Italian architecture studio Carlo Ratti Associati has proposed a replacement design for the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore following its collapse in early 2024.

In collaboration with structural engineer Michel Virlogeux and the construction group Webuild, the proposed design will feature primary support pillars "well away from the navigation channel used by large vessels".

The previous Francis Scott Key Bridge (Key Bridge), which stretched across the Patapsco River, collapsed in late March 2024 after one of its piers was struck by a container ship that suffered an electrical blackout.

Carlo Ratti Associati has designed a replacement cable-stayed bridge with a main span of 2,230 feet (700 metres), an increase from the 1,200-foot (365 metre) span of the collapsed Key Bridge, which will place the central supports farther apart than the previous design.

"Opting for a cable-stayed solution enables the piles to be positioned at a safe distance, well away from the navigation channel used by large vessels and hence preventing the risk of a tragedy such as the one of March 26 happening again," said Carlo Ratti Associati founding partner Carlo Ratti.

In contrast to a cable-stayed bridge, the former Key Bridge was a steel arch continuous through truss bridge, an option that while strong, can be expensive and time-consuming to construct.

This means it's more material-efficient and ultimately sustainable, according to the team.

"In terms of sustainability, Baltimore's cable-stayed design is one of the most material-efficient ways to build at the proposed span, minimizing the project's embodied carbon," said the team.

"Moreover, it avoids the need to construct artificial islands to protect the pillars, which would considerably disturb the ecosystem of the Patapsco River," it continued.

Photovoltaic panels would also be installed "across the whole span".

Other updates would include the addition of a new lane on either side, bringing its total width to six lanes as opposed to four to accommodate high traffic and an increase in clearance from 185 feet (56 metres) to 230 feet (70 metres) in adherence to the shipping industry's latest standards.

It would also include integrated "smart features" that build upon Ratti's Good Vibrations research as a professor at MIT – which included capturing vibration data from smartphones placed in vehicles crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.

The replacement will also reconnect Baltimore "socially". It is unconfirmed if the design will be taken up by the city.

"This approach also provides a light-weight solution to reconnect two sides of Baltimore, both socially and economically–what American infrastructure should be striving to do in the 21st century," said Ratti.

According to the New York Times, the incident remains under the process of investigation, while Reuters reported Maryland officials aim for a 2028 completion of a replacement, with proposals requested by the end of May 2024.

Meanwhile, the resulting closure of the Port of Baltimore is causing delays in the global supply chain, with officials hoping to reopen the passage by the end of May.

Elsewhere, a recent report by the Norwegian Safety Investigation Authority criticised parties involved in the construction and design of a bridge that collapsed in Norway in 2022.

The images are by Brick Visual.

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A large solar farm forms the centrepiece of Rome's bid to host the World Expo in 2030, masterplanned by Carlo Ratti Associati with architect Italo Rota and urbanist Richard Burdett.

If selected for the event, the mosaic-like structure would become "the world's largest urban solar farm" and power the exhibition site in Rome with renewable energy.

According to Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA), Rota and Burdett, the idea is that all nations contributing to the World Expo 2030 would help to run the system.

This is intended to invite discourse on the concept of sharing energy while establishing "a new model for urban development".

"Expo 2030 Roma aims to break new ground for world's fairs and other large-scale events," explained CRA founder Carlo Ratti.

"Our master plan experiments with collective city-making processes, new energy-sharing strategies, and inclusive urban transformations that go well beyond the temporal and spatial confines of the event."

CRA, Rota and Burdett are developing Rome's bid for the expo in collaboration with engineers Arup and Systematica, and landscape designer LAND.

The masterplan proposed for a site in Rome's Tor Vergata district, which is home to a university of the same name, a residential area and the Vela sports complex by Santiago Calatrava.

Its solar farm would be made up of hundreds of square-shaped "energy trees", incorporated into the dedicated plots of each nation and engineered to open and close their panels throughout the day.

While harvesting energy, these structures would also provide shade for visitors exploring the site and form a mosaic-like structure when viewed from above.

Another one of CRA, Rota and Burdett's ambitions for the solar farm is for it to decarbonise surrounding neighbourhoods by supplying them with renewable energy.

"The master plan's vision of the Expo Solar Park ensures that the event will not only reinvigorate the neighborhood, but help decarbonize it," explained CRA.

"The solar farm in Rome covers an area of 150,000 square meters and boasts a production capacity of 36 megawatt-peak, making it the largest urban, publicly accessible solar farm in the world," the studio claimed.

Rome's bid for the World Expo 2030 is divided into three districts, named the City, the Boulevard and the Park. Laid out from east to west, they would take visitors on a journey from an urban to a more natural environment.

The solar farm will sprawl across the central spine of the masterplan, named the Boulevard, which will also incorporate all of the national pavilions.

On its west side will be the City, housing all of the expo's operational buildings, while on the east side, the Park district will be filled themed green spaces.

Dotted between these districts will be five landmark pavilions, each dedicated to a different theme, as well as a series of existing buildings in the area, including Calatrava's Vela sports complex.

The masterplan is hoped to revitalise the Tor Vergata area, with the City district converted into an extension for the University of Tor Vergata and the pavilions transformed into an innovation district for Rome after the event.

"Expo 2030 Roma's commitment to neighborhood revitalization is exemplified by the repurposing of a massive sports complex designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava," said CRA.

"After the 2030 World Expo, all the event pavilions will be used for different functions, giving shape to a new innovation district in the Italian capital."

The theme for the World Expo 2030 is named People and Territories, Together: Urban Regeneration, Inclusion and Innovation.

Other cities bidding to host include Busan in South Korea, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and Odesa in Ukraine. The host will be decided with a vote by the 170 members of Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) organisation in November.

Odesa's bid, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, focuses on providing participating nations with a kit of parts to build their own dismantlable pavilions.

The visuals are by CRA for Expo 2030 Roma.

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Architecture studios Julien De Smedt Architects, Coldefy, Carlo Ratti Associati, NL Architects and Ensamble Studio are set to renovate the European Parliament's Paul-Henri Spaak building in Brussels, with a design featuring a latticed framework and a rooftop botanical garden.

The proposal will see the European Parliament building renovated in an effort to reduce the carbon emissions that would be generated by demolishing the existing building and constructing a new one.

It will be designed by Belgian studio Julien De Smedt Architects, French studio Coldefy, Italian studio Carlo Ratti Associati, Dutch studio NL Architects and Spanish office Ensamble Studio – that are collectivily known as Europarc.

"The current Spaak building has numerous shortcomings," said Europarc. "However, demolishing it and replacing it with a new 'palace' might be the wrong approach."

"In the building sector, over 50 per cent of the carbon footprint generated happens in constructing the raw structure of a building. If fully dismantled, all that expense is lost and needs to be spent again in a new construction. Here, the strategy should be to rigorously re-use most of the Spaak structure, its carbon expense."

Europarc is a design collective made up of five architectural studios – Belgian studio Julien De Smedt Architects, French studio Coldefy, Italian studio Carlo Ratti Associati, Dutch studio NL Architects and Spanish office Ensamble Studio.

The collective will be supported by engineering companies including UTIL and Ramboll.

Renders of the proposal show the postmodern Paul-Henri Spaak Building, which was designed in 1988 by Michel Boucquillon and Atelier Espace Léopold, without its signature arched vault and surrounded by a white-latticed framework that extends above the roof line and encloses a rooftop garden.

Europarc has created a permeable design with a public passage that will lead visitors through the parliamentary building via an open-air entrance, and be connected to Brussels' inner-city pedestrian network.

The collective will remove an existing wall-like facade at the adjoining Spinelli building to better welcome the public to the site and frame views of the pill-shaped Paul Henri Spaak building, which is named after a Belgian politician.

The new design will open up the site and strengthen the pedestrian routes and connections to the adjacent Place du Luxembourg and Parc Léopold, according to Europarc.

"The building should not be impenetrable but should be a place of openness. Therefore, a public passage could be created through the Parliament," said Europarc.

"In a natural and intuitive way, the passage will provide a grand entrance to visitors of the Parliament and establish an actual node in the pedestrian network of Brussels."

The Hemicycle, a new chamber for the European Parliament, will be located on the upper levels of the building. It will be redesigned to integrate more modern amenities that include a number of digital features to broaden external and non-physical connections.

Floor-to-ceiling windows will connect the interior of the Hemicycle with a rooftop garden that will provide views across the city. These will also double as large screens during conferences and meetings.

The building will be topped with the Green Agora, a botanical garden that references ancient Grecian agoras or gathering spaces. The botanical garden will be visually connected to the below Hemicycle through an open ceiling.

Elsewhere, Kéré Architecture designed the National Assembly of Benin, which is set to be built in the capital of Porto-Novo and features a top-heavy form that aims to mimic tree canopies.

In Vienna, Malka Architecture revealed its plans to top the French embassy with art-nouveau-style light wells.

The renders are courtesy of Europarc.

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Italian studio Carlo Ratti Associati and architect Italo Rota have used over 500 metres of copper pipe to create energy-generating sculptures for its Feeling the Energy installation in the Brera botanical garden at Milan design week.

The installation was designed as a path through the small park that lets people explore different types of sustainable and renewable energy.

The copper pipes were bent to create arches and sculptures that support solar and kinetic energy generation devices. This turns the botanical garden in central Milan into an "energy park".

The electricity that is generated is stored with the help of a network of small batteries and used to illuminate the garden at night.

Architect Carlo Ratti, who created the design together with Rota, aimed to showcase what a self-sufficient energy infrastructure could look like, with different sculptures working in different ways.

"'Feeling the Energy is an energy park that explores both energy production and consumption," Ratti told Dezeen.

"When it comes to the former, we display several forms of solar power – organic photovoltaic (OPV) and luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) – as well as several forms of kinetic power; you can move a carousel or turn a handle to produce light."

The installation also showcases more abstract ways to create energy.

"From a more conceptual point of view, you can experience music and sound vibrations (those produced when you play a vibraphone) as other, unexpected ways to 'feel the energy'," he added.

The installation comprises six sculptures in total, called Energy Carousel, Garden Orchestra, The Leading Logo, Powering Vibrations, Blinds in the Sun and Solar Garden.

As well as powering the lights in the evening, some of the installations are also used to cool the botanical garden down by the use of evaporative cooling, using water vaporizers that are activated by sensors to mist the paths when people walk past them.

Ratti, who is the founding partner at Carlo Ratti Associati and the director of the MIT Senseable City Lab, said the design is intended to work as a test case.

"The installation aims to test cutting-edge energy technologies (in particular those related to PVs) in an urban environment," he said.

"The Orto Botanico can be considered as a small 'living lab,'" he added. "It showcases a miniature model of a self-sufficient energy system, inviting visitors to discover the functioning of this system as well as to improve its efficiency. In this sense, it connects each of us with the design of energy grid systems."

He also hopes that the installation will inspire people to think about how we can recover the energy that we create in our daily life.

"There is also an educational component," Ratti said. "Along the exhibition path, you can find some technical devices whose specific purpose is to harvest energy, like the LSC panels. But even more importantly, you can get a sense of how objects from our daily life can potentially become tools to produce energy."

The installation was created for Plenitude, a branch of power company Eni that functions as the "outpost" for its decarbonisation strategy.

For last year's Milan design week, Ratti worked with the brand to look at how plants capture carbon. He defended the choice to work with Eni, a fossil-fuel company, by saying it is "serious about their carbon transition process". The company has pledged to be carbon-neutral by 2050.

Ratti recently designed an Italian house around a 10-metre-tall tree.

The photography is by Marco Beck Peccoz.

Feeling the Energy is on show in Orto Botanico, Brera, from 6 to 13 June as part of Milan design week 2022, which takes place from 6 to 12 June 2022. See our Milan design week 2022 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the week.

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A 10-metre-tall ficus tree grows through the centre of the living space in The Greenary, a farmhouse renovation and extension by studio Carlo Ratti Associati and architect Italo Rota in Italy.

Located in the countryside outside Parma, the home was designed by Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) and Italo Rota for Francesco Mutti, the CEO of tomato company Mutti.

Having already won an international competition in 2017 to redesign the Mutti factory, the architects were invited to design the CEO's "forever home" in a nearby farmhouse and granary.

Named The Greenary – a combination of the words green and granary – the house is intended to "blur the boundaries between the natural and artificial". This led to the large ficus tree, named Alma, being installed in the farmhouse's new open-plan living space and kitchen.

"The 2oth-century Italian architect Carlo Scarpa once said, 'between a tree and a house, choose the tree'," explained CRA founder Carlo Ratti.

"While I resonate with his sentiment, I think we can go a step further and put the two together," he continued. "The tree stands in a new weathered steel-topped extension that abuts the original farmhouse, sunk slightly into the ground and featuring a fully-glazed, south-facing wall and skylights."

Inside the living space, a weathered steel staircase leads around the tree to a series of landings above, which are enclosed by screens that create a play of light and views.

Windows covered by perforated brick walls on either side of this room create a dappled pattern of light and shadow similar to that of the tree.

"Light enters the interior space through the pierced brick wall, corten steel stairs and tree branches," added CRA partner Andrea Cassi.

"By doing so, it mingles with the architectural details of the house, and leaves subtle shades all around it."

The landings above The Greenary's kitchen and living room lead to the bedrooms, which are lined with thinner, elongated openings and windows to provide more privacy.

At the end of the farmhouse building, there is secondary living space, which opens up to the landscape with a fully-glazed south-facing wall, shielded from the sun by large shutters.

Opposite the farmhouse to the north is a workspace housed in the old granary. It features similar weathered steel detailing and has an elasticated net-like floor that functions as a hammock for lounging and reading.

The architects' aim of incorporating nature into the design is also reflected in some of the project's material choices, including the resin flooring that incorporates soil and orange peels.

A weathered steel canopy on brick pillars runs along the edge of the granary, creating an outdoor gathering and creating a sense of continuity between the two buildings.

The landscaping surrounding the two structures was designed by Paolo Pejrone and Alberto Fusari and celebrates the biodiversity of the area.

CRA also recently collaborated with Rota on the design of the Italy Pavilion at Dubai Expo 2020.

Completed with Matteo Gatto and F&M Ingegneria, the structure was topped by a roof of three upturned boats from which hangs a rope curtain facade.

The photography is by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Alessandro Saletta from DSL Studio. 

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Italian studio Carlo Ratti Associati has created a building that aims to investigate reusable materials and natural cooling for the Italy Pavilion at Dubai Expo 2020.

