Carlo Ratti to Direct Next Venice Architecture Biennale
John Hill
21. December 2023
Ratti is a co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Cities and Urbanization. (Photo: Faruk Pinjo © World Economic Forum, via Flickr)
Italian architect, engineer, and educator Carlo Ratti has been selected as curator of the Venice Architecture Biennale's 19th International Architecture Exhibition, which is set to open in May 2025.
The appointment of Carlo Ratti to direct the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, announced today, came from the recommendation of La Biennale di Venezia President Roberto Cicutto, who is stepping down in March and will be replaced by right-wing writer Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. As such, Ratti's Biennale will be under Buttafuoco, who will serve as president for a four-year period.
Ratti, who trained as an architect and engineer, teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is director of the Senseable City Lab, and Politecnico di Milano, where he was educated; he also graduated from École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris and later earned MPhil and PhD degrees from the Martin Centre at the University of Cambridge. Ratti's eponymous “design and innovation office” is based in Turin with branch offices in London and New York.
In addition to his practice and teaching posts, Ratti is an inventor — his Digital Water Pavilion, Copenhagen Wheel, and Scribit have each been on TIME Magazine's “Best Inventions of the Year” lists — and a prolific author: today's announcement mentions Ratti co-authoring no less than 750 publications! One of the most recent publications is Atlas of the Senseable City, which was written with Antoine Picon and explores “how the growth of digital mapping, spurred by sensing technologies, is affecting cities and daily lives.”
“We architects like to think we are smart, but real intelligence is everywhere. The disembodied ingenuity of evolution, the growing power of computers, and the collective wisdom of the crowd. To face a burning world, architecture must harness all the intelligence around us.”
Ratti's multi-faceted career and interests give some hints at what theme he will develop for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, though we won't get anything official until sometime next year. Also of interest is the fact Ratti, an Italian, will be helming the Italian event. One has to go back to the year 2000 and Massimiliano Fuksas's “Less Aesthetics, More Ethics” exhibition to find another Italian native directing the Biennale. Curators since have been from the UK (Deyan Sudjic, 2002; Ricky Burdett, 2006; David Chipperfield, 2012), Switzerland (Kurt W. Forster, 2004), the US (Aaron Betsky, 2008), Japan (Kazuyo Sejima, 2010), the Netherlands (Rem Koolhaas, 2014), Chile (Alejandro Aravena, 2016), Ireland (Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, 2018), Lebanon (Hashim Sarkis, 2021), and Ghana (Lesley Lokko, 2023).
Also announced today were the dates for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition: from Saturday, May 24, to Sunday, November 23, 2025.