Carlo Ratti (born 1971 in Turin, Italy) is an Italian architect, engineer, educator and author. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab, a research group that explores how new technologies are changing the way we understand, design and ultimately live in cities. Ratti is also a founding partner of the international design and innovation office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, which has offices in Turin, New York and London. He is also a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano and an Honorary Professor at TTPU Tashkent. Ratti was named one of the "50 most influential designers in America" by Fast Company[1] and highlighted in Wired magazine's "Smart List: 50 people who will change the world".[2]
Ratti has been featured in Esquire magazine's "Best & Brightest" list[3] and in Thames & Hudson's selection of "60: Innovators Shaping our Creative Future".[4]Blueprint magazine included him as one of the "25 People Who Will Change Architecture and Design",[5]Forbes listed him as one of the "Names You Need To Know".[6] In December 2023, Carlo Ratti was appointed by outgoing president Roberto Cicutto as curator of the 19th Venice Biennale of Architecture, opening in 2025.[7]
In a 2011 TED talk in Long Beach Ratti outlines the vision of an "architecture that senses and responds".[8] Digital technologies are becoming networked and atomised, hence changing the interaction between humans and the built environment. It is as if our cities, buildings and objects were starting to "talk back to us".[9] In a discussion with architect Peter Cook as part of the Royal College of Art 2011/2012 Architecture Lecture Series[10] in London, Ratti traced back his vision to Michelangelo's "why don't you speak to me?"[11] and to the Baroque and Art Nouveau periods.
Ratti's work deals with the built environment of cities – from street grids to plumbing and garbage systems – using new kinds of sensors and hand-held electronics that have transformed the way we can describe and understand cities. Other projects flip this equation – using data gathered from sensors to actually create dazzling new environments. The Copenhagen Wheel developed by MIT Senseable City Lab explores how any bicycle could be transformed into a network-connected e-bike by sampling changing a wheel hub. The project Trash Track uses electronic tracking to better understand and optimise flows of waste through cities. He has also opened a research centre in Singapore as part of an MIT-led initiative on the Future of Urban Mobility.[12]
Ratti's work has been seminal in the field of intelligent or smart cities. In an article[13] published in Scientific American together with Anthony M. Townsend, however, Ratti contrasts the prevailing technocratic vision of smart cities – highlighting instead the "human face" of urban technologies and their potential in promoting bottom-up social empowerment.
Architecture and design
Ratti's designs inventively bridge the digital and the physical. The Digital Water Pavilion at the World Expo 2008 in Zaragoza, developed by CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati design practice, reacts to visitors by having streams of water part to let them through. Its literally fluid architecture was considered by Time magazine as one of the "Best Inventions of the Year".[14] In CRA's extension of the Trussardi fashion house in Milan's central in Piazza della Scala, developed with botanist Patrick Blanc, a green vertical canopy is suspended on a crystal box to promote new interactions with people on the inside and the outside.[15] An un-built proposal for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London turns a landmark building into a "Cloud" of blinking interactive art.
Several design projects rely on data visualisation. Real Time Rome, which filled an entire pavilion at the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture, explored real time dynamics of a city mapped through cellphone data. New York Talk Exchange, exhibited at MoMA in New York City as part of the exhibition "Design and the Elastic Mind", moved further to explore global communication flows together with Saskia Sassen. Several projects from the MIT Senseable City Lab were included in Fast Company's "Best Infographics of 2011".[16] A data analysis and visualisation project resulted in an Op-Ed in The New York Times to redesign the map of the United States.[17]
During the 2013 Milan Design Week ("Salone del Mobile") CRA ventured into product design with a project for Italian furniture manufacturer Cassina, called "Our Universe". At the same venue another project, called "Makr Shakr", explored The Third Industrial Revolution and its effect on creativity and design through the simple process of making a drink.
Ratti curated the "Future Food District" – one of the themed pavilions at Expo 2015 in Milan. In 2017, CRA was part of the team led by developer Lendlease which won the international competition to transform the former area of Milan's Expo 2015 into a district focused on science and innovation (MIND-Milan Innovation District).
While a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, Ratti was one of the initiators of Progetto Collegium for the reform of Italian universities, together with philosophers Umberto Eco and Marco Santambrogio. The project led to the foundation of the Collegio di Milano and other institutions in Italy. Ratti has been involved in several civic initiatives – most notably to preserve Italy's industrial architecture heritage.[19]
In 2009 Ratti worked on several civic initiatives in Brisbane, Australia, after being named Queensland's inaugural Innovator in Residence – a Queensland Government initiative that invites world-renowned thinkers to bring their own unique perspective to the issues currently affecting Queenslanders.
Between 2015 and 2018, he served as special adviser on Urban Innovation to the President and Commissioners of the European Commission.
Since 2009 he has been a delegate to the World Economic Forum in Davos and is currently serving as co-chair of the Global Future Council on Cities and Urbanization.[21]
Since 2015 he is visiting professor at Technische Universität München at the Department of Architecture, within the Fellowship Program of TUM Institute of Advanced Study.
Since 2016 he is principal Investigator at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute).
Start-ups founded
Ratti is also the founder of several start-ups, both in the United States and in Europe.
Launched in 2014, Makr Shakr is a startup producing robotic bartending systems, whose products have been installed aboard Royal Caribbean cruise ships as well as in malls and hotels in the US, France, the UK, and Italy.[22]
In 2018, Ratti contributed to the launch of Scribit, a company manufacturing a portable, wall-mounted drawing robot. In 2019, Scribit was named among Time magazine's Innovation of the Year.[23]
In a seminal paper[27] in Environment and Planning B, Ratti questions the validity of the urban analysis technique Space Syntax. He has been opening the way in exploring the use of cellphone data to understand urban dynamics, which has now developed into an established field of scientific investigation. In general, the MIT Senseable City Lab works on papers that use network analysis and complexity science to better understand cities.[28] Such aspects were discussed by Ratti in Seed magazine's Salon, together with mathematician Steven Strogatz.[29]
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The MIT Senseable City Laboratory is a digital laboratory within MIT's City Design and Development group, within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, which works in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab. The lab aims to investigate and anticipate how digital technologies are changing the way people live and their implications at the urban scale.
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↑ Caterina (9 October 2017). "Michelangelo Buonarroti: 5 things to know". The Art Post Blog. Legend has it that when Michelangelo finished the statue [David or Moses], it seemed so real and alive that he violently hit the knee of the statue with a hammer, shouting 'Why don't you speak to me?'
↑ Trussardi Dehors, a project by Carlo Ratti Associati with Patrick Blanc for Cafe Trussardi "Dehors - Café Trussardi". Archived from the original on 9 March 2013. Retrieved 22 May 2013.
↑ For example: "Eigenplaces: analysing cities using the space-time structure of the mobile phone network" by Jonathan Reades, Francesco Calabrese and Carlo Ratti in Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design (2009; volume 36(5); pages 824 – 836) http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=b34133t
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