For the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, Ensamble Studio presents a luminous and enigmatic floating structure—a merger of earth and sun, two essential elements for architecture and life. This installation blurs the lines between art, technology, and architecture, addressing the Biennale’s central theme by researching bold relationships between the natural and the artificial, from nanomaterial to planetary scales.

Suspended within the Arsenale, this “sun” appears as a monumental yet weightless rock. Its thin crust, crafted by mixing minerals and conglomerates, epitomizes the fusion of the natural and the synthetic, the ancient and the contemporary. Designed as a protective shelter and light source, the rock interacts with its environment in dynamic ways. Illuminated from above, its light intensity fluctuates with visitor activity, creating a poetic interplay of shadow and illumination reminiscent of sunlight breaking through clouds.

Sun Stone is an homage to the delicate balance between the earth and the sun—a relationship that sustains life and drives ecological systems. The installation emphasizes architecture’s potential to learn from this equilibrium, acknowledging the sun’s role not only as a source of energy but as a vital force shaping natural cycles. By engaging with this primal connection, the project invites reflection on how architecture can harmonize with ecological principles, fostering spaces that regenerate rather than deplete.

In this way, far from sealing itself away from natural forces as architecture often does, Sun Stone mediates between natural and built environments. It welcomes light, shadow, and movement, transforming them into active participants in the experience, and celebrates architecture’s capacity to adapt, reflect, and amplify the natural world rather than control or exclude it. The result is a structure that fosters a deeper awareness of the ways architecture can align itself with natural rhythms.

Through this synthesis of material innovation and metaphor, Sun Stone embodies the quest for intelligent architectural solutions that are adaptive, resource-conscious, and impactful, offering a vision of architecture as both an artifact and an agent of transformation.