Carlo Ratti (born 1971) is an architect, engineer, and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in charge of MIT Senseable City Lab. The latter is a research group focused on how technologies shape our cities. Simultaneously, Ratti is also a founding partner of the design and innovation office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati (offices in Turin and New York) and a founder of several start-ups that are challenging the design landscape. Further, the architect has been a program director at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture, and Design in Moscow, a curator of the BMW Guggenheim Pavilion in Berlin, and a curator of the Future Food District Pavilion at Expo 2015 Milan. Ratti was also the chief curator of the 8th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Shenzhen (UABB) in 2019, a co-curator of the second Porto Design Biennale in 2021, and the Creative Mediator responsible for the Urban Vision at Manifesta 14 Prishtina in 2022.
He is a regular contributor to The New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, Project Syndicate, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, and El Pais. He serves as Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Cities and Urbanization.
Carlo Ratti has been recently appointed the Curator of the Biennale Architettura 2025.
LUCIJA ŠUTEJ: I would like to open the conversation with congratulations on your recent appointment as the curator of the 2025 International Architecture Exhibition in Venice – La Biennale di Venezia. In previous interviews, you mentioned how old biennial models need change. How do you see the role and meaning of biennials today? We could also look at your past curatorial work on the Porto Design Biennial and Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture – how did you want to challenge the biennial role?
CARLO RATTI: In all of the Biennales and expositions I have curated, I have aimed to turn the occasion of the event into an opening for experimentation. We have opportunities to try new things and get feedback from a diverse audience that does not make itself available every day. It’s not just about building something big or exciting enough to put the city on the map; it’s about activating the people of the town itself. That’s why, in Shenzhen, we tried to spark a conversation about using facial recognition with interactive exhibits. In Porto, we used Big Data to reveal invisible fault lines of the city’s social segregation. At Manifesta 14 in Prishtina, Kosovo, we made temporary, surgical interventions in the city’s public spaces that allowed us to iterate on them based on how users “voted with their feet.”
LŠ: As mentioned, you also curated the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled “Urban Interactions” with Politecnico di Torino and SCUT; where due to the circumstances, a lot of the event was virtualized. As projects and activities of “smart” cities are looking at merging digital and physical spaces – how can biennials learn from them?
CR: Long before anyone had heard of COVID-19, we were planning the UABB as a digitally integrated production. First, the digital blueprints for all designs were shared in an open-source platform. Participants in the global Fab Labs network were able to rebuild parts of the Biennale in cities worldwide, creating either 1:1 copies or smaller-scale replicas of circuit boards, architectural models, and interactive installations. We also made sure to transport digital information rather than physical materials whenever we could. Shenzhen, a celebrated industrial city, produced much of the Biennale on-site.
None of these adaptations could withstand the full force of the COVID-19 pandemic, but our experiments teach us a lot about how physical and digital spaces can interact, especially in the context of globalization.
Whether it’s a global pandemic, a war in Ukraine, or a ship getting wedged in the Suez Canal, we have repeatedly learned in the past few years that we cannot count on the physical infrastructure of globalization to function smoothly. So here, digital replacements make a huge difference. Our digital sharing/local production model gave us flexibility that circumvented the need for carbon-intensive and logistically complex supply chains on the one hand and expensive airline tickets on the other. Moreover, local visitors to small replicas of Biennale exhibits could experience a taste of the exhibition—and one another—without having to fly to China. By moving bits instead of atoms, we glimpse into a more sustainable future.
LŠ: Perhaps we could also revisit your journey into architecture? I imagine coming from a family of engineers was an influence — it would be great to discuss what sparked your interest and your educational path that led to MIT.
CR: I’m proud of my family’s legacy—every day, my employees and I work in a Turin building that my grandfather built. He and my father were both engineers, and their work, which I think of as literally putting the world together, always called to me. The other important influence they had on me was moving to the countryside as a teenager. Living amidst plants and greenery, I fell in love with nature. I explored the ruins of old farmhouses, where trees and shrubs took hold in the cracks between the bricks. I saw how ecosystems responded to the seasons, shedding their leaves in the winter and absorbing stormwater in the spring.
