Carlo Ratti

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Carlo Ratti in 2008

Carlo F. Ratti (born 1971) is an Italian architect and engineer who practices in Torino, Italy, and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, where he directs the SENSEable City Laboratory.

Ratti grew up in several European countries, graduating in engineering at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, France, and at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy. He later earned his MPhil and PhD degrees in architecture from the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2000 he moved to MIT as a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow, working with Hiroshi Ishii at the MIT Media Lab.

In 2002 Ratti established the design office carlorattiassociati – Walter Nicolino and Carlo Ratti in Torino, Italy. The office was selected at the 2004 Venice Biennale as one of the top Italian practices. In May 2007 the office presented a design for a pavilion featuring walls made of "digital water" at the entrance to the 2008 International Exhibition in Zaragoza, Spain. Their Digital Water Pavilion, chosen by TIME Magazine as one of the Best Inventions of 2007, will be unveiled at its official opening on June 12, 2008, at Expo 2008.

During Milan's Fashion Week in April 2008, the office introduced their "glass-and-green" extension to the Trussardi Cafe, in collaboration with French botanist Patrick Blanc.

In 2003, Ratti established the SENSEable City Laboratory, an MIT research group that explores the "real-time city" by studying the increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics, and their relationship to the built environment. In February 2008 the SENSEable City Lab presented an installation at the MoMA in New York as part of the exhibition "Design and the Elastic Mind." Called NYTE -- the New York Talk Exchange -- the project illustrates the global exchange of information in real-time by visualizing volumes of long-distance telephone and Internet data flowing between New York and cities around the world.^[1]

The group’s work on cities and technology was featured in an entire pavilion at the 2006 Venice Biennale, including a widely-praised project that showed the "heartbeat" of the city of Rome mapped through the analysis of cellphone networks.^[2] ^[3] Previously, the group was involved in the design of 1,000 tsunami-resistant houses in Sri Lanka for the Prajnopaya Foundation.^[4]

Ratti has authored over 80 academic papers. One of these, published in the journal Environment and Planning B in 2004, stimulated a lively scholarly debate over the merits of Space Syntax.

Ratti’s activity in Italy has embraced a number of civic advisory projects, including the Progetto Collegium for the reform of European universities (in association, among others, with writer Umberto Eco) and the Comitato Valdo Fusi for the renewal of a piazza in the center of Torino, Italy. In June 2007 the Italian Minister of Culture Francesco Rutelli selected Ratti as a member of the Italian Design Council - an advisory board to the Italian government that includes 25 leaders of design in Italy.

Ratti will be a keynote speaker at the 2008 Metropolis Congress in Sydney October 2008. He will address world mayors and industry leaders on "connecting cities."