By many accounts, the future of our planet appears quite bleak. Housing shortages, a warming atmosphere, food scarcity and the rise of job-threatening technologies comprise only part of the ever-widening constellation of movements that threaten the fate of the Earth. The confluence and convergence of these global forces are confounding in their expansiveness, their complexity often eliciting a feeling of hopelessness.
In the face of such negativity, designer Carlo Ratti exudes a welcome sense of optimism. Citing Buckminster Fuller in a speech at the 2017 Architizer A+Awards, the Italian designer sees the world as currently balancing on a precipice “between utopia or oblivion.” While Ratti understands full well how the rise of many contemporary technologies has in part contributed to our impending chaos, he is simultaneously confident in their abilities to ultimately do good. It is this optimism that makes Ratti’s work so unique and so valuable to shaping the future of both the architecture profession and the wider construction industry and why there was no better recipient of this year’s Architizer Advocate Award.
Carlo Ratti Associati has proposed a mile-high vertical park and observation deck. If built, it would be the tallest man-made structure in the world.
Part-designer, -inventor, -engineer and -educator — among many other trades — Ratti places a humanism at the core of his work, not unlike other “Renaissance men” that have come before him. Through work at his firm Carlo Ratti Associati in Turin and MIT’s Senseable City Lab, Ratti has demonstrated a commitment to creating a more suitable society for all humans — one that is essentially predicated on a relationship of mutual respect with the environment.
Carlo Ratti Associati’s mutable sofa Lift-Bit was made in collaboration with Swiss furniture manufacturer Vitra.
Working across all scales, Ratti empowers design with technological ingenuity, whether it be tracking the global disposal routes of trash, building a supermarket that encourages more sustainable shopping habits or a mechanized couch that can assume a variety of patterns and permutations. Perhaps what catapults Ratti’s “Renaissance” sensibilities into the 21st century is the intensely collaborative spirit of his work, which applies to both the variety of subjects and skills drawn into his practice and the diverse range of people working alongside him. Architizer caught up with Ratti to discuss his forward-thinking design methodology in light of his being named a 2017 Architizer A+Award honoree.
Joanna Kloppenburg: Congratulations on receiving the Architizer A+Awards Advocate Award! How does it feel to receive this award?
Carlo Ratti: I am honored to accept this award — and to join other recipients whom I have long admired and respected. However, I would prefer to consider the award more of an incentive to improve our future work, rather than simply a recognition of what we have accomplished in the past.
Ratti took the stage this May at the 2017 Architizer A+Awards gala to receive this year’s Advocate Award.
In many capacities, your work is focused on giving a voice to our environment through digital technology. What is the motivation behind this practice?
As a designer, I love Herbert Simon’s definition of design: “The natural sciences are concerned with how things are … Design, on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be” (it is a quote from his book The Sciences of the Artificial). I would like to consider designers as agents that produce mutations, accelerating the transformation of the present into how it “ought to be.” It is the approach that in our latest book, The City of Tomorrow (Yale University Press, 2016), we have called “futurecraft.” I think design can be used as a systematic germination of possible futures, intervening at the interface between people, technologies and the city. In short, this is my motivation: using design and digital technologies to shape a better common future.
Your work shifts dramatically in scale, from the global, with projects such as Monitour, to the more personal, with your furniture designs like Lift-Bit 2.0. How does your work in each scale inform the other?
I think that all scales are interconnected. It was the great Ernesto Nathan Rogers, in the second half of the 20th century, who said that design should engage with everything “from the spoon to the city.” In a similar way, I think that today we must deal with all scales from the microchip to the planet.
Monitour — a project by MIT’s Senseable City Lab — tracked the global dissemination of e-waste.
How do you take your projects from thematic concepts or experiments and develop them for public use, such as with the “Supermarket of the Future?”
If we go back to the idea of the designer as a “mutagen” — as we were saying before — we see that it requires a certain number of iterations. As it happens with natural evolution, you start with a certain design, and then you allow it to mutate. In each iteration, you try to incorporate what has been learned in the previous one — especially through people’s input.
The Supermarket of the Future started as a prototype at the Milan 2015 Expo; the concept has now been integrated into a full-fledged supermarket in Milan.
If you take the example of the Supermarket of the Future, we started with the project shown at the 2015 World’s Fair in Milan. We learned much from the thousands of people who visited it. That input informed the real-life supermarket design, which is being run by Coop in the outskirts of Milan since a few months ago. Finally, we are using the latter project as the starting point for our next endeavors. In general, I like the idea of “open-source design”: a design that evolves based on people’s input, as we propose in our book Open Source Architecture (Thames & Hudson, 2015).
“I think design can be used as a systematic germination of possible futures, intervening at the interface between people, technologies and the city.”
The “Supermarket of the Future” project harnesses the power of technology to better inform people’s consumption habits. How do you approach the more emotional side of your digital projects, such as food consumption, which is a very personal ritual?
The Supermarket of the Future does indeed take inspiration from a very emotional short story by Italian writer Italo Calvino. The main character, Mr. Palomar, enters a cheese shop in Paris and suddenly thinks that he’s in a museum: “Behind every cheese there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky. Mr. Palomar feels as he does in the Louvre, seeing behind every object the presence of the civilization that has given it form.” We believe that tomorrow’s markets will make us feel a bit like Mr. Palomar: Every product will have a story to tell and will be able to make us feel part of it.
In your opinion, is it now the responsibility of the architect to also consider how humans interact with digital space along with physical space?
Absolutely! I think it is one of our main responsibilities today. This entails moving “from form to perform” — a mantra we often repeat in our Lab and Office …
“I do not believe in the idea of the Promethean architect who imposes his views on society from the top down.”
Beyond your practice at CRA and Senseable City Lab, you frequently participate in contemporary architecture and design discourse, publishing research and essays. How is this contribution important and/or useful to you?
It is very important. I do not believe in the idea of the Promethean architect who imposes his views on society from the top down. Think about Le Corbusier’s proposal for the Plan Voisin in the 1920s. His ideas were simple: Erase Paris’ dense and convoluted encrustations of built space, leave only Notre Dame cathedral as a memory of the past and replace all the rest with a new urban fabric of efficient skyscrapers for millions of people — the ultimate dream of the top-down architect.
Sun&shade, a proposal developed by Carlo Ratti Associati, imagines a solar-powered outdoor cooling system.
I believe that our approach today needs to be much different. As architects, we should propose (not impose) our designs. We should then promote a critical discussion in society. And finally, we should let people express what they prefer. In this sense, research and essays are as important as the design itself — as they help transform it and accompany its evolution.
Lastly, how do you think the Architizer A+Awards benefits the architectural community?
I think that awards in general play an important role, as they are catalysts for discussing different approaches to architecture and design. Again, they can have a “mutagenic” effect …
All images courtesy of Carlo Ratti Associati and the Senseable City Lab