I wanted to use my family’s skills with buildings to create something like what I saw in the countryside: a built environment with the dynamism and responsiveness of nature. Luckily, I came of age at the perfect time. I did traditional programs studying engineering and architecture in Turin, Paris, and Cambridge, but I became increasingly captivated by the rise of digital technologies—a set of tools that could animate the artificial world like the natural one. That’s when I moved to the MIT Media Lab to finish my PhD in the early 2000s. Sensors and actuators can make a building responsive and help a data scientist understand the city in real-time.
LŠ: You formed the research group Senseable City Lab at MIT, following your work with Hiroshi Ishii at the MIT Media Lab. Could you tell us more about the formation of the SCL and how the partner institutions were and are selected? Perhaps we could also revisit some of the projects you found most challenging and why.
CR: I founded the Senseable City Lab with one goal: to find the human element in the “smart city” movement. That idea is embedded in the name; it would have been a lot trendier to call ourselves the “smart city lab” in the early 2000s. But instead of perfectly optimizing the city and making it run like clockwork, we wanted a city that was responsive to human users and human needs. The approach was similar to what Hiroshi Ishii was doing with Tangible Media Group – although we decided to focus on the larger, urban scale.
Almost all of our projects rely on external partners: companies, governments, and universities. Generally, the team begins with an idea and then casts about for partners who might be interested in providing us access to resources and datasets we need. We’re passionate about partnering not only with institutions but also with the public. That’s why if you visit our website, you’ll find that projects come with not only papers but also exciting data visualizations. And much of our work is open-source; sometimes we even give out schematics.
Of course, the intersection between pure research and the real world is a messy, messy place. Take one of our most successful areas of research: studying how much you could reduce the size of a taxi fleet if you implemented a combination of vehicle coordination, ride-sharing, and self-driving technology. We found that massive reductions were possible, 40% or more, and some of that research, published at the time in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, helped inform the creation of Uber Pool. But when we made our calculations, we didn’t consider changes in human behavior: add cheap ride-sharing options, and people will take an Uber instead of a bus or a bike. Thus, studies have shown that ride-sharing actually creates more traffic than it displaces. My belief in research has always been tethered to my belief in experimentation. You need real-world testing before anticipating mistakes and sniffing weak points.
LŠ: Concurrently, you also founded and run the Carlo Ratti Associati – how and when did you decide to find your studio? Also, it would be great to look at how CRA is also involved in research, such as AI Timber, through the formation of start-ups.
CR: I founded CRA in 2004, and I did so because I wanted an institution that could put into practice the ideas we were researching at M.I.T. The studio has taken a non-traditional path; we were only known for small-scale experimental projects for many years. Now, we have a large number of employees and are breaking ground on skyscrapers and campuses across the world.
But even as we get more established in the architectural landscape, I remain very attached to the early, experimental days—when we had no obligations, expectations, or limits. Above all, I want to produce innovation, not buildings. So, in recent years, CRA has used its financial resources to support a whole bevy of startups. We’ve sold e-scooters, light show drones, and even a robotic bartender.
You mention Maestro, our most recent startup, and its research with A.I. Timber. That’s one of the most exciting projects we’re working on. Concrete production is responsible for 8% of worldwide CO2 emissions, which is why cross-laminated timber (CLT) is becoming popular as a lightweight, low-emissions alternative. But when you reduce a tree into perfectly straight planks, you waste a huge amount of available wood. That’s why our team at Maestro developed A.I. Timber. With artificial intelligence, we can scan the unique shape of each log and fit them together like puzzle pieces, creating tesselating boards that preserve as much wood as possible.
It’s part of Maestro’s overall mission to reimagine the future of construction. If we want a better future, we can’t rely on old materials or old methods. The same applies to research labs, architecture studios, and Biennales.
