Picoplanktonics
Canada Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
May 10 – November 23, 2025

On the occasion of Canada’s participation in the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the Canada Council for the Arts presents Picoplanktonics at the Canada Pavilion, from May 10 to November 23, 2025.

Amidst the ongoing global climate crisis, the Living Room Collective has developed a groundbreaking exhibition that showcases the potential for collaboration between humans and nature. Comprised of 3D printed structures that contain live cyanobacteria capable of carbon sequestration, Picoplanktonics is an exploration of our potential to cooperate with living systems by co-constructing spaces that remediate the planet rather than exploit it.

The Living Room Collective’s exhibition is the culmination of four years of collaborative research by Andrea Shin Ling and various interdisciplinary contributors. It is focused on harnessing the design principles of living systems to develop sustainable, intelligent and resilient materials and technologies for the future. By leveraging ancient biological processes alongside emergent technologies, it proposes designing environments under an ecology-first ethos.

When visitors enter the Canada Pavilion, they will encounter 3D printed structures that were originally fabricated in an ETH Zürich laboratory. These are the largest living material structures produced using a first-of-its-kind biofabrication platform capable of printing living structures at an architectural scale. The unique Picoplanktonics experience stems from adapting the Canada Pavilion to provide enough light, moisture, and warmth for the living cyanobacteria within the structures to grow, thrive and change. For the duration of the exhibition, caretakers will be onsite tending to the structures, emphasising care and stewardship as essential elements of the design.

As global carbon emissions continue to rise to untenable levels, Picoplanktonics presents a vision of how a regenerative system of construction could operate. It is an ongoing experiment centered on leveraging the reciprocal relationship between living structures, the built environment, and humans. In this way, the Living Room Collective is rethinking building principles and prioritizing ecological resilience beyond human species survival.

The Living Room Collective is a group of architects, scientists, artists and educators who work at the intersection of architecture, biology and digital fabrication technologies—led by Canadian architect and biodesigner Andrea Shin Ling. Alongside core team members Nicholas Hoban, Vincent Hui and Clayton Lee, the collective seeks to move society away from exploitative systems of production to regenerative ones by inventing design methods and processes that center on natural systems.

They see the Biennale Architettura 2025 as a platform to generate national and international conversations that ask: How does one fabricate a biological architecture? What are the conditions of stewardship? What are the strategies to instigate this at scale, regionally and globally?

more. www.picoplanktonics.com