Carlo Ratti
Italian architect, sperimental engineer, inventor, educator and activist
Founder of the SENSEable City Lab, MIT, USA
An architect and engineer by training, Carlo Ratti practices in Italy and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the Senseable City Lab. He is also founding Partner of the international design and innovation office Carlo Ratti Associati.
Carlo holds several patents and has co-authored over 500 publications, including “the City of Tomorrow” (Yale UNiversityh Press, JUne 2016, with Matthew Claudel). As well as being a regular contributor to Project Syndicate, he has written for the international media including New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Scientific American, BBC, il Sole 24 ore, La Stampa, Corriere della Sera and Domus. His work has been exhibited worldwide at venues such as the Venice Biennale, the Design Museum Barcelona, the Science Museum in London, GAFTA in San Francisco, the MAXXI in Rome and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
Carlo has been featured in Esquire Magazine’s ‘2008 Best & Brightest’ list and in Thames & Hudson’s selection of ‘60 innovators’ shaping our creative future.
Blueprint Magazine included him as one of the ‘25 People Who Will Change the World of Design’, Forbes listed him as one of the ‘Names You Need To Know’ and Fast Company named him as one of the ’50 Most Influential Designers in America’. He was also featured in Wired Magazine’s ‘Smart List 2012: 50 people who will change the world’. Two of his pROJECTS- the Digital Water Pavilion (at the 2008 World Expo was hailed by Time Magazine as one of the ‘Best Inventions of the Year’) and the Copenhagen Wheel – have beein included by TIME Magazine in the list of the “Best Innovations of the Year”. In 2012 Carlo was selected with his design office as one of the top three young architects for the ’Premio Fondazione Renzo Piano’.
Carlo has been a presenter at TED 2011, program director at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, curator of the 2012 BMW Guggenheim Pavilion in Berlin, and was named Inaugural Innovator in Residence by the Queensland Government. He was the curator of the Future Food District pavilion for the 2015 World Expo in Milan. He is currently serving as a co-chair of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Cities and Urbanisiation and as special adviser on Urban Innovation to the President and Commissioners of the European Commission.
He graduated from the Politecnico di Torino and the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, and later earned his MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK.