Vittorio Garatti (born 1927 in Italy) is an architect. He graduated in architecture in 1957 from the Politecnico di Milano, where Ernesto Nathan Rogers was a major influence. Guido Canella and Gae Aulenti were his classmates. In that same year, Garatti departed for Venezuela, where he found employment in the Banco Obrero project led by architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, and began teaching at the University in Caracas. Garatti, like fellow architect and Banco Obrero project mate Roberto Gottardi, had been a young participant in the post-war debate in Italy against Rationalism, a critique that was led by such figures as Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Carlo Scarpa, Mario Ridolfi, Giuseppe Samoná and Bruno Zevi.
Following the victory of the Cuban Revolution, Cuban-born architect (and Banco Obrero participant) Ricardo Porro invited Garatti and Roberto Gottardi to join him in Havana in early 1961. Garatti soon began work with Porro and Gottardi on the ambitious project of Havana's new National Art Schools, commissioned by Fidel Castro. Garatti designed the School of Music and the School of Ballet.[1] Garatti fled Cuba in the late 1960s, following a political shift which deemed the architecture and architects of Cuba's National Art Schools to be a politically incorrect counter to the Soviet Functionalist building style that was rapidly gaining dominance in the country. Today Garatti lives and practices architecture in Milan.[2]