental, political and planetary. Guests and keynote lecturers included Diego Ricalde, Ersin Han Ersin, Ingrid Paoletti, Michael Smith, Ross Lovegrove and Theodore Spyropoulos. Facilitators included AA DRL Tutors Angel Tenorio and Anna Kondrashova. Presenters included AA DRL students Rahulraj Choorakad, Gal Gnap, Shreya Gupta, Yuxuan Hu, Sandip Kale, Yash Katare, Tolga Kaya, Sriram Natarajan, Susanna Shajan and Yi Zhou.