Terms and Conditions | Biennale Architettura 2025 curated by Carlo Ratti | Corderie dell’Arsenale, Venise, Italie

Carlo Ratti curator of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, 'Intelligent. Natural. Artificial. Collective', has invited Transsolar to participate in the 2025 Architecture Biennale with a special project titled 'Terms and Conditions'. The true costs of comfort in air-conditioned buildings around the world are often overlooked, and our climate future is continually postponed. While adjusting the thermostat may seem trivial, it has profound consequences. What have we signed up for? Have we read the small print – the terms and conditions?

Outside, air conditioners hum and drip, working tirelessly and dependent on power grids that are still primarily fueled by fossil fuels. While these cooling systems create sealed, optimized interior spaces, they also contribute to the planetary infrastructure that emits greenhouse gases, thereby accelerating global warming and raising sea levels. This vicious cycle of cooling to maintain comfort while warming the planet becomes an unnoticed background hum for the privileged, often masking its dissonance.

The 'Terms and Conditions' vestibule brings the outside world inside, where air conditioning exhausts heat from the cooled exhibition spaces. This passage serves as a spatial metaphor for the growing global thermal inequality. Who benefits from comfort, for how long, and at what cost? On one side is cool, predictable, standardized and limited. On the other side is heat, loudness, humidity, unpredictability, and precariousness. These conditions reflect how a luxurious lifestyle endangers vulnerable populations and future generations through thermal stress.

Carlo Ratti has invited us to create a realistic future scenario that could be experienced in this exhibition space. It is about the common goal of doing everything we can to avert this future.

‘Terms and Conditions’ causes unrest, reflecting in the water of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s installation whose long-term project, ‘Path to the Third Paradise’, strives for harmony between humans and technology. The two intertwined projects highlight the importance of aligning architecture, science and technology with humanitarian goals, as well as the challenges involved.

The installation addresses these topics both literally and allegorically. 80 of the 92 air conditioning units were sourced from Italian scrapyards, and 12 of these are fully functional, pumping waste heat into the entrance hall while cooling the main exhibition hall. As visitors move through the space, they also journey through time: At the entrance, the conditions of the outside world still prevail on a summer's day in Venice 2025, but as you cross the room, the density of the air conditioning units increases, and the heat rises. However, a horizontal temperature gradient is naturally unstable – gravity acts on the air, causing movement. Therefore, the increasing heat along the path is deliberately supported radiantly. Using radiative heat makes it possible to maintain the rising temperatures perceptibly for visitors along the route. Near the exit, conditions become as hot and humid as those forecasted for 2100.

After passing through the heavy thermal curtains into the back room, visitors feel cooled air descending from above, providing relief and a moment for reflection.

Credits Installation:
Climate engineering: Thomas Auer, Jochen Lam, Alina Wagner, Melis Ozalp (Transsolar Energietechnik GmbH) | Design lead: Bilge Kobas (Technical University of Munich) | Design and theoretical team: Daniel A. Barber (TU Eindhoven), Dehlia Hannah (University of Copenhagen), Alexandra Auer, Sebastian C. Koth (Technical University of Munich) | Climate science: Sonia Seneviratne, David N. Bresch, Lorenzo Pierini (ETH Zürich) | Water installation: Massimo Ferranti (ABC Produzioni e Allestimenti), Alessandro dal Pra (pp ABC Srl) | Production: Klaus Feith (boost) | Supporters: DGNB (German Sustainable Building Council), Transsolar Energietechnik GmbH

Exhibition May 10th – November 23rd, 2025