Designed by Carlo Ratti Associati, architect Italo Rota, with architect Matteo Gatto and multidisciplinary studio F&M Ingegneria, the pavilion is topped with three boat hulls and surrounded by a curtain made from 70 kilometres of rope manufactured from recycled plastic.

The pavilion was intended to demonstrate how temporary structures do not need to be hugely wasteful.

"One of the things that always bothered me about expos, Olympics or temporary exhibitions is the fact that we build a temporary city and then everything goes to landfill," said Carlo Ratti Associati founder Carlo Ratti.

"So we wanted to try to say well, how can we do a pavilion where everything tries to be circular and we don't waste anything at the end, you know, it's an experiment – some of these will work. Some of these will not, it will try different angles," he told Dezeen.

The Italian pavilion's structure is formed from 150 slender vertical steel pillars, each 27 meters high, that support a trio of 40-metre-long upturned boat hulls manufactured in collaboration with shipbuilder Fincantieri.

They are coloured red, white and green to represent the Italian flag and after the expo, they will be reused as boats.

"Most of the materials you see here are assembled in a way that can be dismantled and recycled," explained Ratti."One reuse angle is the roof. The roof actually can sail on its own. Think about that reinterpretation – it's like [UK architecture studio] Archigram's moving city, but this time the boats that compose the roof can continue to sail in the oceans."

Hung between the hulls is a wave-shaped roof membrane made from ETFE and covered with a layer of perforated metal sheets to filter the sunlight that enters the building.

This is part of Carlo Ratti Associati's strategy to create a pavilion that did not require air conditioning.

The roof membrane is combined with ropes made from two million plastic bottles that are hung around the exterior to enclose and shade the building in place of walls.

"All the facades are actually ropes – the air goes through the facade," said Ratti. "So this is one of the few non-air-conditioned buildings on the site."

"Today, it's very hot," he continued. "There's a difference between outside and inside of around 10 and 15 degrees. Again, it's not perfect, but it's good. Air conditioning can turn the beach into a refrigerator, but it's just a waste of energy."

As well as being used to create an alternative to air conditioning, the ropes – like the boats – were chosen to evoke a nautical connection.

According to the studio, this references historical trading connections between Italy and the Middle East and ties into the expo's theme – "connecting minds, creating the future".

Within the pavilion, escalators take visitors to the top of a series of ramps that lead down through the exhibits that showcase Italian design and innovation.

Ratti and the exhibition designers were keen to make sure that the pavilion did not present a "cliche" of Italian design and architecture.

"It's so easy when you think about Italy, and the way people talk about Italy, often you end up with a cliche," said Ratti.

"The point was that can we actually turn that historical knowledge into a way to elaborate the future. The pavilion is a lab about experimentation."

Overall, Ratti hopes that the pavilion demonstrates how architecture should be used to experiment.

"What we need to do more and more today, especially in this moment of architecture, is to experiment like, well, nature does try new things to see what works, what doesn't," he said.

"So this is an experiment through different angles, especially with the aim of being a bit more circular, and sustainable."

The Dubai Expo is the latest World Expo – an international exhibition designed to  showcase architecture and innovation.

The six-month event will see contributions from 180 countries, including pavilions from the UK and the Netherlands, as well as the Qatar Pavilion and the UAE Pavilion by Santiago Calatrava.

Photography is by Michele Nastasi.

Expo 2020 Dubai is open to the public from 1 October to 31 March 2022. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Italian architect Carlo Ratti has defended his decision to design an exhibition about climate change sponsored by fossil-fuel giant Eni, saying the Milan design week installation is "not greenwashing".

Held in the Brera Botanical Garden, the Natural Capital installation features large bubbles suspended next to different plant species, detailing how much carbon dioxide they absorb from the atmosphere.

Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) characterises it as a "walkable data visualisation" that quantifies how individual plants contribute to the fight against climate change. The size of the bubble corresponds to the amount of carbon dioxide each plant captures and stores in its lifecycle.

The bubbles are made of thin recyclable film and their appearance is meant to recall the shape of oxygen atoms, released by plants during photosynthesis.

The project is sponsored by Eni, which is one of the world's seven biggest oil and gas producers and one of 100 companies responsible for 71 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Alone, it is responsible for 0.59 per cent of them.

CRA founder Ratti defended Eni's involvement in the project because the fossil-fuel company is "serious about their carbon transition process".

Eni has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050, in line with the European Union's climate target.

It runs forestry conservation programmes and is transforming some of its oil refineries into bio-refineries, where biomaterials such as plant-based oils, animal fats, used cooking oils and algae extracts are processed for fuels.

"I believe that their initiatives are not greenwashing but part of a true conversation process that is ongoing," Ratti told Dezeen.

"I believe that they are serious in their carbon transition process and if so they could play a key role in the future decarbonisation of society, in particular in Italy and southern Europe where they are market leaders."

Oil and gas companies have been coming under fire recently for aligning themselves to environmental exhibitions.

In May, an exhibition on climate change technology at London's Science Museum was protested by environmental activists due to its sponsorship by the oil company Shell.

Scientists from Extinction Rebellion locked themselves inside the museum, arguing that it should cut all ties with such companies because it provided a smokescreen for their ongoing oil and gas exploration, and because of their track record of obstructing action on climate change.

A freedom of information request subsequently showed that Shell's contract with the Science Museum prohibited the institution from doing or saying anything that would damage the company's reputation.

However, Ratti stressed the differences between Shell and Eni, and in the themes of the exhibitions.

"Eni has a large business unit dedicated to forestry, and it contributes to offsetting its hard-to-abate emissions," said Ratti.

"Therefore, we think they could legitimately support a project that explores the role of forests in the global carbon balance of the planet."

Ratti said that Eni provided the theme for the installation – forests – and the site in the Brera Botanical Garden, but that CRA worked with complete freedom.

For the data aspect of the project, the Turin-based design and innovation office collaborated with researchers at the University of Milan, who assessed the ability of various plant species in the garden to sequester carbon dioxide.

CRA has partnered with Eni before, at Milan design week 2019, for which they presented the Circular Garden structure made of mushroom mycelium.

Natural Capital continues at the Brera Botanical Garden until 12 September as part of the INTERNI Creative Connections exhibition. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Carlo Ratti Associati has unveiled plans to build a 218-metre-tall skyscraper in China that would grow crops using hydroponics, as well as contain spaces for selling and consuming the produce.

The Jian Mu Tower would occupy the last available plot in Shenzhen's business district, completing the city's central skyline.

The 51-storey building dedicates 10,000 square metres to the cultivation of crops, creating a vertical hydroponic farm.

Hydroponic farming involves growing plants using water-based, mineral nutrient solutions as opposed to soil. The method is a space-saving solution to farming, and means crops can be organised and grown in a vertical formation.

The building is estimated to produce 270 tonnes of food per year, which is said to feed roughly 40,000 people. It would create a self-sustained food supply chain that manages cultivation, harvest, sale and consumption all within one building.

The vertical farms are planned to produce a range of vegetables and crops including salad greens, fruits and herbs.

"The vertical hydroponic farm embraces the notion of zero food miles in the most comprehensive sense," Carlo Ratti told Dezeen. "Crops cultivated in the tower are sold and even eaten in the same location, which helps us conserve a great deal of energy in food distribution."

Hydroponic farm spaces and crops would be managed by an "AI-supported virtual agronomist" that oversees daily operations including irrigation, and environmental and nutritional conditions.

"We worked alongside a company called ZERO, which specializes in innovative agricultural solutions," said Ratti. "The ultimate solution we developed is an efficient one from a management perspective and it adapts traditional robotic hydroponic farms to a vertical facade."

The name of the tower comes from the mythical Jian Mu tree, which in ancient Chinese folklore is said to connect heaven and earth.

The shape and form of the building were similarly informed by the ancient Chinese philosophy of Tian Yuan Di Fang – "round sky and square earth".

This informed the rectangular base and cylindrical top of the tower, gently morphing from one to the other as it rises.

The building is designed to have a steel construction, with truss beams connecting concrete floor slabs to its core.

Offices, a supermarket and food courts inside the tower would occupy 90,000 square metres spread over the 51 storeys.

Office spaces adjoin double-height landscaped terraces that envelop the exterior of the building and feature a variety of flora including water lilies, ferns and lychee plants.

The greenery across the facade would reduce solar heat gain in the interior and reduce the building's need for air conditioning. Shenzhen's humid climate would help to irrigate the greenery.

"I see a lot of potential in integrating farming into our cities," said Ratti. "However, most examples in cities around the world – from Paris to New York to Singapore – have been small-scale."

"Large vertical facades allow scaling up in a way that can really help cities – the biggest consumers of food produce – to become more self-sufficient," he added.

In 2019, architecture studio Precht unveiled a concept for a modular residential tower where residents could produce their own food through vertical farming.

Another hydroponic vertical farm with crops grown on rotating loops was proposed for Shanghai by Sasaki.

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Italian studio Carlo Ratti Associati and architect Italo Rota have designed a museum dedicated to carbon fibre, which will be partially made from the material.

Created for carbon-fibre manufacturers MAE, the museum will feature objects from the company's 53-year history that show how the ultra-strong, lightweight material is used across the automotive, cycling and fashion industries, among others.

According to Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA), the MAE Museum will be the world's largest archive of acrylic fibre technologies.

It will be situated in a renovated warehouse in Piacenza, Italy, next door to a new MAE pilot plant, and will have an interior largely made of carbon fibre, including some sections made with recycled fibre.

The carbon-fibre elements will include an entrance door that "opens like a curtain", while another feature of the museum will be its heavy use of robots in the exhibition experience.

Its first room will be a robotic archive warehouse, where mechanical arms move along the walls to extract historical photos and documents and place them on a raised viewing platform for the viewer's perusal.

Elsewhere in the museum, visitors will be able to observe the process through which acrylic fibre is transformed into carbon fibre and see objects demonstrating its contemporary use.

In a black room filled with immersive installations, they will be able to interact with cutting-edge prototypes and objects that use the material more experimentally.

CRA founder Carlo Ratti said that the MAE Museum project was an opportunity to explore the ecological potential of the material through such actions as using recycled fibre.

"From high-performance bikes to the Lamborghini Aventador car, carbon fibre is driving innovation in multiple sectors," said Ratti.

"The MAE museum celebrates a defining material of modernity, by focusing on its new circular frontier and envisioning new applications for its use."

Currently, carbon fibre is made with fossil fuels through a highly polluting process. However, its strength and lightness have made it the standard for aircraft, and it is also sometimes used in cars, bicycles and tennis racquets.

Bio-based and recycled carbon fibre are now being explored but have their limitations.

MAE first produced synthetic fibres for clothing, which became popular after world war two in Europe, before moving on to carbon fibre.

The connection to clothing remains — similar synthetic fibres are put through complex chemical processes to turn them into carbon fibre.

CRA has designed the museum with Rota, which specialises in museums and exhibitions and previously designed the Arts and Food exhibition at the Triennale di Milano.

Rota and CRA have undertaken a number of recent collaborations, including creating a shipping container intensive care unit for a Turin hospital and the MEET centre for digital culture in Milan.

Renderings by CRA.

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Architecture studios Diller Scofidio + Renfro, PLP Architecture and Carlo Ratti Associati have revealed plans to convert a goods yard in Milan into a park and the athletes' village for the upcoming Winter Olympic Games.

Located in the Porta Romana neighbourhood in the southeast area of Milan, the scheme will see Diller Scofidio + Renfro, PLP and Carlo Ratti Associati transform the site into a largely residential neighbourhood wrapped around a large urban park.

The neighbourhood will be comprised of apartment blocks, offices, retail space and sports centres.

The large urban park at the heart of the new development will form an accessible biodiverse space, with vast meadow gardens, wet and woodlands as well as two elevated greenways that extend the length of the neighbourhood.

The team of architects designed the elevated-linear greenways that will bridge the remaining active tracks on the site to connect the two parts of the development.

Much like Diller Scofidio + Renfro's High Line in New York, the greenways will form raised gardens that house hundreds of trees and provide walking routes across the development.

Biodiverse wetlands and woodlands will run alongside the tracks and will be set amongst community gardens, courtyards and sports courts that aim to promote communal and wellbeing activities.

On the western side of the development, the scheme includes a mixed-use residential area that will be used to house athletes during the 2026 Winter Olympics, which will be hosted by Milan and the Cortina d'Ampezzo ski resort.

Following the Games, the athletes' village will be repurposed into a residential community, containing social, student and private housing.

Across from the residential area, a large public piazza will be built alongside renovated railway repair sheds that will serve as a vast cultural hub for events and public activities.

The eastern side of the neighbourhood will aim to become a new business centre for Milan, through a collection of new offices and retail buildings connected by a series of raised walkways and public plazas.

"Our team's goal was to retain the industrial heritage of this reclamation site, rather than turn it into a sanitised tabula rasa," said Diller Scofidio + Renfro partner, Elizabeth Diller.

"Our masterplan seeks to foster the heterogeneous feel of a neighbourhood that has grown organically over time, with a truly public gesture that welcomes diverse populations to enhance the quality of city life," she continued.

"This central space reconnects the north and south sides of the city currently severed by the railway, while an ecological spine running east to west in harmony with two active rail lines weaves the diverse programs of the development."

These plans form part of Milan's wider scheme to redevelop many abandoned infrastructural sites.

In 2019, it was announced that OMA and Laboratorio Permanente were to transform two railway yards into public parks that would filter Milan's air and water pollution.

Elsewhere, Diller Scofidio + Renfro has recently won a competition to convert a long section of disused railway infrastructure in Camden into a "garden in the sky".

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Italian studio Carlo Ratti Associati is among four winners of the global Helsinki Energy Challenge, with a proposal to create island-like, floating seawater reservoirs that would store heat to help decarbonise the city's heating network.

The international Helsinki Energy Challenge was launched in 2020 to unearth sustainable alternatives for urban heating networks, using Helsinki as a testbed.

Officials in the Finnish capital intend to use the winning solutions to reduce the city's dependence on coal and biomass, in order to meet its target of carbon-neutrality by 2035.

Floating islands will store heat for winter 

Carlo Ratti Associati's design, named Helsinki's Hot Heart, comprises 10 floating reservoirs that are filled with hot seawater, mimicking a small archipelago. The system would use seawater heat pumps to convert mainly carbon-free electrical energy from sources such as wind and solar power into heat.

