‘Picoplanktonics’ exhibition at Canada Pavilion, 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale – Photos by Valentina Mori.

Architecture. The Picoplanktonics exhibition at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale showcases the potential for collaboration between humans and nature. The Living Room Collective transforms the Canadian Pavilion into an aquatic micro-ecosystem, where cyanobacteria (picoplankton) living in the 3d-printed architectural structures grow, evolve, and naturally degrade. The bacteria slowly strengthen the structures through CO2 consumption and storage, simultaneously producing oxygen and minerals.

• RELATED STORIES: Read more about the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale on Archipanic.

Over 2.4 billion years ago, marine cyanobacteria (picoplankton), one of Earth’s earliest life forms, decreased carbon dioxide levels and created the oxygen-rich environment sustaining life on our planet. Today, Andrea Shin Ling has brought together collaborators in material science, biology, robotics, and computational design to pair these organisms with technology, creating a groundbreaking biofabrication platform capable of printing living structures at an architectural scale.

The Picoplanktonics exhibition transforms the pavilion into a living lab where the bioarchitecture developed during four years of research at ETH Zurich is tested in three different environments. Some structures are housed in glass box incubator chambers, while others are located within the pavilion’s interior to study bacterial interactions with individuals in an indoor environment. A third structure is positioned outside in direct contact with natural agents.

3d printing allowed architects and scientists to create complex structures, maximising the exposed surface area to enable picoplankton to thrive and interact with the material. Throughout the six months of the Biennale, researchers will spray water and nourish the living structures, observing how they evolve. “Imagine future cities built with biomaterials that take carbon from the air and turn it into minerals,” explained at the Canada Pavilion.

• RELATED STORIES: Discover more biophilic architecture and design on Archipanic.

“We are thrilled to invite the public into this open experiment and reveal all phases of the material’s life, including growth, sickness, and death, while collectively imagining a regenerative design approach that seeks planetary remediation,” explains Andrea Shin Ling, The Living Room Collective.

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Picoplanktonics is commissioned by the Canadian Council for the Arts. 

• RELATED STORIES: Discover more Canadian architecture and design on Archipanic.