Carlo Ratti

Carlo Ratti (born 1971 in Turin, Italy) directs the Senseable City Lab at MIT and leads the design office CRA — Carlo Ratti Associati. For two decades he has been the most visible advocate of the data-driven, sensor-laced “smart city,” designing projects from the Digital Water Pavilion to Milan’s CityLife district.

Putting AI at the center of the Biennale

Named curator of the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, Ratti built the 2025 edition — “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” (May–November 2025) — around the proposition that architecture must marshal every kind of intelligence, machine intelligence included, to adapt to a climate-changed world. The exhibition foregrounded AI, robotics, and data science across the Arsenale, and even used AI in its own curation and interpretation, which Ratti framed as “an invitation to rethink authorship.”

The choice was contested. Critic Catherine Slessor called his appointment “a screeching U-turn” toward techno-optimism after Lesley Lokko’s decolonization-focused 2023 edition, and reviewers split on whether the dense, gadget-heavy show illuminated or overwhelmed. Artnet found the experiment of AI-written art summaries in Venice “odd.”

Ratti’s answer is that the stakes are too high for purity: with 2024 the hottest year on record, he argues architecture must move from climate mitigation to adaptation, treating AI as one strand of a braided intelligence that includes evolution and the crowd — “a living lab,” as he called the Biennale, “not for displaying answers, but for asking new questions.”