Venice is full of old stone that’s survived plagues, floods, and tourists in boat shoes. Canada showed up to the 2025 Architecture Biennale with the opposite idea: walls that are alive, and if you don’t babysit them, they die on you.
The Canadian Pavilion’s installation, called“Picoplanktonics”, is built from3D-printed formsdesigned to hostcyanobacteria, tiny photosynthetic organisms that, under the right conditions, consume carbon dioxide and grow. The exhibit is scheduled to run throughNov. 23, 2025. That’s a long time for something that needs daily tuning like a finicky aquarium.
A pavilion that doesn’t “open”, it gets maintained
Most Biennale pavilions deliver architecture like a finished product: look, photograph, move on. Canada’s pitch is closer to: here’s a system, keep it alive.
“Picoplanktonics” depends on a carefully managed mix oflight, humidity, and temperature. If those drift too far, the biology crashes, and the whole point of the project goes with it. In other words, maintenance isn’t some boring facilities line item. It’s the show.
And Venice is a mischievous place to try this. The city swings through seasonal humidity and temperature shifts, and the pavilion has to cope with crowds breathing, moving, and generally messing with the microclimate. The installation reads like a public stress test: can “living” building material hold up outside a lab, day after day, with real-world chaos?
The carbon-capture promise, and the fine print nobody can dodge
The hook is climate. Cyanobacteria dophotosynthesis: with enough light and the right conditions, they turnCO₂ into biomass. In the public story around “Picoplanktonics,” that becomes a seductive idea, building envelopes that don’t just sit there, but actively pull carbon from the air.
But here’s the catch: carbon capture by microbes isn’t magic. It’s math and biology. Output depends onlight intensity, nutrients, temperature, and water balance. And the material has to stay hospitable to life, meaning it can’t be designed like a conventional wall optimized purely for strength, sealing, and long-term predictability.
The article’s underlying point is blunt: without published performance numbers from the Venice run, this is aproof-of-concept, not a verified carbon-accounting solution. That’s not an insult. That’s what prototypes are for. But anyone trying to sell this as ready-to-install climate tech is getting ahead of the evidence.
Living materials sound cool until you ask who’s on the hook
In a pavilion, you can assign a team to monitor conditions and respond when the biology starts acting up. In an occupied building, apartments, schools, hospitals, those questions get sharp fast.
Who’s responsible when the living system fails? What’s the protocol? What do insurers do with a wall whose properties can change depending on its biological health? Building codes are written for materials that behave the same way on Tuesday as they did on Monday. Living systems don’t sign that contract.
Then there’s the health angle. Cyanobacteria are common in nature, but putting them into the built environment invites questions aboutcontainment, spread, and hygiene standards. If you’re going to grow organisms in walls, you don’t get to wave away risk management as somebody else’s problem.
Four years in the making, led by Andrea Shin Ling’s Living Room Collective
This wasn’t thrown together as Biennale eye candy. According to the project description, “Picoplanktonics” tookfour yearsto develop by theLiving Room Collective, led by Canadian architect and biodesignerAndrea Shin Ling.
That timeline tells you what the glossy photos don’t: working with living systems is slow, iterative, and stubborn. You’re not just choosing finishes, you’re testing compatibilities, tweaking growth conditions, and accepting that reproducibility can be harder than in a normal industrial pipeline.
The 3D printing matters here because it’s not decoration. The geometry can be tuned, porosity, surface area, water pathways, to create a micro-habitat that keeps organisms functioning. The wall isn’t a “support.” It’s a home.
ArchDaily calls it the biggest “living material” structure, big enough to expose the headaches
ArchDailyhas described the project as thelargest architectural structure made from living materials, with printed components designed to host carbon-sequestering microorganisms. That’s a splashy label, but the real significance is simpler: scale and duration force reality to show up.
A petri dish can look perfect. A public installation running for months has to deal with operations: staffing, monitoring, energy use, and the unglamorous grind of keeping conditions stable. If you need dehumidifiers and tight temperature control to keep your carbon-eating wall alive, you’d better be honest about the energy bill, and whether it eats the climate benefit.
Canada’s pavilion ends up making an argument the rest of the Biennale often dodges: the green future of building won’t be won by swapping one material for another and calling it a day. It’s going to involve new routines, new liabilities, and a lot more caretaking than architects like to admit.