The circular basins would then work together like a giant thermal battery, storing the heat that has been converted from renewable energy so that it is readily available for district heating in the winter.

Four of these reservoirs will also be covered by inflatable roof structures to create a series of enclosed recreational spaces.

These will be filled with plants from tropical ecosystems and lit by LED lights that mimic sunlight, offering a "unique public space" for locals and visitors throughout the year.

According to Carlo Ratti Associati, the project is hoped to be fully implemented in 2028 and would cover Helsinki's entire heating needs. It is being developed in collaboration with Squint/Opera, Ramboll, Transsolar, Danfoss/Leanhear, Schneider Electric, OP and Schlaich Bergermann Partner.

AI-driven energy system another winner

Other winning proposals include Smart Salt City, a new model for an energy system that uses artificial intelligence to monitor demand and supply forecasts.

Designed by SaltX Technology and Rebase Energy, it relies on renewable energy technologies for heat, but will also utilise thermochemical energy storage – thermal energy that is stored as chemical energy – for times when demand is not met.

A scheme that proposes the installation of heat pumps within the Baltic Sea to meet 50 per cent of Helsinki's heating demand was also a winning design, conceived by Storengy, Newheat, Engie, PlanEnergi, AEE Intec and Savosolar.

Named HIVE, it would also utilise solar thermal fields, thermal energy storages and district heating optimisation.

The fourth winning scheme, named Beyond Fossils, is "an energy transition management model". It proposes that Helsinki replaces using coal for heating by 2029 through clean heating auctions – a process where renewable energy developers bid against each other to supply energy.

It was put forward by the VTT, Hansel and the Finnish Environment Institute.

Helsinki to share solutions "around the world"

The winners of the Helsinki Energy Challenge were selected from 252 teams, ranging from tech start-ups to banks, engineers and architects, from 35 countries.

Carlo Ratti Associati will take a share of a prize fund worth one million euros, split between the four teams.

While helping Helsinki decarbonise, the organisers hope the competition will also encourage other cities to "take the energy revolution into their own hands" in order to achieve carbon-neutrality.

"Helsinki is not alone: to fight climate change, sustainable heating solutions are needed in cities all over the world – heating not just beyond coal, but also beyond burning biomass," organisers said.

"The City of Helsinki is committed to sharing the lessons learned and results gained in the competition so that also other cities around the world can use them in their climate work."

London is another city that is trying to find sustainable ways to support its district heating networks. In the Borough of Islington, waste heat is channelled from the Northern Line tube to the grid to warm offices, leisure centres and 1,350 homes.

The system was developed with engineering firm Ramboll to make London more self-sufficient in energy while cutting carbon emissions and reducing heating bills.

Visuals are by Carlo Ratti Associati.

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Italian studio Carlo Ratti Associati and architect Italo Rota have designed a concept for a tower called Playscraper, which is a temporary structure that consists of eight tennis courts layered on top of each other.

The conceptual Playscraper rises 90 metres (300 feet) into the sky and has 5,500 square metres (60,000 square feet) of playing space.

"We liked the idea of creating a temporary structure that could easily be assembled and disassembled, while at the same time creating a new type of public space extending into the sky and unprecedented visual experiences for people in different cities," Carlo Ratti Associati founder Carlo Ratti told Dezeen.

The concept, created for Italian sport and media company RCS Sport, uses a construction technology based on a lightweight, stainless-steel sandwich structure that was developed by the Broad Sustainable Building company (BSB).

"None of this would have been possible without Broad's innovative technology of lightweight metal sandwiches – which we had already studied in detail while curating the Shenzhen Biennale last year," Ratti explained.

Each of the eight boxes in the concept is designed to have a stand-alone tennis court, with the narrow sides of the box featuring transparent walls to give the players views of the surrounding landscape.

The long sides, meanwhile, have electronic facades for streaming the game being played, or other digital content, to onlookers.

The courts in the proposal are stacked vertically using BSB's B-Core slab structure. B-Core slabs are prefabricated and consist of two stainless steel plates held together with an array of extremely thin core tubes.

BSB claims the construction of B-Core slab buildings is at least 10 times faster than the construction of regular buildings.

"I find the technology that is being developed by BROAD in China extremely interesting," Ratti said. "Most people have gotten to know it because of the many popular online videos of skyscrapers built in a handful days."

"What I like about it is that it allows us to construct circular buildings, where everything including the structure can be reassembled or recycled," he added.

While it's just a concept for now, Ratti hopes the Playscraper building might be realised.

"RCS commissioned it to us as a concept to be built and I know that they have been looking at its financial feasibility in detail," he said. "So I think that we stand a good chance to build it."

Even if the building isn't ever completed, coming up with these kinds of concepts are a designer's "responsibility", according to Ratti.

"I like the definition of design as an exploration into different futures," Ratti said. "As such, I think that it is our responsibility as designers to constantly introduce new ideas, even if at times they are just speculative."

He also believes that these ideas can stimulate public debate and create healthy feedback loops in society.

"As we recently wrote together with Daan Roosegarde, even fantastical concepts at times become self-fulfilling prophecies – they start circulating, aggregate support and become reality," he said.

The studio also recently unveiled a design for compostable markers to be used with its drawing robot Scribit, and completed MEET, a centre for digital culture in Milan.

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Italian studio Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) has designed a concept for a compostable marker pen comprising natural fibres and a water-based, edible ink that would break down within six months.

The Scribit Pen comprises a barrel made from a choice of either wood, bioplastic or anodised aluminium, which is designed for repeated use.

This holds a nib and cartridge made from natural fibres including sawdust, hemp fibres, polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) – a polymer that is used to produce biodegradable plastic – and lignin.

The replaceable cartridge would be filled with a non-toxic, water-based ink made from edible ingredients and composted after it is used.

The bioplastic pen outer will be fully compostable, made from the same materials as the cartridge, while the wood and aluminium barrels aren't compostable but are designed to last a long time.

"Upon learning that over 35 billion markers are sent to the landfills every year, we began to work on a solution in line with the concept of circular economy," said the CRA design team.

"As we arrived at the innovative concept to create a cartridge that can be separated from the barrel, we tested a large amount of organic fibres in order to produce the biodegradable cartridge with the optimal performance."

Designed for CRA's drawing robot Scribit, the pen is currently a concept and is in its development stage. The bioplastic design has been billed by the studio as a "world first".

As the design team told Dezeen, it is working towards a final product that would be 100 per cent compostable, with at least 90 per cent of the product decomposing within six months in a general composting environment.

"We are proud of Scribit's success, and how it has empowered thousands of people around the world to change the way they draw," said Italian architect and CRA founder Carlo Ratti.

"However we were troubled by the amount of plastic produced by the markers that the robot uses," he continued. "By developing the new Scribit pen, we can turn one of humankind's primordial acts – drawing – into a fully sustainable one."

This isn't the first time CRA has geared its efforts towards designing products for a circular economy. For last year's Milan design week the studio grew a series of arched architectural structures from mushroom mycelium, which were later returned to the soil.

It also developed an experimental orange juice bar that turns the waste fruit peel into 3D-printed bioplastic cups to drink the contents from.

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Italian architect Carlo Ratti has unveiled MEET, a centre for digital culture in Milan designed to maximise chance encounters between visitors.

Located in a historic palazzo in the Porta Venezia neighbourhood in Milan, the centre centres around an orange staircase inserted into a 15-metre-high stairwell that doubles as a performance and meeting space.

Carlo Ratti Associati said the project explores "the meaning of physical space in a digital world".

"We have used architecture to produce serendipity and new weak social ties, which rarely happen in the digital world," said the studio. "This results in the hybridization of different kinds of spaces, as we have seen happening during the pandemic."

"For instance, the central stairwell also becomes a theatre, a café and a working/meeting space."

The design was informed by an earlier renovation of the space carried out by Milanese designer Gae Aulenti at the end of the 20th century.

"We started from Aulenti's intuition to create a new staircase in the middle of the building but redesigned it to turn it into a 15-metre-high vertical plaza," Ratti told Dezeen as he shared exclusive photos of the project.

"The plaza should become the backdrop for informal presentations and everyday casual encounters. Furthermore, it fulfils a more traditional function to connect all the spaces of the MEET centre across five or six different levels."

Carlo Ratti Associati, together with architect Italo Rota, renovated the 1,500-square-metre (16,000-square-feet) space across three levels. As well as the plaza the centre, which is now open to the public, has a reconfigurable auditorium and movie theatre, a cafe and an immersive hall for digital installations.

Ratti began working on the project a couple of years ago, before the coronavirus pandemic struck, and believes the brief – which focused on the meaning of physical space in a digitised world – is even more important today.

"From the onset, the client asked us: MEET could be a totally digital platform, so what should be the role of physical space?" Ratti said.

After discussions with the MEET leadership, Rota, and other architects, sociologists, and philosophers, Ratti says they came to the conclusion that physical spaces can function as an antidote to the homophily – the tendency for people to be drawn to those who are similar to themselves – of the digital world.

"The internet encourages us to algorithmically filter out individuals and ideas that challenge our comfort zone, trapping us within ideological echo chambers that are worsening polarisation," Ratti said.

"Social media easily connects like-minded individuals, but rarely starts those serendipitous conversations that a functioning community needs."

"The physical space of MEET should counter all of the above. It should maximise serendipitous encounters, which can lead to creativity and knowledge-sharing."

It was to fulfil this vision that the studio created the central, vertical plaza, which features a vibrant resin-coated steel staircase. Ratti aimed to innovate on the material fabrication process by using digital tools.

"The stairwell was digitally fabricated using an innovative laser-cut steel sandwich we developed – which allows it to cover significant spans with an extremely thin section," he explained.

The stairwell features asymmetric landings and moves in a zig-zag fashion to encourage spontaneous meet-ups.

It was also designed as a backdrop for multimedia projections, to help the digital centre's aim of marrying the physical and digital.

A number of projection systems and screens are scattered across the building so that people can access the MEET's digital archives in unexpected ways, while still enjoying physical interaction with other people.

"Since we were forced into widespread lockdowns, we have adopted a new way to live and work in which almost everything is done virtually," Ratti said.

"But such a lifestyle narrows our social circle. The internet seems to be weak at nurturing what sociologist Mark Granovetter calls 'weak ties' – relationships with people exogenous to our tightly-knit social circles – which are crucial for the strength of our social circles."

According to Ratti, physical spaces can function as a much-needed way of strengthening social ties.

"Physical space is an antidote to such an effect," he said.

"I think that as designers we are all called to imagine a new, post-pandemic 'networked specificity' – an approach to architecture able to forge new serendipitous connections amongst people and to counter the fault lines of digital communities. "

Ratti has previously designed multiple pandemic-related projects, including an intensive care unit made from a shipping container that was installed at a Turin hospital and a battery-powered wardrobe purifier that sanitises clothes.

In a live interview for Dezeen's Virtual Design Festival, the architect said "dinosaur" hospitals and universities need to be redesigned for the post-coronavirus era.

Photography is by Michele Nastasi unless otherwise stated.

Project credits:

Architects: CRA Carlo Ratti Associati
Creative consultancy: Italo Rota, Francesca Grassi
CRA Team: Carlo Ratti, Andrea Cassi (Project Manager), Chiara Morandini, Valentina Grasso, Luca Giacolini, Serena
Giardina, Aurora Maggio, Anna Morani, Matteo Zerbi, Aunie Frisch, Andrea Galli, Oliver Kazimir, Gerolamo Gnecchi
Rusconi, Alessandro Tassinari
Preliminary setting of MEP and environmental strategy: Ai Studio
Execution: Studio Del Giacco
Structural design: INGEMBP
Lighting design: Artemide
Acoustic consultancy: Onleco
Audio-video technologies: Audviser

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Architect Carlo Ratti spoke to Dezeen in this Screentime conversation sponsored by Enscape as part of Virtual Design Festival.

Italian architect Ratti is the founder of international design and architecture studio Carlo Ratti Associati and is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he directs the SENSEable City Lab.

In the discussion, Ratti discussed his work with Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs. Among Ratti's recent projects are two that focus on helping to fight the coronavirus and adapting to a post-pandemic world.

The shipping-container intensive care unit, CURA, designed by Ratti and Italo Rota, was built at a Turin hospital in March and can treat two patients.

Ratti spoke about about CURA, which admitted its first patient on 19 April, in the interview. He also discussed Pura-Case, a concept for a battery-powered wardrobe purifier that uses ozone to remove viruses and bacteria from clothes.

Previously, he's installed facial-recognition tech in a working train station in China to track visitors as part of the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture in Shenzhen, and launched Scribit, a small robot that draws erasable images on vertical surfaces in marker pens.

Ratti was also featured in our launch video for Virtual Design Festival, in which he said that what we need to do today is use the crisis to rethink what we do, and to see how we can use our skills in order to contribute solutions.

Other creatives featured in our Screentime series include trend forecaster Li Edelkoort, architect Dong-Ping Wong, New York architecture practice SO-IL, The World Around curator Beatrice Galilee, filmmaker Gary Hustwit and British-Israeli architect Ron Arad.

This Screentime conversation is sponsored by Enscape, a virtual reality and real-time rendering plugin for architectural design programme Autodesk Revit.

Virtual Design Festival is the world's first online design festival, taking place from 15 April to 30 June. For more information, or to be added to the mailing list, contact us at virtualdesignfestival@dezeen.com.

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Italian studio Carlo Ratti Associati has designed a concept for a battery-powered wardrobe purifier that uses ozone to remove bacteria and viruses from the user's clothes.

The portable case can be placed in a hallway or inside a closet and will be made from recycled fibres, which will be coated to keep the ozone inside the case during the sanitisation process.

According to the studio, the case uses ozone to remove an estimated 98 per cent of micro-organisms, bacteria and viruses from the user's clothes and fabric items contained inside within one hour.

The Pura-Case concept is Carlo Ratti Associati's vision of what the "new normal" of domestic life post-coronavirus will look like.

"As the entire world adjusts to a new normal in terms of health and hygiene, Pura-Case aims to promote top sanitation standards in the key interface between us and the environment – clothes," said architect Carlo Ratti.

"Pura-Case is an alternative to large-sized devices currently being used in hospitals," he added. "It can play a vital role in the post-pandemic world next year as we regain our old social life."

Users would place their clothes inside the case, which has space for up to four hangers, and close it with an air-tight zipper before beginning the cleaning cycle.

The purification process, which takes around one hour to complete, can be started and controlled directly using the battery-powered panel on top of the case or remotely via the Pura-Case mobile app.

