In the final days of the Architecture Biennale in Venice, long after the applause fades and the visitors have scattered, a quieter drama unfolds across the city’s narrow canals and uneven alleys. The grandeur of pavilions, installations, and temporary structures—many of them the result of years of creative labor—is dismantled in haste. Wood, glass, steel, textiles, lighting components, and customized systems are loaded onto handcarts, ferried by boats, and shuffled into warehouses or recycling centers. Some of these materials vanish into landfills. Others make short detours before suffering the same fate. For a global event that often celebrates sustainability and the future of design, this post-show dismantling presents a striking contradiction.
Behind the curtain of architectural spectacle lies the gritty reality of material logistics. High CPC keywords like “construction waste management,” “sustainable building materials,” and “green architecture solutions” have become buzzwords in design circles, but turning them into real practices on the ground is far more complicated—especially in a city like Venice. The physical limitations are immediate: Venice is not a place of trucks or forklifts. Transportation relies heavily on small boats and foot-powered carts. Space is precious, expensive, and often inaccessible for storing bulk building materials. These constraints make reuse a logistical puzzle, not just a design consideration.
When speaking with Clara, a young architect from Spain who contributed to a national pavilion in the 2023 Biennale, she described how heart-wrenching it was to see beautifully crafted wooden panels, imported steel frames, and locally sourced fabrics discarded or broken down within days of the event closing. “We designed everything with circularity in mind,” she said, “but we just didn’t have a plan for what happened after.” Her team had tried negotiating with local organizations to donate parts of the installation, but shipping costs and bureaucratic delays made it impossible. What remained was mostly waste.
These stories aren’t unique. Every edition of the Biennale leaves behind traces of this contradiction—glorious ambition followed by logistical disappointment. This doesn’t make the architects careless. It reveals a deeper issue embedded in international architecture exhibitions: a system that celebrates innovative design but underfunds and undervalues the infrastructure required for true sustainability. Even when structures are designed for disassembly or modular reuse, challenges like international trade regulations, customs duties, and transport insurance make relocation difficult. Environmental certifications and carbon footprint transparency are often not extended to the deconstruction phase, leaving a significant blind spot in the circular economy of architecture.
Still, change is beginning to ripple through the waters. Environmental urgency is pushing architects and institutions to consider not only what gets built but what happens next. Strategies that once sounded utopian—like reverse logistics in architecture, carbon-neutral material repurposing, or adaptive reuse at scale—are being tested in the real world. And they are beginning to stick. Some pavilions have begun partnering with Venetian artisans to transform leftover structures into public furniture. Others have struck deals with nearby schools or cultural centers to donate panels, lighting systems, or even whole small structures for reuse in educational environments.
There’s something poetic about seeing a piece of an international pavilion reborn as a bookshelf in a local library or as a shelter in a nearby park. The emotional resonance of this practice goes beyond carbon calculations or lifecycle analysis. It becomes about legacy, memory, and respect for craft. For example, the Austrian pavilion in a recent edition repurposed part of its wood framing for a series of bus shelters in rural Veneto. Not only did this extend the life of the material, but it re-rooted the architecture in a new social context. Children now wait under beams that once framed ambitious dialogues about the future of cities.
Such gestures are more than anecdotal. They point toward an expanding awareness that sustainable architecture is not only about what we build but also what we unbuild. Professionals in construction and architecture are starting to use digital tools like BIM (Building Information Modeling) to tag materials for future reuse. These systems can help track the condition and carbon footprint of each piece of a structure, making it easier to sort, catalog, and redistribute components after dismantling. The keywords “digital material passport” and “construction lifecycle tracking” are gaining traction not just as search terms but as actual tools on job sites.
Of course, digital platforms alone can’t solve the human and financial issues involved. The value chain of reuse includes people who must carry heavy panels across bridges, coordinate with customs officers, or negotiate with small NGOs for donations. This is where the story becomes personal. Take Giorgio, a logistics coordinator who has worked every Biennale for the last decade. “We don’t throw things away because we want to,” he says. “We throw them away because we don’t know where to put them, or we can’t afford the time it takes to repurpose them.” He mentions a time when he tried to donate a large wooden wall from a Nordic pavilion to a community theater. By the time the paperwork cleared, the wood had warped from weeks in a temporary storage yard.
These realities are pushing the industry to look not just at green materials or energy-efficient buildings but toward circular supply chains and the policies that support them. Policy incentives for reuse, tax credits for donation of construction materials, and government-funded storage solutions are slowly entering the conversation. In cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, circular architecture is supported by citywide material banks and reuse hubs, something Venice could emulate with support from both local government and international institutions.
Yet, no matter how sophisticated the system becomes, the soul of reuse still lives in the stories of people like Clara and Giorgio—those who don’t see sustainability as a brand, but as a quiet, persistent ethic. It’s in the volunteers who organize reuse workshops in the off-season, the young architects who redesign a project when they realize their original materials can’t be shipped sustainably, and the local caretakers who find value in what others discard.
Venice, with all its fragility and beauty, becomes more than just a backdrop for these questions—it becomes a metaphor. A city built on centuries of reinvention, surviving on foundations of timber sunk deep into shifting waters, now struggles with a modern dilemma: how to honor the past while building a future that doesn’t drown in its own waste. It’s not an easy path, but then again, nothing ever moves easily through Venice. Except, perhaps, a handcart with purpose.