I live in the Mediterranean and this past winter (which is as warm as a New York spring) I had a cricket living outside my window. Every night at dusk he would start up his legs –– at first with a squeaky creak –– and he would ratchet it up to a steady sing for us a marvelous song that would last a few hours. I’d go out and check on him sometimes, hoping to keep him safe but eventually he moved on, or died. My friends say crickets in their garden is their bedtime nightmare. I was dreaming of keeping crickets for my lullabies and the scientists and musicians from Melbourne have helped my dreams come true.

In Venice, sustainability isn’t just a theme—it’s a living, breathing force at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, opening Saturday, May 10.

Among the standout exhibits this year is “Song of the Cricket”, a groundbreaking fusion of ecological conservation and interactive sound art brought to life by researchers from the University of Melbourne.

Set in the heart of the Venice lagoon, the installation highlights the precarious status of the Adriatic Marbled Bush-Cricket, a once-common singing insect whose habitat has been reduced to a mere 0.57 square kilometers. Fewer than 5,000 adults are estimated to remain. But this project aims to change that.

Led by Professor Alex Felson and the Urban Ecology and Design Lab at Melbourne, the team will collect, breed, and relocate these critically endangered crickets in an effort to reintroduce them into the Venice lagoon. At the same time, they will explore adaptive land-use strategies and smarter conservation approaches to help safeguard the species against future climate shifts.

“This is not just a temporary installation – it’s a step toward reconstructing vital cricket populations in the Venice lagoon,” said Professor Felson.

The exhibit features floating, mobile habitats that serve both as conservation tools and interactive sculpture. Each structure is designed to house the crickets while also offering an immersive audio experience for visitors. Blending science and sound art, the project creates a multisensory call to action for ecological stewardship.

Professor Julie Willis, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, praised the initiative as a vivid example of university-led innovation.

“‘Song of the Cricket’ showcases world-leading research from across the University. Combining art and science, the exhibit helps people to reimagine this iconic place as a living, responsive, and biodiverse city,” she said.

One of the installation’s most unique features is the interactive sound garden and cricket choir, designed by Associate Professor Miriama Young. Set against the backdrop of a 16th-century Venetian shipyard, the soundscape reawakens the natural chorus that once filled the city’s wetlands.

“Antonio Vivaldi’s Venice was once alive with the sounds of nature. This project re-imagines a healthy bioacoustic environment and develops synergies in ecological art practice through architectures of sound and sustainability,” said Young.

This exhibit joins other sustainability-focused pavilions at the Biennale, such as Australia’s “HOME,” which explores Indigenous environmental knowledge, and Seoul’s call for coexistence with nature in urban planning.

“HOME,” is showcasing Indigenous knowledge systems and their relationship with environmental stewardship. The exhibition invites visitors to engage with Australia’s natural environment through Indigenous perspectives, emphasizing the importance of sustainability and cultural heritage.

Together, these works underscore a larger truth: that architecture and design are no longer just about buildings, but about reviving the ecosystems and cultural soundscapes that make cities truly alive.

Sustainability Takes Center Stage at the 2025 Venice Biennale

The 2025 Venice Biennale is placing sustainability at the forefront, with several national pavilions and exhibitions highlighting environmental themes and practices.

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Posterity may end up migrating from place to place to find food like our nomadic ancestors did if we don’t get a hold of desertification and climate change. To make that easier for desert dwellers, Stephane Malka and Yachar Bouhaya propose the Green Machine – a massive city on tank treads that fertilizes the Sahara as it moves. 

Originally entered into a competition as the Morrocan pavilion for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and selected for the Jury special prize, The Green Machine rethinks our future survival in the desert – albeit in a wild and wacky way.

A self-sufficient roaming city on caterpillar treads, the large and unsightly machine city plows the desert sands as it progresses through the dunes and rocks.

It then injects fertilizer, plants seeds and drops water – all in an effort to turn the desert from a veritable wasteland into something that can eventually produce food.

Related: Qatar’s Sahara Forest Desert Forest Project grows cucumbers from saltwater

Equipped with nine large balloons that collect water through condensation and store it – in part for irrigation and in part to sustain people living on the machine, and large solar towers that capture the sun’s energy, the city addresses the multi pronged issues of overpopulation, food scarcity, and water shortages.

There are of course some drawbacks to the design: for example, who will tend the lands plowed and planted after the city moves on to another section of the desert?

Albeit rather fantastical, we think The Green Machine offers exactly the kind of alternate thinking we need to be doing to prepare ourselves for the dramatic changes that our planet is undergoing. The status quo certainly won’t get us anywhere.

:: Yachar Bouhaya, Stephane Malka

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Unlike many of the exhibits on display as part of this year’s “Common Ground,” Kethra, curated by Zahra Ali Baba, takes a bold, multidisciplinary look at the social stagnation that has emerged since the nation first stumbled upon oil. This pavilion even received a special mention from Paolo Baratta – the Venice Biennale president. 

Kethra means abundance or surplus – something that Kuwait and other oil-rich Gulf nations understand well. But the centralized distribution of wealth following the discovery of oil has had some unintended consequences – something that the Kuwaiti pavilion explores through a fascinating manipulation of sound and space.

The speakers that dangle from wooden rafters issue a series of radial sounds in sequences, each of which represents some aspect of Kuwait’s urban life -namely domestic, public, periphery, void, worship, government, Diwaniya and parliament.

While absorbing these carefully-constructed sounds, the exhibit’s participant can either wander along the walls that are decorated with a host of abandoned drawings and plans originally designed to shape Kuwait’s post-oil urban development, or they can relax on cushions – in the way that Kuwaitis, traditionally, have always done.

Baratta is astonished by the Kuwaiti team’s creativity and professionalism, according to the Kuwait News Agency, and claimed the biennale’s organizers are very pleased with the Gulf country’s participation in the event.

Egypt is the only other Middle Eastern or North African country to take part; more on that later (hint: observers are more than a little disappointed.)

“The socio spatial typologies emerging from a culture of gathering can be traced back to pre-oil Kuwait,” according to the Kethra brief. “Increasing in density by a welfare state economy, these local habits of information gathering and distribution are registers of a critical condition between abundance and overflow.”

Kethra is an expansive gesture, a map of potential proximity and accessibility, influencing scenarios of rapid change.

How refreshing, given the cultural attacks underway in Egypt and Tunisia, to see such a smart and slightly political approach from the Arab world to the resource curse so often associated with oil and other natural resources.

:: Architecture of Kuwait

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