
Engineer, architect and designer Carlo Ratti wants cities to be smarter so that we can live in them in new and better ways.
Walls made of water, mobile phones that measure bridge stability, skyscrapers that burst apart to reveal tropical gardens … Carlo Ratti’s ideas sound like science fiction, but for a man who has written a book called The City of Tomorrow, he is not much inclined towards prognostication.
“It can be very difficult to predict the future,” the engineer, architect and designer told create.
“The future is not written in stone; the future is something that we all build together. So it depends on the decisions that we make today, tomorrow, in a year and so on.”
Maybe that is why Ratti’s designs — from schemes that use big data to reimagine infrastructure use in urban areas, to high concept installations in expos and festivals — seem to transform the future into something that can exist right now.

Carlo Ratti at one of his creations. the Digital Water Pavilion.
“What we can do is experiment with the present,” he said.
“And I think that’s what we really should do as architects, designers, engineers — to try to look at the potential of the present and how we can change it. That’s a way to try to build the future, not to try to predict it.”
Coming together
A native of Turin, Italy, Ratti built up his knowledge of maths and physics studying structural engineering — first in his home country and then in France.
“And then I liked architecture, so I went to do architecture at Cambridge,” he said. He earned his PhD at the esteemed UK university and added studies in computer science to his repertoire.
“The path was very weird,” he said.

The Digital Water Pavilion has curtains of water dividing its spaces instead of walls.
“Those things started converging into this space, which is in between computer science, design, and engineering — which is the space of cities and intelligence.”
Today he is the Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Senseable City Lab, a research initiative that studies how digital information and layers of networks are transforming the way cities can be designed and understood.
He is also a founding partner of the architecture firm Carlo Ratti Associati, and has been described, by Fast Company, as one of the 50 most influential designers in America and, by Wired, as one of 50 people who will change the world.
His Digital Water Pavilion, an installation created for the Zaragoza Expo 2008, was listed as one of the inventions of the year by Time magazine. The installation was a structure with controllable and reconfigurable curtains of water dividing its spaces, rather than walls.
“It was a way to show people in an exciting way how digital could allow us to control atoms — in this case drops of water — in a new way,” Ratti said.
“To create an architecture made of that.”
New perspectives
The inventiveness in these one-off ideas comes to life in some of Ratti’s larger designs. One example is his CapitaSpring project in Singapore.
A 280-metre tall skyscraper designed with Bjarke Ingels Group, CapitaSpring forms a literal oasis in the centre of the South-East Asian metropolis.

The CapitaSpring building in Singapore. (Image: Big-Bjarke Ingels Group)
“This building has a tropical forest in the middle,” Ratti explained to an audience in Sydney this past November.
“With a public space where people can go and meet, you can have a coffee and look at the city in the middle of nature.”
But the building’s smart design outlook extends beyond this integration of natural and built spaces. It features an array of sensors, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things capabilities.
Even its car parks are forward-thinking, built with an awareness that a future of ride-sharing or self-driving cars might render vehicles for individual transport obsolete.
“You might need much less parking spaces tomorrow. So how do we do it?” Ratti asked.
One answer was not to bury the parking beneath the ground.
“There’s a lot of infrastructure that’s going to be useless tomorrow and we cannot convert it into anything else,” he said.
“Let’s keep it above ground … let’s make the structure inside a bit more flexible so that place could be used for some other activities tomorrow.”
Another Ratti project that brings together technology, data and the people that use each is Good Vibrations.
A creation of the Senseable City Lab, Good Vibrations is a scheme to check the structural integrity of tens of thousands of US bridges without relying on costly sensors or infrequent and potentially inadequate visual evaluations.
Ratti’s plan to find a new way to measure the ‘structural fingerprint’ of a bridge relies on the ubiquity of a device able to measure vibrations: the smart phone.
“The bridge’s vibrations are transmitted from the road surface, through the tires, into the suspension system, and vehicle cabin,” explained the Senseable Cities website.
“The vibration sensors located in the vehicle can capture traces of the bridge’s structural dynamics.”