Armenian Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2025 Explores AI and Cultural Memory – ArchDaily

VENICE — At the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2025, the Republic of Armenia presents “Microarchitecture Through AI: Making New Memories with Ancient Monuments,” ArchDaily writes.

The pavilion brings attention to the challenges facing cultural heritage today, particularly loss through climate change, conflict, and neglect, while exploring how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence may offer new methods for preservation and reinterpretation.

Curated by Marianna Karapetyan and commissioned by Svetlana Sahakyan of Armenia’s Ministry of Education, Science, Culture, and Sports, the exhibition brings together a network of collaborators across digital innovation, architecture, and cultural preservation. Key contributors include Electric Architects, the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies, CALFA, and MoNumEd. Together, they examine how cultural memory can be activated and extended through a dialogue between technology and traditional materials.

At the core of the exhibition is a generative AI model trained on the Armenian Heritage Scanning Project developed by TUMO, a comprehensive archive of digitized Armenian architectural sites. Rather than simply documenting existing monuments, the AI generates new spatial compositions that reinterpret the forms, motifs, and material logic of endangered or vanished structures. These digital outputs are translated into physical form by carving them into tuff stone, a material historically embedded in Armenian architecture.

“Bringing together digital design, craft, and experimental practice, the Armenian Pavilion contributes to ongoing discussions about the future of preservation, the agency of technology, and how cultural memory might be sustained in an era of environmental and political uncertainty,” ArchDaily writes.