The ozone released penetrates the fabric to sanitise it while simultaneously removing any odour. Once the system is finished, the ozone, which can be harmful to be exposed to, is reduced to oxygen through a natural decay process, making the case safe to open.

Carlo Ratti Associati envisions the case being used in offices, households and restaurants – particularly by individuals whose work requires frequent contact with strangers.

"Viruses or bacteria can survive on clothes for long periods," explained the studio. "Ozone, a naturally-occurring triatomic form of oxygen (O3), is commonly used in the health and textile industry to sanitise fashion items, objects, and spaces."

"Pura-Case brings this technology safely into the household," it continued. "It uses ozone to sterilise clothes while reducing the need for unnecessary washing and thus the consumption of water."

The project was commissioned by tech startup Scribit, which recently converted part of its production line to respond to the coronavirus outbreak.

Pura-Case is currently being developed as a prototype at the startup's factory in Turin, Italy, and will soon be launched through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign.

Ratti also teamed up with Italian architect Italo Rota to design a two-bed intensive care unit from shipping containers, which has been built at a hospital in Italy to help people suffering from Covid-19.

The intensive care pod, called Connected Units for Respiratory Ailments (CURA), has been installed at a temporary hospital built within the Officine Grandi Riparazioni complex in central Turin, and had its first patient admitted on 19 April.

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A two-bed intensive care unit within a shipping container, designed by Italian architects Carlo Ratti and Italo Rota, has been built at a hospital in Turin and is being used to treat patients fighting the coronavirus.

Named Connected Units for Respiratory Ailments (CURA), the intensive care pod was designed by Carlo Ratti Associati and Rota to increase intensive care unit (ICU) capacity in northern Italy.

The pod, which contains two beds, has been installed at a temporary hospital built within the Officine Grandi Riparazioni complex in central Turin. The first patient was admitted earlier this week on 19 April.

Built within a 6.1-metre-long shipping container, the intensive care pod contains beds and facilities – including ventilators, monitors, intravenous fluid stands and syringe drivers – for two patients.

"From a design point of view, containers have constraints: their dimensions cannot be changed," Ratti told Dezeen. "So CURA has required quite a bit of work to make sure that everything would fit inside them and that doctors would be comfortable with intubating patients inside it."

Ratti believes that the shipping-container pods combine the benefits of quickly assembled hospital tents with the safety of permanent isolation wards, which have ventilation systems that generate negative pressure.

"A standard hospital for infectious diseases needs special air treatment systems," explained Ratti.

"According to Chinese Covid-19 guidelines, it should guarantee at least 12 air changes per hour, sanitise exhausts with an ozone filter or an absolute filter and make sure that there is negative pressure inside each room, so that the virus cannot leak – negative pressure allows so-called 'bio-containment'," he continued.

"Such conditions are almost impossible to achieve in most tents or makeshift hospitals, which end up putting the lives of healthcare professionals at risk," he added.

"Using shipping containers, each with its own air treatment and filtering system, it is possible to make CURA pods as fast to mount as a tent hospital, but as safe to operate as a proper infectious disease ward."

Ratti thinks that shipping containers have several further advantages over other prefabricated structures, as they can be moved to areas most impacted by the pandemic and require little set-up time.

"We have seen that Covid-19 infections move in waves," he said. "First Wuhan, then Milan, Madrid, New York have been the background of a shifting battleground."

"Shipping containers can be moved from city to city and installed faster than any other prefabricated structure," he continued. "CURA pods come already furnished with all medical equipment – beds, monitors, ventilators, gases, vacuum, etc. – and can be deployed and moved in a matter of hours.

"Even the most streamlined prefabricated hospital requires a few days of installation and testing before being fully functional."

The CURA pods are designed to work as single units or combined with inflatable tunnels to create larger field hospitals. At the temporary Officine Grandi Riparazioni  hospital, the unit is being used as a stand-alone intensive care ward.

"The site in Turin is a large, temporary hospital aimed primarily at patients who need sub-intensive care," said Ratti. "However, the conditions of Covid-19 patients can quickly degenerate – that's where CURA pods can provide intensive care."

Two glass windows have been cut into the sides of the containers, which could potentially allow visitors to see their relatives while they are in intensive care.

"Two windows carved on the opposite sides of the shipping containers are meant for doctors to always get a sense of the status of patients both from inside and outside the pods," explained Ratti.

"In general the windows also allow visual contact between patients and their families, without the latter being exposed to the virus – one of the tragedies of Covid-19 has been the large number of 'lonely deaths'."

The pod in Turin is the first CURA pod to be built, but further units are already under construction in other parts of the world including the the USA, UAE and Canada. Ratti believes that the CURA template could be used across the world to increase intensive care capacity.

"Hospitals all over the world have been struggling to increase their ICU capacity to admit a growing number of patients suffering from severe respiratory diseases and needing ventilation," explained Ratti.

"Need is projected to continue in the next weeks or months, especially in the Global South. CURA provides an easy-to-install ICU extension for existing hospitals," continued Ratti.

"Shipping containers have been standardised and can be quickly moved all over the world by land, sea or air – CURA leverages the global logistics network for ICUs. Once on site, each container requires less than an hour of installation time as everything is already mounted inside it – it is only a matter of unloading it, powering it and connecting it to the vacuum and gases."

CURA is an open-source project, with all of the technical specifications and drawings available online. Designers around the world have already begun adapting the design to create intensive care units.

"In less than three weeks we received inquiries from hundreds of organisations and professionals from all over the world," said Ratti.

"CURA has developed as an open-source initiative. It is great to see that there are different teams improving the design in parallel. Some of them have already started building their own units – including in Canada, the USA, the UAE and other countries," continued Ratti.

"The virus is code that replicates itself and attacks us. Our best response is to develop our own code – in the case of CURA, the code of open-source design – and to let it multiply to fight back. This is not the time for patents or copyrights in design."

Architects and designers have been helping to combat the coronavirus pandemic in numerous ways including designing face shields and flat-pack intensive care units. Keep up with developments by following Dezeen's coverage of the coronavirus outbreak.

Photography is by Max Tomasinelli.

Project credits:

Design and innovation: CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati with Italo Rota
Medical engineering: Humanitas Research Hospital
Medical consultancy: Policlinico di Milano
Master planning, design, construction and logistics support services: Jacobs
Research: MIT Senseable City Lab
Visual identity & graphic design: Studio FM milano
Digital media: Squint/Opera
Safety and certifications: IEC Engineering
Logistics: Alex Neame of Team Rubicon UK
MEP engineering: Ivan Pavanello of Projema
Medical consultancy: Maurizio Lanfranco of Ospedale Cottolengo
Medical equipment supply: Philips
Painting products: Gruppo Boero
Support: World Economic Forum Covid-19 Action Platform, and Cities, Infrastructure and Urban Services Platform

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Italian architects Carlo Ratti and Italo Rota have designed an intensive-care pod within a shipping container that could be added to hospitals fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

Named Connected Units for Respiratory Ailments – or CURA, which is the latin word for cure – the intensive care unit (ICU) pods have been designed to increase the country's intensive care capacity.

"The aim is that they can be quickly deployed in cities around the world, promptly responding to the shortage of ICU space in hospitals and the spread of the disease," explained the CURA team.

The first prototype unit is being built at a hospital in Milan, which is one of the cities in Italy with the most cases of coronavirus Covid-19.

The units have been designed by Italian architecture studio Carlo Ratti Associati and architect Italo Rota as part of a development team including engineering studio Jacobs and digital studio Squint/Opera, which created the video explaining the concept.

The idea is to create temporary structures that could be deployed rapidly, like traditional hospital tents, but with a high level of biocontainment to prevent the spread of the virus.

Built within repurposed 6.1-metre-long shipping containers, the units would feature a ventilation system that generates negative pressure inside, a common technique used in hospitals and laboratories to prevent contaminated air from escaping. The designers say the units have been designed to comply with Airborne Infection Isolation Rooms (AIIRs) standards.

"The units could be as fast to mount as a hospital tent, but as safe as an isolation ward, thanks to biocontainment with negative pressure," said the CURA team.

Each of the biocontainment units would contain all the medical equipment needed to support two coronavirus Covid-19 intensive-care patients. Each could work as a single unit, or be connected by an inflatable structure in various configurations to create larger, multi-bed setups.

The designers envision the units being set up alongside existing hospitals, in spaces like car parks, to expand intensive care capacity, or being deployed as field hospitals.

The team created CURA in response to the current coronavirus pandemic, which is putting a huge strain on intensive care units in countries around the world. The coronavirus has infected over 300,000 people globally with Italy, China and Spain some of the hardest-hit countries.

"CURA aims to improve the efficiency of existing solutions in the design of field hospitals, tailoring them to the current pandemic," explained the team.

"In the last weeks, hospitals in the countries most affected by Covid-19, from China to Italy, Spain to the UK and USA, have been struggling to increase their ICU capacity to admit a growing number of patients with severe respiratory diseases, in need of ventilators," it continued.

"Whatever the evolution of this pandemic, it is expected that more ICUs will be needed internationally in the next few months."

Designers and companies have been responding to the coronavirus in with numerous solutions, with brands including car manufacturer Vauxhall, Gucci parent company Kering and beer maker BrewDog offering up money and production lines to make items needed to treat the virus.

A group of Chinese designers has devised products for protection against the virus, while experience designer Bompas & Parr has launched a competition to rethink hand sanitisers Italian start-up Isinnova has 3D printed a crucial valve for a ventilator.

Video is by Squint/Opera.

Project credits:

Design and innovation: CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati with Italo Rota
Medical engineering: Humanitas Research Hospital
Medical consultancy: Policlinico di Milano
Master planning, design, construction and logistics support services: Jacobs
Visual identity & graphic design: Studio FM milano
Digital media: Squint/Opera
Logistics: Alex Neame of Team Rubicon UK
MEP engineering: Ivan Pavanello of Projema
Medical consultancy: Maurizio Lanfranco of Ospedale Cottolengo

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Marco Maria Pedrazzo is a strategic designer at international design practice Carlo Ratti Associati. For the Dezeen Jobs careers guide he explains how he progressed from intern to design lead.

Pedrazzo's position as head of strategy and innovation sees him reviewing all projects the firm takes on at the beginning of the development process.

He works with prospective clients at the start of any new proposal, to negotiate and outline concept feasibility, framework legality and expectation management.

"Having a broad-spectrum designer on board from the first conversation with a potential client ensures we create the right design space to push the boundaries on every project," Pedrazzo explained.

When Pedrazzo first started working at Carlo Ratti Associati, he explains the team only consisted of 10 employees giving him the chance to, "see everything and do everything from the beginning to the end of the process".

"Go where you can experience multiple sides of the process – at the cost of having less famous names on your CV," he said. "You'll learn skills for life. Skills which will help you outcompete other candidates."

The rapid growth of the studio has seen Pedrazzo's role quickly evolve from design intern to becoming the head of the strategy and innovation department.

The opportunity to join the company arose whilst he attended the Alta Scuola Politecnica in Milan. Italian architect Carlo Ratti's MIT Senseable City Lab were partners of his thesis project and extended an invitation to Pedrazzo and his team to meet them before offering him a design internship at the company's Turin headquarters.

Since starting at the company, Pedrazzo has worked on projects including the Future Food District of EXPO2015 in Milan and a robotic bartending system for Google I/O.

Pedrazzo reveals Carlo Ratti Associati offers frequent internships with "a sufficient chance for these to transform into regular jobs".

He explains diversity is highly valued by the company, adding they are always interested in those with, "non-conventional educational and professional paths".

"We value courageous people who didn't stop at the easy option," he told Dezeen Jobs.

Offering advice to young designers wishing to follow a similar career path, he encourages individuals to gain experience at smaller firms where they can learn a variety of skills.

"Make mistakes, a lot of them, and learn fast," he said. "Don't try the easy way, don't settle for a specific vertical until you're 30. Either you define your priorities or somebody else will define them for you."

Read the interview on Dezeen Jobs ›

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Designer Daan Roosegaarde is the latest creative to collaborate with Carlo Ratti's Scribit project, creating a robot-drawn illustration based on his ongoing research into space waste.

Launched via a kickstarter campaign in 2018, Scribit is a small robot that draws erasable images on vertical surfaces in marker pens, effectively turning any wall into an automated whiteboard.

Designers Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) wanted Scribit to not only be a source of constantly updating artworks but also data, news, and information on social and environmental causes.

Roosegarde's collaboration with the company represents a combination of the two. It is an exclusive, original illustration from Studio Roosegaarde about space waste — a problem that the Dutch designer terms "the smog of our universe".

Titled What Connects Us?, it shows the globe with the known orbits of space junk superimposed on top.

There are an estimated 8.1 million kilograms of space waste circling the earth, where it poses a danger to spacecraft.

According to Roosegaarde, who has been exploring the issue through his Space Waste Lab design project, this junk — mainly old satellites, spent rocket stages and associated fragments — could be salvaged and upcycled into something useful.

"We need to look at space in a more effective way," said Roosegaarde. "What is space waste? How can we fix it? What is its potential?"

Some of the ideas to come out of the Space Waste Lab, which included NASA and the European Space Agency among its collaborators, were to make the waste into shooting stars, use it to 3D-print moon habitats or assemble it into a gigantic sun reflector to reduce climate change.

Roosegaarde's goal in collaborating with Scribit is to raise awareness about the issue at a time when human pollution is mainly thought of in terms of land, sea and air.

The little robot is pitched at both home and office environments as an alternative to an artwork hung on a blank wall or as a low-refresh screen.

"With Scribit, we aim to bring the Space Waste Lab's mission into people's homes, allowing them to view it and wonder," said Roosegaarde.

The illustration is the third in a series of exclusive artworks made for Scribit Originals, the robot maker's art streaming platform.

The series launched earlier this year with a work produced by artist Olafur Eliasson and his social enterprise Little Sun.

Scribit users can access the artworks alongside hundreds of others in the product's app, or they can create their own work.

The robot can be set up by stringing it up between two nails and loading it with four marker pens.

Scribit was invented at CRA, the design and innovation office of Italian architect and MIT professor Carlo Ratti, and launched by its own spin-off company.

Its crowdfunding mission in 2018 was hugely successful, raising over US$2.4 million across Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

The company plans to exhibit its full Scribit Originals series at Milan design week in April 2020.

