SCAPE’s exhibition “Cool Forest” opens this week at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia: “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective,” curated by Carlo Ratti and on view from May 10–November 23, 2025.
“Cool Forest” is an interactive journey through a lush microforest on the Arsenale grounds. A forest pavilion exhibits vegetation that is adapted to Venice’s end-of-century climate condition, exploring themes of urban heat, adaptation, and biodiversity. Sensors monitor sap flow, growth, humidity, and temperature, tracking and making visible landscape’s role in mitigating future climate extremes. The installation was designed with participating team Marco Scano, Agronomist and the Harvard Graduate School of Design Department of Landscape Architecture.
As visitors walk along the promenade, they learn about the biodiversity of the forest, engage with urban cooling methods, and consider our climate-changed future. The plants are future visitors, foreshadowing the species that will eventually join the current ecosystem as the climate of Venice shifts. By highlighting a cluster of these future biotic regions, the species selection in “Cool Forest” also sparks conversation about assisted adaptation of existing regional ecosystems as a component crucial to climate-resilient landscapes.
“Cool Forest” lies at the nexus of the natural, the urban, the circular, and collective. By encouraging active participation in monitoring landscape interventions, the forest and sensors highlight the power of vegetation as a critical piece of infrastructure in our cities. The plant materials are intended to be donated and installed in the Venice area at the end of the exhibition, assisting in adapting the Venetian landscape to future climate conditions.
“SCAPE’s installation reveals the power and potential of landscape to mitigate temperature extremes in our cities,” said Kate Orff, FASLA. “‘Cool Forest’ brings a fragment of nature to the Biennale that manifests an adaptive landscape planting palette and tracks its efficacy as climate infrastructure.”
This year, Venice is not just the host of the Biennale Architettura—it is a living laboratory. With the venue of the Central Pavilion under renovation in 2025, the city itself serves as the backdrop for a new kind of Exhibition, where installations, prototypes, and experiments are scattered across the Giardini, the Arsenale and other neighborhoods.