From September 18 to October 19, 2025, the city of São Paulo will host the 14th edition of the International Architecture Biennale (BIAsp), which returns to the Oca Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park after nearly a decade of decentralized editions. Organized by the São Paulo Department of the Institute of Architects of Brazil (IABsp), the exhibition raises a pressing question: what is architecture’s role in facing climate change and the extreme events already reshaping our urban and environmental landscapes?
Curated collectively by six architects — Renato Anelli, Karina de Souza, Marcos Cereto, Clevio Rabelo, Marcella Arruda, Jerá Guarani —, the 2025 edition, titled “Extremes: Architectures for an overheated planet", acknowledges that we are living at a point of no return. The curatorial proposal draws inspiration from reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), particularly the AR6, and invites architecture to deliver bold and innovative responses to the climate crisis, bridging scientific, technical, and popular knowledge—including insights from urban peripheries, Indigenous villages, and quilombola communities.
A century ago, architecture made a massive effort to create cities tailored to industrial production. Today, a similar effort is needed to reverse the effects of an industrial model based on limitless growth and greenhouse gas emissions. We must establish a new relationship with nature, no longer positioning ourselves outside of it to exploit it, but rather building a city that coexists with water and fosters biodiversity. The 14th BIAsp invites architects from around the world to share proposals and practices that prove it is possible to mitigate global warming through a shift in how we shape the built environment. — Renato Anelli, Curator
The Biennale is conceived as a space for convergence—bringing together architectural, urban, landscape, and design practices to present both concrete and experimental proposals for confronting climate collapse. The program will feature built and unbuilt projects, experimental installations, audiovisual works, lectures, performances, workshops, and site-specific actions beyond the Oca.
The exhibition design, led by architect Álvaro Razuk, employs a modular system made of six-meter-long scaffolding structures, conceived to showcase drawings, models, videos, and plans. The installation is designed to make full use of the pavilion’s 10,000-square-meter floor area while also allowing the modernist architecture of the building to remain visible and appreciated.
Five thematic axes will guide projects and practices featured in the exhibition:
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Preserving Forests and Reforesting Cities
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Embracing Water
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Refurbishing More and Building Green
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Moving and Reaching Places Together with Renewable Energies
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Ensuring Climate Justice and Social Housing
Among the confirmed participants are Yu Kongjian, the Chinese landscape architect known for pioneering sponge cities in China, and the Dutch office Ooze, presenting their City of 1000 Tanks project—based on traditional Indian stepped water tanks. The Biennale will also include a special section on biomaterials, developed in partnership with institutions such as IED – Istituto Europeo di Design, Bauhaus Earth (Germany), and Craterre (France).
The 2025 edition reasserts the Biennale as a platform for collective propositions and action, positioning architecture as a fundamental tool in building just, resilient, and sustainable futures.
Open Calls
Three open calls are currently active for the 14th BIAsp: the International Open Call for Exhibitions and Activities and the International Competition for Architecture and Urbanism Schools (both extended until June 1), and the International Open Call for the Forum of Debates + SP Meeting (extended until May 15). Participation is free and entries must be submitted online via the Biennale's official website.
Extremes: Architectures for an overheated planet
Curatorial text:
We live in a world of extreme climatic events, and the limit for human life, the point of no return, looms on the horizon. If architecture plays a part in the production of climatic extremes, resource use, and climate injustice, what is the role of architecture in reversing this scenario?
Addressing extreme problems demands extreme, radical solutions. These can be at the cutting edge of technology and knowledge, or they can exist at the other end, on the margins: in the responses that emerge from the periphery of cities or in the traditional knowledge preserved in villages and quilombos (communities of escaped enslaved people).
Proposals generated within these different forms of knowledge, as well as from dialogue, friction, and mutual learning among them, offer new pathways to tackle global warming and adapt human habitats to the climatic extremes we already face. After a decade of decentralization, in 2025 the 14th International Architecture Biennial of São Paulo (BIAsp in Portuguese) will return to Ibirapuera Park to bring together, at Oca, a collection of these responses produced in the field of architecture from different parts of the planet. Another new feature of this edition of BIAsp, one of the most important forums for discussing the emerging challenges of architecture and urbanism, is the experimental construction and production of spatial solutions on-site.
Five axes will guide projects, experiences, experiments, and discussions aimed at transforming this landscape towards the creation of more resilient and adaptable cities, prepared to resume life after disasters.
The first axis, Preserving Forests and Reforesting Cities, suggests the radical incorporation of vegetation to reverse global warming by capturing carbon from the atmosphere and improving local microclimates to mitigate heatwaves.
The second axis, Embracing Water, will bring together experiences of stream renaturalization and Nature-Based Solutions to stabilize slopes and recover riverbanks, working in favor of the biogeochemical cycle of water.
Refurbishing More and Building Green will address the adaptive reuse of obsolete buildings and the adoption of low-carbon sustainable construction systems to tackle the challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with the construction and use of buildings.
Meanwhile, the axis Moving and Reaching Places Together with Renewable Energies will explore the possibilities of urban planning and mobility networks to reduce the need for individual travel and promote active transportation, also considering the energy transition in public transport.
Finally, the axis Ensuring Climate Justice and Social Housing will focus on the disproportionate vulnerability of poorer populations (often racialized and with a strong presence of women and children) to extreme climate events. These communities, which have historically contributed the least to global warming, often inhabit high-risk areas—precarious housing settlements frequently located on floodplains and slopes. Due to its significance, this axis will cut across all others.
To construct the 14th BIAsp, we invite society to present and develop concrete proposals that unite advancements in climate science with ancestral knowledge, combining new socio-environmental technologies with traditional practices and materials. Proposals that together help us understand what architectures we need to inhabit a world beyond extremes.
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