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Italian studio Carlo Ratti Associati has developed an orange juice bar that turns the waste fruit peel into 3D-printed bioplastic cups to drink the contents from, as an example of the circular economy in practice.

Created for global energy company Eni, Feel the Peel is a prototype orange-squeezing machine that aims to bring circular design into everyday life.

The 3.10-metre-tall experimental juice bar is topped by a circular dome filled with 1,500 oranges. When someone orders a juice, the oranges slide down into the squeezer where they are cut in half and juiced.

After being juiced, the leftover orange peel falls into a see-through compartment at the bottom of the machine. The collected rinds are then dried and milled to make "orange dust", which is mixed with polylactic acid (PLA) to form a bioplastic material.

This material is then heated and melted to form a filament, which is fed through a 3D printer incorporated into the machine.

Visitors can watch the printing process as it builds up concentric layers of the filament, before using the finished product to drink the freshly-squeezed juice.

The cup can then be recycled after use, with the material continually broken down and remade into further cups in theory.

The move to a circular economy – which involves designing out waste and pollution from the production and consumption process, and regenerating natural systems – is being encouraged by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and others.

Last month, MacArthur launched an initiative to persuade 20 million designers to shift from linear to circular principles in their work.

"The principle of circularity is a must for today's objects," said founder Carlo Ratti. "Working with Eni, we tried to show circularity in a very tangible way, by developing a machine that helps us to understand how oranges can be used well beyond their juice."

According to Ratti, the next iterations of Feel the Peel might include new functions, such as printing fabric for clothing from orange peel.

The Circular Juice Bar will be installed at the Singularity University Summit in Milan from 8 to 9 October 2019, before touring around Italy in the following months in a bid to "demonstrate a new approach to environmental circularity in daily life".

Feel the Peel is not the first collaboration between Carlo Ratti Associati and Eni that explores circular design. The pair previously teamed up to present a series of arched architectural structures made from mushroom mycelium at Milan Design Week 2019.

Grown from a fungus material, the structures were shredded and returned to the soil as compost after the design festival, in a fully circular fashion.

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Italian studio Carlo Ratti Associati used a swarm of drones to graffiti this artwork in Turin that is based on visual content submitted by hundreds of contributors.

The large-scale painting measuring 14 by 12 metres was developed as part of UFO Urban Flying Opera, a participatory technology and art project funded by Turin-based arts and business foundation Compagnia di San Paolo.

The vertical graffiti was created by four unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying simultaneously over the course of two consecutive days.

Each drone carried a tank of sustainable spray paint and sketched designs onto a canvas installed in the city's Aurelio Peccei park, inside an industrial structure that previously belonged to Italian car manufacturer Iveco.

The final painting comprises three layers; a grey one that sets the story, a magenta layer that represents Torino's communities and public spaces, and a light blue one that ties together elements of the narrative.

The studio, which is headed by architect Carlo Ratti and based in Turin, collaborated on the project with local research and innovation organisation Links, as well as Russian firm Tsuru Robotics.

The drones were controlled by a central management system and a monitoring system tracked their precise location to enable real-time coordination across the entire formation.

According to its creators, the project represents the first example of drones being used to create a collaborative artwork on a vertical surface.

More than a thousand participants submitted their visions for the future of cities to the project's organisers, who worked with the University of Turin and the Polytechnic University of Turin to select around 100 examples for inclusion in the final design.

"The city is an open canvas, where people can inscribe their stories in many ways," said Carlo Ratti, who is also director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

"Such processes have always been happening; however, with UFO we tried to accelerate them, using drone technology to allow for a new use of painting as a means of expression."

An early version of the concept featured in Dezeen's award-winning documentary Elevation, which explores the many potential applications for unmanned aerial vehicles. The film features insight from leading architects, designers and researchers discussing the role of drones in future society.

The UFO project is an evolution of Carlo Ratti Associati's research into vertical drawing and participatory design, and particularly its Paint By Drone system, which uses flying robots to create artworks on the sides of buildings.

"The project is inherently participatory, and is about hacking the city," said Antonio Atripaldi, project manager and partner at Carlo Ratti Associati.

"It allows us to consider people's input, and build new initiatives around bottom-up contributions. For cities, this means residents can reclaim, beautify and leave their mark on the space they inhabit."

Carlo Ratti Associati has established an international reputation for projects ranging in scale from furniture to urban masterplans, which merge design with cutting-edge digital technologies to examine ways in which technology can enhance everyday life.

The studio's previous projects include an internet-connected robot that can write or draw on any surface, and a proposal for an autonomous robotic bar that would make cocktails for city dwellers wherever they are.

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Paris' famous Périphérique ring road could have its car lanes slashed by half and replaced by a playground in the switch to driverless cars, says Carlo Ratti.

The Italian architect, who is one of the world's leading voices on technology in urban environments, has explored how Paris could adapt its roads to an autonomous, electric and data-rich future in five new concept designs.

Ratti's New Deal concepts are part of an exhibition currently on at the Pavillon de l'Arsenal, the city's centre for architecture and urbanism.

Titled Les Routes du Futur du Grand Paris, the exhibition looks at how the French capital's major roads might evolve in the decades to 2050.

As well as the reimagined Boulevard Périphérique, Ratti's design and innovation office Carlo Ratti Associati envisions repurposing most of the A6 highway for farming and energy production.

According to Ratti, these changes are possible because electric and autonomous vehicles (EVs and AVs) will make roads cleaner and safer.

"In the 20th century, urbanists made space for bigger roads and more cars," said Ratti. "Today, we can leverage innovation in mobility to imagine creating a more seamless and inclusive city."

The design team drew on Ratti's research at MIT's Senseable City Lab, which he heads, to develop the five New Deal concepts.

Two of the five designs take on Paris' Boulevard Périphérique, whose 35 kilometres constitute the busiest stretch of road in Europe.

One concept, titled Habiter Le Lateralité (Living Laterality), imagines that with less traffic moving more efficiently on the road, the majority of lanes are given over to a reconfigurable playground instead.

This concept references the Dynamic Street modular paving tiles CRA developed together with Google's Sidewalk Labs last year.

The hexagonal pavers are designed to be easily picked up and moved around within minutes, meaning the same segment of street can provide different functions throughout the day.

The other Périphérique concept is titled Habiter les Dessus (Living Above). It imagines green residential buildings spanning the ring road like "inhabitable bridges". CRA points out that in its current state, the ring road sharply divides the historic centre of Paris and its outer suburbs, or "banlieues".

The Living Above concept would have the effect of "recomposing a historical fracture between the two Parises".

A third concept, titled La Voie Monde (The Street of the World), focuses on Paris' massive A6 highway.

It proposes that with future technologies, its 12 lanes could be reduced down to just four, with those previously running down the middle turned into greenhouses or a photovoltaic plant generating solar energy. The concepts show EVs charging in this repurposed segment of road.

The final two concepts address how real-time mobility data can enhance public transport and public spaces.

Multimodalite Partout (Multimodality Everywhere) shows a plaza-like mass transit hub where minibus-sized AVs meet last-mile transport options such as share bikes and scooters.

La Voie Dynamique (The Dynamic Road) suggests the possibility of these hubs appearing and disappearing at different times of the day, as they suit the transport needs of commuters.

CRA is based in Turin, Italy. Among the studio's other roads-based projects is a smart system with traffic-monitoring drones.

Ratti is currently involved in curating the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture in Shenzhen, the only biennale to focus on urbanism and technology.

The Les Routes du Futur du Grand Paris is organised by the Forum Métropolitain du Grand Paris. It opened at the Pavilion de l'Arsenal on 6 June and runs until 31 August 2019.

Images are by Gary di Silvio, Pasquale Milieri and Gianluca Zimbardi.

Project credits:

Exhibition credits: SEURA, CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, Jornet Llop Pastor, Anna Cervera, Marina Zahonero, Leonard
CRA team: Carlo Ratti, Giovanni de Niederhausern, Andrea Cassi, Gerolamo Gnecchi Ruscone, Serena Giardina, Chiara Borghi

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Italian architect Carlo Ratti has grown a series of arched architectural structures from mushroom mycelium, which will be returned to the soil after Milan design week is over, in a fully circular fashion.

The Circular Garden installation comprises a chain of 60 four-metre-tall arches, matching a form used often in the work of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. End-to-end the chain measures a kilometre – a "record" length for the fungus material.

Found dotted around the Orto Botanico di Brera botanical garden in Milan, the archways were grown organically "just like real mushrooms" over a period of six weeks from mycelium – the fibrous root of mushrooms.

Spores were injected into organic material to start the growth process, with help from mycology researchers at the Krown bio lab in the Netherlands.

The arches are assembled in groups to form a series of four architectural "open rooms" positioned in different spots around the garden.

Designed in collaboration with global energy company Eni, they will remain on view in the botanical garden until 19 April as part of the city's annual design festival, before being shredded and returned to the soil as compost.

"Nature is much smarter architect than us," said Ratti. "As we continue our collective quest for a more responsive 'living' architecture, we will increasingly blur the boundaries between the worlds of the natural and the artificial."

"Gardens are beautiful circular systems that humanity has been using for thousands of years," the architect told Dezeen.

"So we asked ourselves, could we create a piece of architecture that grows like a plant, or like a mushroom?"

The reference to Antoni Gaudí, and also Swiss engineer Heinz Isler, is the use of inverted catenaries, which are the curves formed when a rope hangs freely between two points.

As Ratti explained, this method enables architects to create structures that rely on compression rather than tension to hold their shape, by taking the form of suspended catenaries, and turning them upside-down.

"We did a few structural tests and found that, while mycelium is not too strong in traction, it is strong in compression," said the architect. "We knew if we used catenaries then we could calculate how the structures would behave."

While many pavilions designed for temporary exhibitions and fairs like Milan design week end up generating large amounts of waste, Ratti's Circular Garden installation will be disposed of in a fully sustainable manner.

The mycelium will be shredded and returned to the soil where it will become compost, as will the ropes made from hemp. Any small metal elements used in the construction will be recycled.

"For us, this is more like a lesson about how we can create architecture where every single thing can be reused," said Ratti.

"It's probably the first installation ever at Salone where not one single element will be going to landfill," he added. "Everything will either go back into the soil, or will be reused."

French architect Arthur Mamou-Mani is also promoting sustainable design at this year's Milan design week. His Conifera installation created for fashion brand COS consists of 700 lattice-structured bricks that have been 3D-printed from a mixture of bioplastic and wood.

Photography is by Marco Beck Peccoz.

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Italian architect Carlo Ratti has revealed his concept for an autonomous robotic cafe and bar that would make on-demand cocktails for city-dwellers wherever they are.

The driverless drinks cart, called Guido, has a unit with two mechanical arms – one for shaking and stirring and another for pouring and serving – that can accurately prepare and serve any drink within seconds, mounted onto a self-driving vehicle platform.

Billed as the world's first self-driving bar unit, Guido was devised in collaboration with Ratti's company Makr Shakr in a bid to offer new leisure experiences in urban environments.

The concept is a development on Ratti's mass-market robotic cocktail maker, called Nino, which has the capacity to mix an infinite variety of cocktails using up to 170 bottles of different spirits stored in its overhead rack.

"Guido is the application of a city-on-demand paradigm," said Makr Shakr CEO Emanuele Rossetti.

"By matching Makr Shakr's robotic bartenders with the mobility systems of the future researched by Carlo Ratti Associati, we can put forward a new idea for the experience of leisure."

"Our company has always encouraged a paradigm of participation when it comes to making your own drink," he added.

"Now, what happens if you extend the same approach to the city? With Guido, we show how technologies can make cities more responsive, and ultimately more fun."

For the time being, Guido is just a concept, but Carlo Ratti Associati plans to make it into a reality later his year.

Customers would be able to use an app to book Guido and order it to meet them in their current location, like a "drink-hailing" version of on-demand transport services such as Uber.

Guido, which translates to "I drive" in Italian, would use self-driving technology to move around autonomously and reach its customer, who can then order a drink via the app.

The system would be able to scan its customer's ID to verify their age, and allow them to pay using their mobile phone.

Ratti envisions this on-the-go drink experience as a way of utilising the latest technologies to offer new social opportunities in the capital, and to create new social dynamics by bring different groups of people together in "serendipitous, smaller hubs of activity".

"Right now, in many cities, small central areas are full of life while only a few steps away more peripheral areas are empty and lifeless, and sometimes unsafe," explained Carlo Ratti Associati.

"Guido offers an alternative, imagining that different parts of the city can be activated by the opportunity to enjoy one's leisure time on their streets," the company added.

Guido is a continuation of Ratti's interest in autonomous mobility, which saw him reveal a concept for a smart road system back in January 2018, which features swarms of drones that deliver first aid, monitor traffic and detect accidents in preparation for the arrival of self-driving vehicles.

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Architect Carlo Ratti has worked with Indian non-profit WeRise to develop a system of low-cost housing with a prefabricated core that homeowners can build any structure they like on top of.

The Livingboard system, which is currently being tried in a pilot project in a village just outside Bangalore, is designed to support housing development in rural areas anywhere in the world.

It combines elements of prefabricated housing with the do-it-yourself approach of the open-source and maker movements.

Homeowners receive the key functional parts of the house prefabricated and flat-packed — incorporating elements like waste management and water treatment systems — and then design and build the home they want on top of that.

Ratti, who as well as leading his own architecture practice, Carlo Ratti Associati, is the director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), likens Livingboard to a portable "motherboard".

"The maker movement has shown how empowering it is to put the new fabrication tools in the hands of people," said Ratti. "An important challenge for the next years will be to apply the same principle to construction – transferring the DIY attitude of Fab Labs to housing. This is the vision behind our design for Livingboard."

Some of the other functional elements that are packed into the Livingboard core include heating, batteries for energy storage and Wi-Fi connectivity.

However, this core is adaptable to suit the local environment. For the current pilot project in the village of Udagirinallappanahalli, Carlo Ratti Associati and WeRise will swap out rainwater collection modules in favour of grey water filtration for irrigation purposes.

The Karnataka region in which the village is located receives little rainfall, and this configuration will minimise overall water consumption.

If they had to adapt the system for somewhere like the western and central Himalaya regions, where earthquake activity is high, they imagine opting for seismic isolation modules.

To empower the local community to take on the next stage of the design and building process themselves, WeRise will run workshops, with a volunteer architect from the RMZ Foundation attached to oversee each home. It is currently organising its first workshop as part of the pilot project.

