For the 2025 edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, France goes en plein air.

In reaction to the increasingly digital aspect of our reality and spatial perception, this year’s curators of the French Pavilion, Parisian architects Moreau Kusunoki, aspire to create a Pavilion anchored in sensory experience rather than screens and information. Taking advantage of the well-known and easily sensed shortage of seating and pausing opportunities in the Biennale, the architects invite us for a seat outside and turn our attention to the binding matter in-between the national Pavilions – the Giardini – in a literal call for a return to the roots and heightened sensitivity to the physicality of our experiences. “En plein air” encourages visitors to slow down and reset the pace of their promenade, to contemplate and process newly collected ideas, or to interact and debate.

Moreau Kusunoki take as a case study the informal and polyvalent culture of France’s green public spaces and their function as a plateau of collective expression. They revisit the public garden as the pre-eminent site for interrogating the relationship between nature and culture, wilderness and order, freedom and control, a true testing ground for the manifestation of patterns of human behaviour. The architects build a case that gardens are not only restorative and meditative spaces that we tend to idealise as a refuge from urban noise and speed, but also a potent and dynamic place of personal expression in societal proportions, a playing field for the spontaneous manifestation of individual and collective will.

Moreau Kusunoki offer a view of the shared urban outdoors as a place of agency rather than mere aesthetic consumption. They suggest that it is the objects that our bodies touch and move – starting from the iconically French “chaise Luxembourg” and including other elements – that bring about deeper psychological and subjective connection to the common garden, and reinforce the lasting impact of the landscape and vistas that our eyes more readily comprehend. These simple yet empowering devices enable us to reclaim physical space and to become attuned to the ephemeral fleeting conditions around us (light, wind…) which make each individual experience unique.

Together with makers Atelier Blam , the architects have produced a collection of tactile mobile objects that invite us to sit, lie, play and arrange as we wish, and through this process to manifest and acknowledge (and eventually celebrate!) our innate and virtually inescapable human agency in designing the physical world around us through the senses and movement of our bodies.