Transforming a problem into an opportunity. Carlo Ratti, director of the Architecture Biennale which will take place from 10 May to 23 November 2025, will try and certainly succeed.
The issue is not an unexpected hiccup. It was already illustrated to him at the time of his investiture – at the end of 2023 – with an appointment made by the outgoing president, Roberto Cicutto in agreement with the incoming president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco.
The next edition of Architecture will be physically missing a “piece”: the central Pavilion of the gardens – 3500 square meters of surface area – which together with the Corderie dell’Arsenale is the essential “playing field” on which all the directors of visual arts compete and architecture in carrying out the theme chosen from time to time.
That not insignificant portion of exhibition space will not be available because, at the conclusion of the 60th Art Biennale – Strangers Everywhere – which has just been inaugurated, important works financed by the Pnrr, the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, will begin. A series of adjustments – not the first since there were numerous interventions, additions and modifications over time – which will renew and perhaps transform the first exhibition nucleus of the Biennale, that exhibition building built in 1894 by the Municipality of Venice in which, until 1905, the entire Biennial was concentrated.
But 2025 will not be a truncated Biennial. Ratti has leapt over the obstacle and is transubstantiating unavailability into opportunity, in chance, perhaps in a miracle.
Furthermore, one cannot be surprised even by just taking a quick look at his biography. Trained as an architect and engineer, Ratti teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at the Polytechnic of Milan. He is director of the Senseable City Lab and founding partner of the architecture and innovation studio CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati (Turin, New York City, London). He is – explains the CV provided by the Biennale – one of the ten most cited scholars at an international level in the field of urban planning, he is co-author of over 750 scientific publications, including the recent Atlas of the Senseable City (written with Antoine Picon, published by Yale University Press). Following – in the biographical sheet – is a long list of assignments, collaborations and citations in prestigious magazines.
A list that tells what this man (born in Turin in 1971) is made of: a mixture of concreteness and visionaryness, of feet firmly on the ground while, with the tips of his fingers, he tries to touch the stars.
There is no space in the historic Central Pavilion in the Giardini for his Biennale, but Venice is there. And it will be the city, therefore, that will open up to host Ratti’s vision of architecture and the future.
How? With a series of special projects: transforming portions of the city into Living Labs. How this will translate, we will find out.
Venice, however, seems to be the protagonist of the 2025 Biennale because, as Ratti underlined, the city is vulnerable to the climate crisis. However, the city also shows us something different: the practice of different forms of intelligence, the tidal cycles that provide a natural remedy to the problems of urban hygiene, the electromechanical energy of the MOSE that protects the lagoon from the rise in the level of the sea.“Through coordinated actions, the collective intelligence of citizens has made it possible to develop innovative housing solutions. For centuries – said Ratti – many have wondered how to save Venice. What if instead it were Venice that offered possible recipes for salvation?“.
A point of view not dissimilar to that reiterated several times – in many other places – by Renato Brunetta, president of the Venice World Capital of Sustainability Foundation. A concept taken up by Buttafuoco who referred to Venice as Hydropolis “which no utopia has ever dared to imagine but which the ingenuity of a people has been able to create – throughout its history – by poeticizing with nature through architecture. The city of water – said Buttafuoco – is therefore the local model to be read on a global scale. Complexity laboratory par excellence in which to find useful solutions for the entire world.”
Pietrangelo Buttafuoco speaks words full of enthusiasm, but also of authentic pride, regarding Carlo Ratti, a figure who unites a vast range of skills and who manifests the intention of uniting a plurality of knowledge for the 2025 Biennale, who wants to network. “The network – said the President of the Biennale – is in fact the common denominator of intelligence, human relationships, urbanity. Whether it is neuronal synapses, social networks, the Internet, it is the rhizome shape that ensures the centrality of each periphery, the interchange of nodes, the different points of view. And it is the vision but, even better, the prediction that, in the words of the poets, allows us to cross ‘the night of the world’. And this is what forecasting is for: to equip ourselves and intervene. So to create the future.” And he mentions Heraclitus, Buttafuoco, (“One is worth ten thousand to me”), for, he says, “Ratti is ten thousand.” It is the future time, the project, the present and his vision goes beyond everyday life. He speaks of theoretical horizons, the president of the Biennale, of memory, of history. Buttafuoco then mentions Cacciari, Umberto Eco and Pope Francis (calling him the Reigning Pontiff), in his cultured presentation speech.
Certainly Ratti, the man worth ten thousand, has his own plan, partly stated in the press conference with which Buttafuoco presented him while also announcing the theme chosen for the 19th edition of the International Architecture Exhibition: Intelligentgens.