The family who will be living in the home will determine the layout that suits them. It's likely this will see Livingboard adapted to local architectural norms — in Udagirinallappanahalli, houses are often laid out according to the principles of Vastu, which aim to promote balance between humans and nature by guiding the orientation and placement of various elements.

The homeowners will also work with WeRise and its local partners to pick the finishings for the house. For the pilot project, the companies foresee working with compressed earth blocks for the units, and local woods like bamboo, mathi, honne and sal for the framing.

Flat roofs will probably be made with slabs of south Indian Sadarahalli granite, on which residents often dry seeds.

WeRise's mission is to connect those in need of a new home with implementation partners. These people will become homeowners through the contribution of a small amount of money and "sweat equity".

"The approach to this project developed together with CRA meets WeRise's vision of improving living conditions in rural India, by adopting technology as a means of democratisation," said WeRise founder Adhya Menda.

"We want to empower local communities through an open-source approach," added CRA project manager Emma Greer. "Our goal is not to superimpose any design category but rather give local communities a tool to access basic services in their homes, while harmonising it with their desires."

Ratti's firm focuses on architecture, design and innovation, drawing on his boundary-pushing research at MIT. Among its recent projects is the Dynamic Street that can be reconfigured for different uses throughout the day, the 88 Market Street tower with BIG in Singapore and the technology-laden Office 3.0 in Turin.

Project credits:

Carlo Ratti Associati team: Carlo Ratti, Giovanni de Niederhausern, Saverio Panata, Emma Greer (Project Manager), Chiara Morandini (Project Lead), Anna Morani.
Renderings by CRA graphic team: Gary di Silvio, Gianluca Zimbardi, Pasquale Milieri

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Italian architect Carlo Ratti and Alphabet company Sidewalk Labs have worked together on a modular paving system that can change the use of a street throughout the day.

Dynamic Street is a prototype paver developed by Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) alongside Sidewalk Labs — the urbanism-focused subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet.

The system of hexagonal pavers is designed to be easily picked up and moved around "within hours or even minutes", according to CRA.

The goal is to enable the same stretch of road or pavement to be used for different purposes at different times of the day or week. CRA gives the example of an urban passageway that is busy with foot and bicycle traffic during rush hour, but quiet for the rest of the day.

Dynamic Street would enable this strip to be transformed into a play space in the middle of the day, or reconfigured for a block party or basketball game on weekends.

"The Dynamic Street creates a space for urban experimentation," said Ratti, who also serves as the director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "With this project, we aim to create a streetscape that responds to citizens' ever-changing needs."

In addition to being easy to rearrange, the Dynamic Street pavers are embedded with lights that can be set to communicate crossings, bike lanes, pick-up zones or other guidance.

Each paver also has a slot for inserting optional vertical elements, such as bollards, bike racks, exercise equipment, microphone stands or basketball hoops.

CRA project manager Emma Greer believes that it will become even more useful to have flexible streetscapes with the arrival of self-driving cars.

"Self-driving cars will change both the number of lanes and the amount of parking we will need," she said. "The Dynamic Street explores a flexible platform that allows people to see how technology can evolve and respond to different conditions."

The Dynamic Street is inspired by a developments in removable pavers made by French research group IFSTTAR in the city of Nantes.

CRA and Sidewalk Labs' prototype is made from wood, but the creators envision the finished product coming in a range of materials, including concrete and rubber.

The project is on display at Sidewalk Labs' 307 workspace in Toronto, where 232 of the modular pavers are arranged to simulate an 11-metre-wide street. It's open to visitors every weekend throughout the summer.

Sidewalk Labs is in the process of redeveloping an unused stretch of waterfront in the city — Canada's largest — which will incorporate several experimental elements and innovative tech.

In an interview with Dezeen, the company's head of urban systems Rohit Aggarwala said that their goal is to "speed up" the process of urban regeneration by taking advantage of newly available technologies.

Ratti similarly incorporates cutting-edge tech into his projects. Recent examples include Turin's high-tech Office 3.0, a smart road system and a sewage-sampling robot for eliminating diseases.

Photography is by David Pike.

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Italian architect Carlo Ratti and his company Makr Shakr have launched a mass-market robotic cocktail maker.

Nino is an updated version of Makr Shakr's existing Bionic Bar, which debuted at Milan design week in 2013 and has since been put into use in cruise liners and hotels.

Nino has the capacity to mix an infinite variety of cocktails from up to 170 bottles of different spirits stored in its overhead rack.

Customers can place orders via an accompanying phone app, where they can either pick a recipe created by a professional mixologist, or devise their own concoctions.

"Nino explores the new dynamics of social creation and consumption — 'design, make and enjoy' — allowing users to design their own cocktail creations, while digitally controlled machines transform their ideas into reality," said Ratti, who is a founder of Makr Shakr as well as the head of his own practice, Carlo Ratti Associati and a professor at MIT.

Although Nino might lack the banter of the best human bartenders, Makr Shakr describes the robot as able to "precisely prepare and elegantly serve any drink in seconds".

The system has two robotic arms — one for the complex tasks of shaking, stirring and muddling, and a second for pouring and serving.

While its appearance is similar to industrial robots commonly seen in warehouses, Ratti modelled its "dance-like" movements on humans — and one human in particular, Italian choreographer Marco Pelle. Pelle's gestures were filmed and used as inputs when programming the robot.

Ratti told Dezeen that Nino is not intended to replace human bartenders; rather, he sees it as an opportunity to teach people how to interact with the machines that will almost certainly be part of their lives in the future.

"We like to think that Nino can help us explore how people might embrace the new possibilities offered by robotics and digital manufacturing," he said. "Robots are already revolutionising the job market — but few people have seen them in real life, let alone controlled them."

"We think that this knowledge is the first step to be able to manage technology — and for us is a crucial role of Nino'" he continued. "This is also the reason why we have picked standard industrial arms, instead of camouflaging them under a humanoid appearance."

Nino uses Corian counters and has an illuminated rear wall display that can show information including current orders and queue time.

After its initial prototype was previewed in Milan in May 2013, Makr Shakr 1.0 officially launched at Google's developer conference later that month.

Makr Shakr was spun off into its own company in 2014, and has since installed five units on Royal Caribbean cruise ships, plus one on the Las Vegas strip.

The company says that these units have so far made more than 1 million drinks, sometimes serving as many as 800 cocktails per night.

Ratti is one of the key players shaping the future of smart technology. As well as heading up the influential Senseable City Lab at MIT, he was the architect of Office 3.0 in Turin, which has a personalised "environmental bubble" for every worker, and recently revealed a concept smart road system complete with traffic-monitoring drones.

Images are by CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati

Project credits:

Design: CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati
Technical support: Kuka, Cia Automation and Robotics, Sintexa, SMC, Keyence, Wurth, Pac Team, Google Cloud

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Four teams including architects Amanda Levete, Carlo Ratti and Junya Ishigami are vying to improve facilities at the Eiffel Tower, in time for the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The teams including architects, landscape designers and urban planners have been selected to draw up ideas that would improve facilities for the six million tourists that visit the Paris landmark each year.

The project – called Grand Site Tour Eiffel: discover, approach, visit – will see the teams revise the approach to the 324-metre tower, rethink access to its lifts, and make improvement to the reception and workspaces within.

Amanda Levete's London-based firm AL_A is leading one team that also includes landscape architects Gross Max and urban design expert Ricky Burdett.

British firm Gustafson Porter + Bowman heads up another team including architects Chartier and Corbasson, Atelier Monchecourt & Co, and urban planners Sathy, and Devillers & Associés Agency.

A third team is headed by French studio KOZ Architects with architects Junya Ishigami and Niclas Dünnebacke.

The final team competing for the contract is led by French landscapers Agence Ter and includes architects Carlo Ratti and Explorations Architecture.

The brief also calls for "the partial transformation of certain built elements, in a spirit of sobriety, robustness and economy of resources".

"Currently, the configuration of the places and their layout do not always allow to guide and welcome visitors in satisfactory conditions. Pathways are often complex and queues sometimes messy," reads the brief.

The four teams will develop their proposals using a 3D model of the tower developed by software company Autodesk.

The winner of the competition will be announced in early 2019, with work expected to complete by 2023 – the year before Paris hosts the Olympic Games.

Other plans afoot to ready the city for the sporting events include a masterplan by architecture and engineering pairing Populous and Egis that will see a beach volleyball court will be installed at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

And last week French architects SCAU revealed its plans to cover the Clamart stadium in foliage as part of a renovation that will complete before the Olympics kick off.

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Italian architect Carlo Ratti has created an internet-connected writing robot that is able to draw and erase images on any surface.

The small Scribit robot allows users to personalise their walls with digital artworks. It will be unveiled at this year's Milan design week, taking place from 16 to 25 April 2018.

Requiring just two nails and a power plug, the device can be installed in less than five minutes. It then uses inbuilt engines to move, draw, erase and re-draw new content a limitless amount of times.

Users can either create brand new content or upload an existing visual file from the internet, which will then be autonomously drawn by Scribit. The robot is able to draw onto any wall surface, including whiteboards, glass and plaster.

"A restaurant can post the day's menu on its wall, a financial firm can post stock market updates in its lobby, or someone who loves art can project a Van Gogh – or their own drawings – onto their bedroom wall," said Ratti, who will join the judging panel at this year's Dezeen Awards.

The digital device works on a two-axis plane, moving up and down two cables that hang from a vertical wall. After moving itself to the desired point, Scribit then uses markers to reproduce the content dictated by the user.

These marks can then be reversed by Scribit's erasing process, which works in a similar way. Once the relevant input is given by the user, Scribit knows where the previous content has been drawn and will follow its shape until the image is fully erased.

The robot is also able to reproduce any kind of data in real-time, including notes, messages, images and graphics. Once the user sends their digital information to the device, the plotter instantly reproduces it.

"We are totally deluged with information, and spend too much of our non-sleeping time in front of one form or another of a digital screen – TV, desktop computer, laptop, tablet or phone. Do we really want to add more screens to our lives?" said Ratti.

"Scribit offers up an alternative: a robotic system that draws on any kind of vertical surface, following a primordial act performed by humanity since our first cave graffiti," he added.

According to Ratti, Scribit will also offer users access to a vast range of digital content via a series of apps, where businesses or institutions would be able to develop and upload any type of content.

"You might draw on masterpieces from the best museums of New York, Paris or Tokyo, or discover the latest works by emerging artists," explained the architect. "Alternatively, you might receive updates or news about your favourite topics, or other practical information such as weather forecasts or grocery lists, without having to look at your mobile phone."

"Finally, you could share more personal content, for instance by delivering a surprise message on your friend's wall for his or her birthday," he added.

While Scribit comes with its own patented "reversible" ink markers in red, blue, yellow and black that leave no trace, it can also mount any ordinary non-erasable marker.

Taking its name from the Latin term meaning "she/he writes," the robot follows on from another "writing machine" being developed at Ratti's firm, Carlo Ratti Associati.

The firm presented the OSArc installation at the Istanbul Design Biennale in 2011, where a plotter registered the text taken from the Open Source Architecture Manifesto Wikipedia page, and write it onto a wall. The plotter would update the text as the Wikipedia page changes.

Scribit will be on show as part of Ratti's Milan design week installation, named Living Nature, located at the city's Piazza del Duomo.

For job opportunities at Carlo Ratti Associati, visit their company profile on Dezeen Jobs.

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Bjarke Ingels Group and Carlo Ratti Associati have started building a 280-metre-high skyscraper in Singapore, which will feature a four-storey vertical park complete with treetop cocoons.

The tower, at 88 Market Street in the city-state's financial district, will contain 29 floors of office space and 299 apartments, along with gardens spread through the building.

BIG and CRA's design shows the glass and steel facade of the 51-storey tower being "pulled apart" at the base, mid and upper levels to allow trees and plants to protrude out.

"At multiple elevations, the facade peels open to reveal urban oases for its users and the surrounding city – animating the elegant smoothness of modern architecture with the ubiquitous tropical nature," said BIG founder Bjarke Ingels.

The tower will become the joint-second tallest building in downtown Singapore, with only SOM's Tanjong Pagar Centre rising higher.

Construction of the 93,000 square metre mixed-use skyscraper, being developed by Asian real estate company CapitaLand, is already underway, following a groundbreaking ceremony on 9 February 2018.

A public park will be located on the ground floor, with spaces for exercise classes, art installations and community events.

Paths and covered walkways through the forest will lead to a 19-metre-high open space in the tower's podium housing shopping and dining outlets, as well as the lobbies for the offices and residences.

Four interconnected levels of the tower, at the 100-metre point, will be dedicated to a 30-metre high vertical park, with a covered spiral stairway rising through the centre. This tropical garden will also feature a jungle gym, cocoons suspended in the treetops, "sky hammocks" and a cafe.

"In this building, green areas are made accessible to the public at different heights, allowing the city's exuberance to extend throughout the entire tower," said Carlo Ratti, CRA's founding partner.

"Working in nature will be as essential to the experience of the building as the most advanced digital technologies, offering us a glimpse of tomorrow's offices," Ratti added.

Tech-wise, the Singapore Tower is due to have sensors, Internet of Things-enabled devices and artificial intelligence capabilities "scattered throughout" to allow tenants to "fully customise" the skyscraper.

"Buildings can no longer be designed with a singular purpose or customer profile in mind – the definition of work is rapidly evolving and will continue to take on new forms," said CapitaLand president and CEO Lim Ming Yan.

"The upcoming integrated development will set a new benchmark for workspaces of the future as we harness the best-in-class design, engineering and smart technologies to empower occupants with new levels of flexibility and mobility," he added.

The lower eight floors of the tower will be occupied by 299 serviced apartments, along with a swimming pool, jogging track and gym, residents lounge, social kitchen and barbecue pits.

While the upper 29 floors will be office spaces, a sky terrace on the rooftop is set to feature more cascading greenery, a restaurant, and what the developers claim will be Singapore's "highest urban farm".

Offices that blend high-tech with nature are becoming increasingly popular – and both BIG and CRA have worked on other projects that combine the two.

Ingels' firm is currently working with Google to design the tech giant a pair of pair of office blocks topped by ramping green roofs, while other projects by Ratti's studio include a garden that uses climate-control technology to recreate the experience of all four seasons.

The two firms expect to complete 88 Market Street by 2021.

