*All of Pope Francis’s responses are quotes from his 2015 Laudato Si’ text. He died on April 21. The new pope, Leo XIV, an American, was elected on May 8, which coincided with the opening days of the Biennale.
Matt Shaw (MS): Thank you for joining me today, Your Holiness. I have enjoyed your 2015 encyclical text, Laudato Si’. It bridges the gap between the progressive discourse of the environmental movement and the often-overlooked progressivism of the Church.
Pope Francis (PF): Our planet is a homeland, and humanity is one people living in a common home. An interdependent world not only makes us more conscious of the negative effects of certain lifestyles and models of production and consumption which affect us all; more importantly, it motivates us to ensure that solutions are proposed from a global perspective and not simply to defend the interests of a few countries. Interdependence obliges us to think of one world with a common plan.
Caring for ecosystems demands farsightedness, since no one looking for quick and easy profit is truly interested in their preservation.
Human life is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships—with God, with our neighbor, and with the earth itself. According to the Bible, these three vital relationships have been broken, both outwardly and within us. This rupture is sin.
MS: Intelligens seemed to address these topics you speak of. An architecture exhibition can’t really solve the world’s problems. Ratti’s invitation of “different types of intelligence to work together to rethink the built environment” sets an agenda and surveys responses. I think that is what a Biennale can do: Identify a large issue, make it legible, and publicize it through media—in this case, an exhibition and a book. What do you think of Ratti’s agenda for architecture and urbanism in the era of climate change?
PF: Many cities are huge, inefficient structures, excessively wasteful of energy and water. These are signs that the growth of the past two centuries has not always led to an integral development and an improvement in the quality of life. Some of these signs are also symptomatic of real social decline, the silent rupture of the bonds of integration and social cohesion.
On many concrete questions, the Church has no reason to offer a definitive opinion; she knows that honest debate must be encouraged among experts, while respecting divergent views.
MS: Yes, the exhibition’s inclusion of science and experts on science was useful, even if just to posit the importance of such thinking. There were three types of intelligences showcased: Natural, Artificial, and Collective. The Natural portion included great examples of using less and coexisting with non-human neighbors, from the wind to microorganisms. There were many scales of thinking, from large-scale like Anthony Acciavatti’s Grounded Growth was a series of designs for agrarian communities in the Sonoran Desert and the Indo-Gangetic plains that would naturally replenish aquifers.
There were also many new, earth-friendly materials being pioneered, including in Boonserm Premthada’s Elephant Chapel, where elephant dung is used to make a series of brick arches. The Al-Musallah Prize pavilion, presented by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation and designed by East Architecture Studio with AKT II and Rayyane Tabet, was a clever and handsome modular prayer space constructed from waste materials derived from date palm trees.
PF: Human life is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbour, and with the earth itself. According to the Bible, these three vital relationships have been broken, both outwardly and within us. This rupture is sin.
Jesus reminded us that we have God as our common Father and that this makes us brothers and sisters. That is why it is possible to love our enemies. This same gratuitousness inspires us to love and accept the wind, the sun and the clouds, even though we cannot control them. In this sense, we can speak of a “universal fraternity”
MS: You say that we need all the expertise and solutions we can get when tackling climate change, which includes technology. But you also warn of “a blind confidence in technical solutions.” What do you see as the role of technology in making a better world and, more specifically, helping to curb climate change?
PF: It is right to rejoice in these advances and to be excited by the immense possibilities which they continue to open up before us, for science and technology are wonderful products of a God-given human creativity.
Techno-science, when well directed, can produce important means of improving the quality of human life, from useful domestic appliances to great transportation systems, bridges, buildings, and public spaces. It can also produce art and enable men and women immersed in the material world to “leap” into the world of beauty. Who can deny the beauty of an aircraft or a skyscraper?
The basic problem goes even deeper. It is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.…Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational.
MS: So you are saying that these advanced technological solutions in the Biennale like solar technology, clean energy systems, carbon capture technology, and higher performing glass on buildings are part of the solution, but not all of it?
PF: There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm. Otherwise, even the best ecological initiatives can find themselves caught up in the same globalized logic. To seek only a technical remedy to each environmental problem which comes up is to separate what is in reality interconnected and to mask the true and deepest problems of the global system.
MS: It sounds like we need to temper our impulses to rely on technology too heavily. Do you think that Intelligens is at times too optimistic about the techno-economic paradigm’s positive impacts?
PF: The basic problem goes even deeper: it is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object…Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational.
Technology tends to absorb everything into its ironclad logic, and those who are surrounded with technology know full well that it moves forward in the final analysis neither for profit nor for the well-being of the human race, that in the most radical sense of the term power is its motive – a lordship over all.
MS: Ratti’s third type of intelligence, its collective version, could have provided critique or more of an explicit counterpoint to the optimism of the technological. The “collective” is a generic way of theorizing architecture. Everything falls under this rubric. In the case of Intelligens, it acts as a catch-all, with even less aesthetic and intellectual rigor than the natural and artificial sections.
What would you think of this alternative spiritual intelligence? The general watering down of the “collective” in our current secular, social media–poisoned world perhaps parallels a general loss of spirituality.
PF: The accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality which pulls us in one direction. It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life. If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything. Otherwise we would simply legitimize the present situation and need new forms of escapism to help us endure the emptiness.
MS: In this spirit, I particularly enjoyed your country’s contribution, the Holy See pavilion, Opera Aperta, curated by Marina Otero Verzier and Giovanna Zambotti with design by MAIO Architects and Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO. It is a deft, long-term renovation of the Santa Maria Ausiliatrice complex. The project does what you mention, as it does not replace a structure but rather learns from it, inhabits it, and draws on it to extend its life. It embraces a building’s cracks as a productive space of ecological thinking.
It seems to embody so much of what you call “cultural ecology”—a way of working outside of our current techno-scientific paradigm to foster community among people, nonhumans, and their environment. What do you mean by this?
PF: Together with the patrimony of nature, there is also an historic, artistic, and cultural patrimony which is likewise under threat. This patrimony is a part of the shared identity of each place and a foundation upon which to build a habitable city. It is not a matter of tearing down and building new cities, supposedly more respectful of the environment yet not always more attractive to live in. Rather, there is a need to incorporate the history, culture, and architecture of each place, thus preserving its original identity.
MS: The programming of Opera Aperto, an ongoing series of performances and events, will bring that culture into that “living… participatory present” you speak of. In this sense, it was good to see that the Biennale was still deeply aesthetic, perhaps unavoidably so. It easily could have eschewed beauty for simple problem-solving in the face of crisis, as is sometimes the case.
PF:The relationship between a good aesthetic education and the maintenance of a healthy environment cannot be overlooked. By learning to see and appreciate beauty, we learn to reject self-interested pragmatism. If someone has not learned to stop and admire something beautiful, we should not be surprised if he or she treats everything as an object to be used and abused without scruple.
MS What do you see as a path forward?
PF: Love, overflowing with small gestures of mutual care, is also civic and political, and it makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world.
Matt Shaw is a New York–based architecture author, editor, and curator, and a former executive editor of AN.
