Ascents: Events: Implements

The 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2025, curated by Carlo Ratti 

Ascents: Events: Implements turns its gaze to the Blue Marble photograph captured by Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972-the first and only time the unshadowed earth has been enclosed by a single analogue frame. Beneath its familiarity, this image serves as a complex prompt and pivot for reimagining the planet and our role in it.

While often evoked to signal self-reliance and individual empowerment, the image was created through one of humanity's most successful collective efforts, and it depicts a collective-billions of humans, minus the three astronauts behind the camera. Captured with a handheld Hasselblad and a square of Ektachrome film, it challenges us to rethink, tools not as isolated implements, but as instruments for collective engagement.

Framed historically and spatially by this legacy, Ascents: Events: Implements reveals speculative models: new, shared tools that project a future of collective action. These open-ended implements serve as objects of inquiry and proposals for collaboration.

Drawings, evoking the cryptic calligraphy of interplanetary communication, suggest that the tools we create are as much about shared purpose and cooperation as they are about functionality.

Inspired by the countless individuals behind Apollo's infrastructure, the installation - advocates for widespread yet localised approaches to contemporary crises-climate change, global tensions, and resource scarcity. It imagines tools designed not for individual use, but as instruments for shared responsibility and resilience. Visitors are invited to engage with a "whole earth"- not just captured on film, but realised through collective action-where tools help sustain ecologies and work on behalf of future generations

Designed by modem (Kathryn Moll & Nicholas de Monchaux) and Smout Allen (Mark Smout & Laura Allen), the work resists solutionism. Instead, it stages encounters — in isolated pools of light — between artifact and allegory, past and future, memory and imagination. The project presents design not as a tool of mastery, but a medium for reimagining all we have yet to know.

Collaborator and Fabricator: Mauro Dell’Orco, Steve Cook and Matt Taylor

Supported by the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and MIT, School of Architecture and Planning.