Project credits:

Design: CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group
Client: CapitaLand
Collaborators: RSP Architects, Dragages Singapore, BIG Ideas, BIG Landscape
CRA project team: Carlo Ratti, Giovanni de Niederhausern, Saverio Panata (Project lead), Monika Love,
Antonio Atripaldi, Andrea Giordano, Chiara de Grandi, Damiano Gui, Mariachiara Mondini, Andrea Pedrina, Andrea Riva
CRA 3D visualisation: Alberto Bottero, Gary di Silvio, Gianluca Zimbardi
Consultants: dotdotdot - Alessandro Masserdotti, Fabrizio Pignoloni, Gabriele Gambotto
BIG partners-in-charge: Bjarke Ingels, Brian Yang
BIG Project manager: Günther Weber
BIG design lead: Song He
BIG team: Aime Desert, Aleksander Wadas, Aleksandra Domian, Alessandro Zanini, Andrew Lo, Anke Kristina Schramm, Antonio Sollo, Augusto Lavieri Zamperlini, Bartosz Kobylakiewicz, Dalma Ujvari, David Schwarzman, David Vega y Rojo, Dimitrie Grigorescu, Dina Brændstrup, Dominika Trybe, Elise Cauchard, Eriko Maekawa, Espen Vik, Ewa Szajda, Filippo Lorenzi, Francisco Castellanos, Frederik Skou Jensen, Gabrielé Ubareviciute, Gorka Calzada Medina, Helen Chen, Hongduo Zhou, Jakub Wlodarczyk, Jonas Käckenmester, Julieta Muzzillo, Kirsty Badenoch, Luca Pileri, Luis Torsten Wagenführer, Lukas Kerner, Malgorzata Mutkowska, Maria Teresa Fernandez Rojo, Matilde Tavanti, Moa Carlsson, Niu Jing, Orges Guga, Patrycja Lyszczyk, Pedro Savio jobim Pinheiro, Philip Rufus Knauf, Praewa Samachai, Rahul Girish, Ramon Julio Muros Cortes, Rebecca Carrai, Roberto Fabbri, Ryohei Koike, Samuel Rubio Sanchez, Shuhei Kamiya, Sorcha Burke, Steen Kortbæk Svendsen, Szymon Kolecki, Talia Fatte, Teodor Fratila Cristian, Tore Banke, Ulla Hornsyld, Viktoria Millentrup, Vilius Linge, Vinish Sethi, Xin Su, Xinying Zhang, Zhen Tong

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Italian architect Carlo Ratti has unveiled a concept for a smart road system, which would feature swarms of drones that deliver first aid, monitor traffic and detect accidents.

The scheme was designed as part of a €30 million proposal by highways company ANAS, presented in late December 2017, to develop a new smart road infrastructure around Italy's roads in preparation for the arrival of self-driving vehicles.

The plan, which would be implemented on more than 2,500 kilometres of roads and highways in Italy, sees an infrastructure that includes drones able to deliver first-aid support and "flying poles" that can send useful information to vehicles – for example, the conditions of the roads ahead.

"We are living in a time of momentous changes in the field of mobility. The internet has radically transformed the way we get around, and how we design our roads," said Ratti. "With this project, we aim to superimpose a digital layer over the existing physical infrastructure of our road network, to gather better data about our highways."

"The next step will be to pool this data with information already collected by individual cars, in an 'Internet-of-Roads' scenario that will make us ready for the other revolutionary breakthrough that is likely to happen in the next decade: the arrival of self-driving vehicles."

The so-called "flying poles" feature sensors that detect major environmental changes, from air pollution to wind speed and humidity.

This information would then be sent to vehicles via Wi-Fi and also displayed through low-energy panels that are attached to the main body of the poles.

The poles come equipped with a recharging station, where passing drones can charge their batteries between monitoring the roads.

Ratti's smart road would also be supported by a swarm of drones, which would function as both safety and maintenance aids – monitoring tunnels, viaducts and general infrastructure.

They are also programmed to detect accidents, like fires and floods, and can bring medicine and first aid to drivers.

Ratti's proposal comes at a time where the race towards driverless cars is significantly picking up momentum.

Self-driving cars are already being tested by companies including Apple, BMW, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Google and Tesla and Uber.

For the most part, governments have been slowly but surely welcoming driverless cars. In the USA, the Department of Transportation has pledged $4 billion (£2.8 billion) towards improving autonomous vehicles and providing the infrastructure to support them, based on evidence suggesting it will reduce road accidents.

But last year, India became the first major economy to say no to driverless cars, with transport minister Nitin Gadkari saying the government "won't allow any technology that takes away jobs".

Ratti, who teaches at MIT and directs its Senseable City Lab, is the founder of architecture firm Carlo Ratti Associati. The company has worked on a wide range of projects, from a retreat in the Himalayan mountains, to the "world's first Internet of Things sofa".

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Architect Carlo Ratti has revealed plans to transform a former 19th-century military complex in Turin, Italy, into a campus where students, workers and makers can set up their own labs and studios.

Carlo Ratti Associati will transform the 20,000 square-metre Caserma Lamarmora barracks into "a testing ground for an open-source approach to architecture".

Using the barracks’ modular structure as a base, the Italian firm wants to open the building up to multiple uses, such as co-living, co-making and co-working. But it will not impose any fixed notions of how the space should be used.

The vacant complex is currently owned by Italian state fund CDP, and comprises a porticoed main building and six smaller barracks.

Each of these smaller barracks buildings are based on an arch-shaped unit of approximately 80 square metres. There are over 150 units in the development, which the studio hopes said will "allow for a lively, ever-changing overlapping of functions."

Carlo Ratti, the firm's founder and professor at MIT in Boston, explained: "This project does not dictate how people should use the space – rather it allows the space to evolve organically, through a continuous process of renewal, improvement, and adaptation of individual spaces."

"To borrow Dutch theorist John Habraken's metaphor, our design provides the structure and the technical foundation, but the actual infill will be up to the inhabitants. We believe that such a hybrid approach is crucial to achieve a true user-driven, open-source approach to the built environment."

Built in the late 19th century, the Caserma Lamarmora became the location where fascist police imprisoned partisans and political opponents. It is reported that more than 400 people died in the building, with evidence of the executions still visible on the barracks' walls. In memory of the killings, one of the barracks is set to become a museum focused on the Italian resistance movement.

"We wanted to acknowledge the building's tragic history, by being as respectful to the original structure as possible," said Antonio Atripaldi, project leader at Carlo Ratti Associati.

"While we have discreetly played with the modules, the most visible evidence of our intervention is the opening of the central square. With this project, we aim at transforming a former place of arms into what we may call a place of arts."

In addition to the open-source units, a new 100-metre-long, 60-metre wide public square will be built in the vast disused area between the buildings, which is currently hidden behind a walled structure.

Accessible via large flight of steps, the square will provide a new public space for events and performances in Turin.

The project was initially presented to Turin’s City Hall in Spring 2016, and has been evolving since then in accordance with feedback from the community and local authorities. Work is expected to start in 2018.

Other examples of military buildings being repurposed include a former US Army barracks in Mannheim, Germany, that was turned into a "village" of affordable housing by MVRDV, and a former Prussian military uniform factory that now accommodate offices and an artist's studio by Berlin practice Sauerbruch Hutton.

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Italian architect Carlo Ratti has revealed plans for a covered garden in Milan, which would use climate-control technology to allow visitors to experience spring, summer, autumn and winter at any time of year.

Carlo Ratti Associati designed The Garden of the Four Seasons to offer city-dwellers a closer glimpse of nature's cycles. Summer, winter, autumn and spring are represented by four pavilions beneath a huge curved roof in the designs for the 2,500-square-metre garden.

The project was commissioned by the property developer Citylife for a park located in the north-west of the Italian city that was masterplanned by Zaha Hadid, Daniel Liebeskind and Arata Isozaki.

To achieve the different climates, The Garden of the Four Seasons will employ a zero-net-energy climate control system based on a concept developed by Barbara Römer, founder of creative consultancy Studio Römer.

Photovoltaic panels on the roof will collect solar energy and redistribute it to the different pavilions accordingly.

A heat exchanger will cool the winter area and heat the summer space – the team describes the system as like a refrigerator, offering hot air out one side and cool on the other. Heat will also be transferred between the pavilions.

The roof membrane, which is made of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) – a transparent fluorine-based plastic – will respond to sensors and opens and closes to help maintain heat levels consistent to the seasons.

The spring pavilion will be located at the entrance, followed by summer, autumn and ending with winter, so that the pathway around offers visitors a natural progression through the seasons. Carlo Ratti Associati also imagines the pavilions to host a range of activities.

"In the garden, people can interact with nature in many ways – from working within nature, to eating al fresco during Milan's cold winters, to celebrating a wedding in the Eternal Spring area," said Carlo Ratti.

Other features in The Garden of the Four Seasons include digital sensors that will measure the levels of water, temperature, humidity and nutrients needed by each vegetable species and display them in real time. It is intended create the impression that the plants themselves are tweeting about their conditions.

The Garden of the Four Seasons forms part of a series of projects that play with climate control and remediation that Ratti has developed in response to climate change, including the Cloud Cast, which offers an energy-efficient cooling system for tropical desert climates and an office with a personalised "environmental bubble" to avoid thermostat wars.

"As climate change might become more extreme, the importance of envisioning strategies for climate remediation will increase dramatically," said Ratti.

"This was our inspiration behind the Four Seasons Garden – in which we usher in a technique for a sustainable and emphatic Internet of Plants."

Project credits: 

Project team: Andrea Cassi, Peter Magnus, Chiara Borghi, Gary di Silvio
Environmental sustainability: Ai (Carlo Micono e Giulia Guglielmo)
Construction consultancy: Studio Ceruti

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Italian architect Carlo Ratti has transformed a Turin building into an office space with a personalised "environmental bubble" for every worker.

Office 3.0 – first previewed in plans in the middle of last year – is the new headquarters for the Agnelli Foundation cultural institution in Turin, Italy.

Ratti's firm, Carlo Ratti Associati, renovated the foundation's 20th-century home in the neighbourhood of San Salvario to turn it into a contemporary office that is part of the Internet of Things, with a thermostat that automatically adjusts to its employees' wishes.

Office 3.0's heating and cooling – as well as its lighting – can all be personalised to individual preferences, creating a little environmental bubble for each worker that then "follows" them from room to room.

The system is based on hundreds of WiFi-enabled sensors that collect data relating to occupancy, temperature, carbon dioxide concentration, and the status of meeting rooms.

By tailoring the heating and lighting to the needs of individuals and groups, the firm believes the office could cut energy use significantly, as well as avoiding what Ratti calls "thermostat wars".

"As work has become increasingly digital, why should we bother to go into the office?", said Ratti, who is also director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "The key answer to that question lies in human interaction."

"The central idea behind the Agnelli Foundation project is that by seamlessly integrating digital technologies within the physical space, we can forge better relationships between people and with the building they inhabit, ultimately fostering interaction and creativity."

In addition to controlling heating, cooling and lighting, the app also allows users to book spaces and facilities within the building, such as meeting rooms and shared desk space.

Because the app knows its users' locations, workspaces can be suggested on the basis of both proximity and availability.

Office 3.0 occupies a historic building in Turin. Ratti's teams worked with the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles group, which has close ties to the foundation, on the project.

The building includes a co-working space for 350 digital workers – an office model becoming increasingly popular across large businesses as well as small startups.

"Such a progressive mix of professionals of all ages, backgrounds and responsibilities – from students to C-level executives of Fortune 500 companies – would have never happened just a few years ago," said Ratti.

In terms of the rest of the fit-out, Ratti was keen to "open up" the office space into the city, adding a large glass volume that hosts a cafe and an expansive skylight that illuminates the building's staircase.

The staircase is also dominated by a kaleidescopic installation called La Congiuntura del Tempo (Tempo junction), the work of renowned artist Olafur Eliasson.

Landscape architect Louis Benech, who previously worked on the Tuileries gardens in Paris and the Water Theatre Grove at the Palace of Versailles, has created an orchard that surrounds the building.

Ratti's other work with sensor technology has resulted in a ceiling-mounted installation that directs personalised "clouds" of water vapour at anyone walking beneath.

The architect previously launched the "world's first Internet of Things sofa" – a system of smart modular seats that can be adjusted with an app or hand gestures into different configurations.

Photography by Beppe Giardino.

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Italian architect Carlo Ratti's Paint By Drone system uses remotely controlled flying robots to cover buildings in giant paintings.

Designed to turn scaffolding into giant canvases, the system uses a formation of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to create artworks on blank surfaces. Each drone carries its own tank of paint, and uses CMYK colours to replicate the traditional printing process.

The robots are managed remotely, with their positions individually tracked, and are able to recreate any artwork submitted to a mobile app.

"We are keen to explore their artistic use, particularly as a way to engage with the built environment," Ratti told Dezeen. "What we call 'phygital graffiti' is the idea of leveraging drones and, more in general, digital technologies to create participatory works of public art."

The designer's office, Carlo Ratti Associati, has worked on several projects incorporating drones, including using them to act as a personal tour guide for visitors to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus. In the past, Ratti also suggested that robots could be used to help eliminate disease in cities.

Two Paint By Drone pieces are planned for this year in Berlin and Turin, which will see scaffold sheeting in the cities covered in a giant artwork created by the system.

Details are yet to be finalised, but the artwork could be created by an artist first and coloured in by drones – controlled by an app, so that people can choose their own piece of the canvas to paint. There's also the potential for passers-by to draw their own designs, which will be recreated by the robots.

The system is still in development, but Ratti hopes to be able to eventually use it on any vertical surface.

"Imagine how this could make the realisation of works of public art both easier and safer, in urban contexts as well as the infrastructure level – for example alongside highways, within railway galleries, on bridges and viaducts," he said.

The designer, who teaches at MIT and directs its Senseable City Lab, is the founder of architecture firm Carlo Ratti Associati. The company has worked on a wide range of projects, from a retreat in the Himalayan mountains, to the "world's first Internet of Things sofa".

The possibilities of drones are being explored in everything from building – deployed to weave a carbon fibre pavilion in Stuttgart – to search and rescue, with Land Rover using unmanned aerial vehicles to scan landscapes after natural disasters.

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Our next Dezeen x MINI Living Initiative video explores Carlo Ratti's proposals to replace traditional heating and cooling systems with personalised environments for different occupants in a building.

Ratti, who founded Italian architecture firm Carlo Ratti Associati and directs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Senseable City Lab, is developing a number of different technologies that allow personalised heating or cooling.