“The titles of International Architecture Exhibitions are usually announced in both English and Italian – explained Ratti – in 2025, the title will instead be condensed into a single word for both languages, invoking the common Latin origin: Intelligentgens.”
“The modern “intelligence” derives from intelligens, but the choice of title also indicates an expansion of meaning associations. Translated separately, the final syllable, “gens” means “people”: from here emerges an imaginary alternative root, which suggests a more multiple and inclusive future of intelligence, which escapes the excessive limits of today’s focus on AI”.
The subtitle – Natural. Artificial. Collective.- is extremely ambitious and broadens the scope to the built environment and the many disciplines that shape it: art, engineering, biology, data science, social and political sciences, planetary sciences and other disciplines connecting each of them to the materiality of the urban space. Ratti’s will be an exhibition that imagines architects as “mutagenic agents”, capable of triggering evolutionary processes and directing them in new directions.
“The objective will be to chart new routes by putting together experimental design proposals inspired by a definition of intelligence as the ability to adapt to the environment.” All this spanning a horizon full of questions: “will we one day be able to design a building that is as intelligent as a tree?”; or, again, with reference to artificial intelligence, “how the profession will change when generative models are able to produce construction details starting from a simple textual input”. Considering collective intelligence, the one that has produced architecture without architects since prehistory, “How can we connect the old with the new to exploit the infinite possibilities of collective intelligence?” Ratti asks himself and asks us again: what if it were too late to slow down the acceleration of the climate crisis, is space exploration really the final frontier or a distraction from the real challenge, that of solving the problems on earth?
Complex questions that Ratti looks at using a layered methodology that focuses on transdisciplinarity, on a “collection of ideas”, on a circularity protocol, and on the creation of a “living laboratory”, the Venetian one, to begin with.
An overall vision already established but susceptible to subsequent definitions shines through: the Biennale website has opened a space for the collection of ideas, contributions, visions, suggestions. An original collaborative approach to which the development of a “Circularity Manifesto” will be added.
Ratti certainly shows great openness but also extreme determination in wanting to drive the machine of the 2025 Biennale. And we understand this when he explains that he aims to direct national participations – which are historically organized and managed independently from the choices of the Biennale and its directors – towards coordination and coherence with the themes of the main exhibition.
Ratti mentions a precedent: in 2014 the Dutch architect Rem Kohlaas (the designer of the restoration of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice and the Fondazione Prada in Milan) proposed to all the participating countries to contribute to Fundamentals – this is the title of the 14th exhibition he curated – developing a collective research on architecture around the theme Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014 .
For 2025, Ratti added, “we will encourage participating countries to address the common theme ‘One place, one solution’, to highlight the ways in which human ingenuity can provide answers to the challenges of our time.” Ingenuity. Intelligence in all its forms. Intelligens, as the chosen title says.
He decided on a title in Latin, Ratti. But he is an Italian who looks at the world. And, in fact, he confines his native language only to the word “thank you”, which he pronounces always preceded by “thank you” every time he answers a question. He chooses to speak in English in the crowded column hall of Ca’ Giustinian, the loose and fluent English of someone who has studied, taught and worked using that language a lot.
The choice of language naturally takes into account the remote connections of those following the live video of the press conference. A large and attentive but silent external audience which – although invited to do so – did not express any questions.
From the room, however, more than one question, more than one request. To understand something more about the upcoming Biennale, so different, we seem to intuit, from that of Lesley Lokko, the curator with Scottish and Ghanaian roots who worked in 2023 on the sustainability of projects and materials. You also have questions of a practical nature, but steeped in ethics, about who will “pay” for the transitions imagined or already underway. On the feared cost for the most vulnerable classes. But in Ratti’s vision everything evidently holds true. The “smart cities high technology and natural cities low-tech”. There Intelligens”it intertwines different scales: from the spoon to the city, from microprocessors to interstellar space; it embraces the natural and the artificial, promising a future of co-evolution between worlds long in conflict.” Over all there is a strong reference to artificial intelligence and the connection networks and sensors that connect our metropolises, creating a digital infrastructure that envelops the entire planet. And technology, the network, are an essential necessity, if it is true that – it was recalled with a reference to the inclusion of Rio de Janeiro in the list of the main smart cities, but also to a project that about ten years ago involved even Unicef – in Rio’s favelas there may not be running water, but everyone is connected.
Architecture? It’s Venice was last modified: May 8th, 2024 by SANDRA GASTALDO
Architecture? It’s Venice
last edit: 2024-05-08T17:14:54+02:00
from SANDRA GASTALDO
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