RCA School of Architecture ResearchRCA SoA Research

Towers of Winds was exhibited at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, in 2025, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. The exhibition presented the Athens-based research project to an international architectural audience through films, drawings, prototype documentation and digital material, translating a practice-based investigation into urban heat, air pollution and passive climatic infrastructure into a public exhibition format.

The Venice presentation responded directly to the Biennale’s curatorial emphasis on multiple forms of intelligence. Rather than treating intelligence as an attribute of individuals, machines or discrete organisms, the project approached intelligence through Gregory Bateson’s concept of an “ecology of mind”: a distributed process that unfolds through relations between bodies, atmospheres, materials, technologies, environments, signs and feedback systems. In this sense, the installation framed Athens itself as an eco-mental system, whose heat, pollution, winds, dust, fires, infrastructures and social inequalities could be read as signs of a larger atmospheric intelligence under stress.

Two new film collaborations were central to this response. The main film, a twenty-seven-minute documentary made with filmmaker Gemma Riggs, narrated the development of the project, its theoretical framing, the construction and testing of the prototype in Athens, and the wider ambition to rethink architecture as climatic infrastructure. Jon Goodbun coordinated and produced the drawings and exhibition material, and scripted the text and narrative for the documentary. This film took on the more discursive, expository and “prose” aspect of the installation: it explained the project’s research questions, environmental context, technical development and civic ambitions.

A second, shorter five-minute film was made with filmmaker Lynn Phyllis Seeger. This supporting work channelled “The Eco-Mental Systems of Athena,” giving the project a more poetic, speculative and ecological voice. It was conceived as an attempt to speak from within the distributed intelligence of the city itself: a channelling of the goddess Athena as a figure for the more-than-human mind of Athens, composed of air, heat, stone, dust, water, forests, infrastructures, memories and political histories. Where the documentary film foregrounded research, design development and prototype testing, the shorter film opened a more atmospheric, mythic and semiotic register.

The two films were therefore conceived as interacting components within a single installation. Drawing loosely on Bateson’s interest in different forms and modes of cognition, including bicameral and relational understandings of mind, the films operated as two interacting “hemispheres” of the project: one more 'rational' and prose-based narration, the other more 'poetic'. One worked through explanation, evidence, modelling and argument; the other through metaphor, image, rhythm, voice and ecological imagination. Together they formed a double description of Towers of Winds: not simply an account of a prototype, but an attempt to stage the project as a distributed cognitive system in which architecture, atmosphere, sensing, myth and environmental research could think together.

The exhibition communicated the project’s two interlinked scales — a community-buildable seven-metre tower and larger twenty-five-metre municipal towers for heatwave response — and situated them within the wider environmental crises of the Athens basin: extreme heat, atmospheric stratification, air pollution, energy poverty, fire, dust, urban inequality and the search for low-energy alternatives to air-conditioning. The tower was presented as both a built experiment and a speculative civic infrastructure: a device for cooling, sensing and learning from the Athenian atmosphere.

The exhibition marked a significant moment of international dissemination for the project. It brought together previous research on ecological semiotics and Athens’ atmospheric crisis with new prototype evidence, new visual material and new filmic interpretation. It also helped communicate the project beyond specialist environmental design audiences, addressing architects, curators, researchers, policy actors and the wider Biennale public. The project was documented in the official catalogue of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition and supported by a dedicated project website and public release of the films online.

The Venice exhibition also generated critical recognition. Phineas Harper singled out the project for praise in ArtReview, while Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos discussed it positively in Anthropocenes. These reviews are significant because they register the project’s relevance beyond conventional technical sustainability discourse. They position Towers of Winds within wider debates on architecture, ecology, atmosphere, public space, environmental justice and the political imagination of climate adaptation.

As an exhibition output, Towers of Winds at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 should be understood not as a simple representation of an existing design project, but as a research dissemination format in its own right. The films, drawings and installation translated a complex interdisciplinary project into a public cultural platform, making visible the relations between passive cooling, urban atmospheric systems, climate inequality, ecological semiotics and civic infrastructure. Through its paired film structure, the installation also tested a specifically Batesonian response to the Biennale’s theme of intelligence: an ecological aesthetics in which documentary knowledge and poetic intuition, sensing and myth, infrastructure and atmosphere, could operate as interacting modes of thought.