The Office 3.0 system he designed for an office in Turin, Italy, uses a system of sensors to monitor employees, and instructs heating and cooling systems to follow them around the building to create unique environmental bubbles.

Occupants could set their preferred temperature via a smartphone app. Fan coil units situated in the false ceilings would be activated by their presence, creating a "thermal bubble" that follows them around the building.

As well as allowing individuals to set their own ideal temperature, Ratti believes such systems could reduce energy consumption dramatically, because no energy is wasted heating empty spaces in a building.

"By synchronising energy usage and human occupancy within buildings, we can create a more sustainable and responsive architecture – theoretically slashing energy consumption by up to 40 per cent," he said.

The concept builds on previous projects developed by Ratti, such as the 2015 Cloud Cast installation in Dubai, which uses motion tracking technology to direct clouds of water vapour at people to cool them down.

The jets of mist are expelled from a series of cylinders mounted on the ceiling controlled by ultrasonic sensors that detect detect people passing by.

The idea is intended to make cities like Dubai, where summer temperatures average around 40 degrees celsius, more liveable, without having to use the vast amounts of energy required to air condition large spaces.

Ratti used a similar idea in the Local Warming project he developed at MIT's Senseable City Lab, which uses motion sensors to focus beams of infrared radiation on people as they move through a building.

The idea involves mounting infrared lamps on the ceiling, which tilt and rotate to focus beams of radiation onto people to warm them up as they pass underneath.

This movie is part of Dezeen x MINI Living Initiative, a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how architecture and design can contribute to a brighter urban future through a series of videos and talks.

Ratti spoke at our first Dezeen x MINI Living talk in Milan last month, which we live streamed and can still be watched in full on Dezeen's Facebook channel.

All images in the video and story are courtesy of Carlo Ratti Associati.

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Architecture office Carlo Ratti Associati has used submarine technologies to design a buoyant public space off the coast of West Palm Beach's Currie Park.

As part of his masterplan for the Florida city's waterfront, architect Carlo Ratti and his team have proposed a plaza that will be partly submerged and constructed like an underwater vessel.

It is the latest in a string of both proposed and realised designs for floating structures, which range from a modular home on a canal to a temporary parliament building for the UK.

Ratti's project aims to transform a vacant 19-hectare area on the coast of Lake Worth Lagoon, a narrow sea channel separating the cities of West Palm Beach and Palm Beach.

The new complex will include housing, retail and leisure facilities along the water's edge, along with the public park extending into the lagoon.

"With this project, we aim to reclaim West Palm Beach's connection to the natural elements that surround it, and give shape to a vibrant new district that will serve as a creative catalyst for the entire city," said the Italian architect, who is the director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

"The project also showcases how a new technology allows us to radically redefine the relationship between architecture and water."

The plaza will be built on a series of air chambers, which will automatically open and close to release or take in water, depending on the number of people walking on the surface.

"Architecture usually conceives of buildings as separate, autonomous entities, but in this case, the plaza inhabits the water as if it was carved right into it," said Ratti. "The water becomes a moving element that harmoniously accommodates the new public space."

The structure will comprise a series of connected circular areas that partially sit below the level of the water. The different sections will offer outdoor seating, a covered performance space and walkways around ponds.

On the shore, the expanded Currie Park district will be organised around a pair of "leafy ramblas". These will feature residential towers, a pool terrace overlooking the ocean and a retail area with a food hall for organic products.

A parking lot to the north will be replaced by a landscaped hill, offering view across the lagoon to Palm Beach and beyond.

Construction is due to start this month and complete by 2018.

Carlo Ratti Associati's previous experience working with water and architecture goes back to 2008, when the office designed a pavilion for the Expo Zaragoza with retractable walls made of water.

Other recent projects by the firm include a digitally connected retreat in the Himalayan mountains, and a system of smart modular seats that can be adjusted with an app or hand gestures.

Project credits:

Team: Carlo Ratti, Andrea Galanti, Emma Greer, Chiara Borghi, Valentina Grasso, Oliver Kazimir, Alessandro Tassinari
Client: Jeff Greene
Collaborator: City of West Palm Beach's Community Redevelopment Agency
Advisors on landscape design: Stoss

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Construction has started on a digitally connected co-living and co-working retreat in the Himalayas, designed by Italian architect Carlo Ratti.

Carlo Ratti Associati has teamed up with Turin-based architect Michele Bonino on the Pankhasari Retreat, a remote getaway where guests will be able to live and work like they would in a city.

Despite its position in a valley in India's Darjeeling region – surrounded by waterfalls, a fast-moving river and one of the world's tallest mountains, Kanchenjunga – it will offer high-speed internet and teleworking facilities.

Ratti said the resort comes close to the vision of the late urban designer Melvin Webber, who in the 1970s claimed "it might be possible to locate on a mountaintop and to maintain intimate, real-time and realistic contact with business or other associates".

"Though a mountaintop might be a bit extreme to some, the Himalayan valley of Pankhasari is an ideal place for staying connected and testing new longer-term concepts of international living and working, trying to build a bridge between the local and the global communities," said the architect.

Ratti, who is also a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has worked on several projects that combine physical environments with digital systems, including a smart heating system and a digital supermarket.

The Pankhasari Retreat will combine ideas from some of these projects with regional expertise and craftsmanship.

The complex will be made up of three blocks, arranged around a set of sacred black boulders and connected by a wooden footbridge.

Buildings will be constructed from local materials – including stone, farmed teak and sissoo wood – and will incorporate typical forms, like gabled roofs and verandas.

"We wanted to oppose both architectural choices that are indifferent to their geographical context, and any uncritical cult of a local tradition" said Ratti. "The result is a more collaborative architecture, opened to the influence of people from different backgrounds and with different skills."

The lightweight structures will also be easy to dismantle, ensuring the resort has a minimal impact on the landscape.

Inside, each one will contain facilities for up to three or four residents, including living spaces arranged around a fireplace, work studios, bedrooms and bathrooms. Built-in furniture will also feature.

Ratti hopes the project will help to promote a more sustainable form of tourism.

"I think these buildings stand out as an example of how you can reconcile the opposite dimensions of local and international architecture, utilising an open-source design approach," he added.

"Pankhasari has a unique flavour, located at an equal distance between the global zeitgeist (the spirit of the time which is reflected in contemporary architecture) and the genius loci (the profound spirit of a place)."

The project is backed by developer ASCO Projects. Construction started earlier this week.

"Carlo Ratti and I started reflecting on the visions for Pankhasari about 10 years ago," revealed company CEO Chiradeep Sirkar. "Finally we are ready to make this project real, and to bring a beautiful design and deeply respectful construction to this site."

Project credits:

Architects: Carlo Ratti Associati, Michele Bonino
Client: ASCO Projects
Local architect: Alleya and Associates (Ashish Sharan Lal)
Structural engineer: Sankha Choudhuri

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Robots could soon be infiltrating urban sewage systems to identify potential outbreaks of disease before they happen, according to architect and MIT professor Carlo Ratti (+ interview).

Ratti's team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created a prototype robot called Luigi, which is able to collect samples from city sewers, as part of a project called Underworlds.

According to Ratti, these samples could be used create a map of human health from biological data that would help scientists predict outbreaks of disease and possibly prevent them.

"We could be looking at epidemics before they happen," said Ratti. "So we're able to see the influenza virus before people have influenza."

The ongoing Underworlds project, which includes a team of MIT biologists and researchers, aims to prove that cities can make use of their waste water systems.

"We're collecting this information and we're using it to understand the micro-biome of the city," Ratti told Dezeen. "The applications of this are diverse."

The tube-shaped Luigi robot contains filters and can be guided via an iPhone app to collect samples from key points in a city's waste system, and is currently being used for pilot studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Boston. The filters collect the samples and can be removed for analysis and replaced to collect new data, and the robot is cleaned after each use.

Ratti said the data the team was collecting with Luigi could also show patterns of drug consumption in cities and help detect problems like antibiotic resistance.

The Italian architect spoke to Dezeen at New York's Cooper Union ahead of a talk earlier this spring about his work with the Internet of Things (IOT) – a collective name for everyday devices, objects and systems that are networked via Wi-Fi to share and respond to data.

His other projects include traffic infrastructure for driverless cars, smart modular seats that can be reconfigured with hand gestures, and offices where heating, lighting and cooling systems follow occupants around the building.

"Our cities are becoming these kind of cyber-physical systems," Ratti said. "Cyber-physical includes both the physical and the biological, and that means that we have a great wealth of information to understand them and to transform them."

"That is radically changing architecture, cities, planning and so on, because it's the natural entry space in creating this hybrid system," he added.

Ratti, 45, is the director of MIT's Senseable City Lab, which investigates and anticipates how digital technologies are changing the way people live at an urban scale.

He also runs his own Turin-based firm, Carlo Ratti Associati, where the same technologies are explored through architecture, planning and design.

"What we see is a beautiful frontier of architecture and planning, which brings together the physical, the digital and the biological," said Ratti.

Read an edited transcript from our interview with Carlo Ratti:

Dan Howarth: Can you briefly explain your different roles?

Carlo Ratti: I have three hats, one is the professor at MIT's Senseable City Lab, one with the design office Carlo Ratti Associati and then in the past couple of years, a few startups with Copenhagen Wheel, Makr Shakr and a few others.

Dan Howarth: Tell me about what you're doing with driverless cars.

Carlo Ratti: Driverless cars are coming to the street, they are reality as we speak. There are probably hundreds of them being tested around the world. The exciting thing is that driverless cars will blur the distinction between private transportation and public transportation. That means the car can give you a lift in the morning when you go to the office and then it can give a lift to somebody else, and then somebody else in the city.

We are doing some theoretical work showing that in places such as New York you could potentially run the whole city with 20 per cent of the cars we have today, and still take everybody to where they need to be when. It would be an amazing change in the way the city operates.

Dan Howarth: So the idea is that cars are continuously cycling around the city, and people just hop in and out of them?

Carlo Ratti: To a certain extent, you will still have times when you need more cars and less cars but still you have this mobile infrastructure that works much better. The car is one of the most inefficient pieces of urban infrastructure, we use a car five per cent of the time. The other 95 per cent the car is parked somewhere without anybody in it and is using valuable parking space.

Dan Howarth: What do you think about Bentley's idea that rich passengers could pay more for faster driverless car lanes?

Carlo Ratti: Technology can allow us to do that, it is not a scandal to talk about that. If you think about how I'm flying tonight to Miami with a standard regular airline, I could fly there with a private jet and I could probably get there faster at any time I want.

Today it already happens that if you pay more you get better transportation. If we want to go there however it's a decision we need to discuss together. It's a political decision not a technological decision. It's important for designers to see what the potential is but then society needs to make a choice. Is this what we want? For people inside the city, the system of "if you pay more then you get there faster and you avoid traffic lights and if you pay less you're stuck in traffic"? I think that is something we should all discuss.

Dan Howarth: What other kinds of research are you doing at MIT?

Carlo Ratti: One of the projects that actually intersects most of things that we are doing now is a project where we had robots going in to sewers and sample sewage, and then we looked at all the viruses and bacteria in the sewage. In our guts we have more viruses and bacteria than cells in our body. For every cell in our body we have about nine or 10 viruses and bacteria living with us. This is a big component of our health and who we are.

It's very difficult to monitor it on an individual level but there's a beautiful aggregate in cities, which is sewage. So we're collecting this information and we're using it to understand the micro-biome of the city. The applications of this are diverse; we could be looking at epidemics before they happen, so we're able to see the influenza virus before people have influenza. We are seeing drug consumption as well. We are able to also look at all these colonies of viruses and bacteria, and how we could look at new therapies that go beyond antibiotics.

We are doing that project together with people from biological engineering at MIT and in other departments. What we see is a beautiful frontier of architecture and planning, which brings together the physical, the digital and the biological.

Dan Howarth: Why is this a good task for robots?

Carlo Ratti: Originally we went in to sample the sewage, but we discovered that it was not that fun. So we built a robot that's called Luigi that goes down and samples.

Dan Howarth: How does the robot collect the samples, and how does it know where to go and where to take them from?

Carlo Ratti: First we do a lot of modelling of the sewer system to see how the sewage is representative of different parts of the city. Then we go and put the robot in different parts of the city so that it can collect something that is representative of a certain neighbourhood instead of an aggregate.

Dan Howarth: What does the combination of these projects mean for the future of cities?

Carlo Ratti: What we believe is happening today is that our cities are becoming these kind of cyber-physical systems. Cyber-physical includes both the physical and the biological. And that means that we have a great wealth of information to understand them and to transform them.

Dan Howarth: How exactly would you define a cyber-physical city and how are we going to live in them?

Carlo Ratti: It's about a city where the digital system and the physical system work together.

The internet until now was something separate, now it is becoming the IOT, so it's entering physical space. That is radically changing architecture, cities, planning and so on, because it's the natural entry space in creating this hybrid system; this cyber-physical system. The mechanism behind it is cybernetics, that allows this communication between the network and the city and so on.

Dan Howarth: How do you think this is going to develop? How will these cities evolve in the next few years?

Carlo Ratti: I think what we're going to see more and more is an architecture that comes alive. It's always been said that architecture is the third skin; we have our own skin and then the skin of the clothes and then we have architecture. But as a skin, it has always been very rigid, uncompromising, almost like a corset.

I think tomorrow we can think about an environment that can become much more responsive because of these cyber-physical loops. For instance what we presented at design week in Milan is a totally mouldable thing. Again it's an architecture that moves with us.

The idea was for a system that is based on elements, each element has a linear equator so it goes up and down. You can control it with your phone or you can put your hand on it, and if you put your hand on it, it goes up or goes down. You can control it just by hovering it over the place and it has a sensor that tells you the capacity and changes the capacity and then it goes up and down and they create a reconfigurable environment.

Dan Howarth: So this has implications for furniture as well as architecture?

Carlo Ratti: Anything from furniture to buildings to cityscapes.

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Italian architect Carlo Ratti has designed a system for an office in Turin that instructs heating, lighting and cooling systems to follow occupants around the building like an "individually-tailored environmental bubble".

Carlo Ratti Associati's Office 3.0 will use a system of sensors to monitor employees as they move around the headquarters of the Agnelli Foundation cultural institution.

The technology – known as the Internet of Things – employs a series of Wi-Fi-connected sensors to monitor environments and collect sets of data, then uses the information to send instructions to products and services within the building.

In this case, the data includes occupancy levels, temperature, CO2 concentration, and the status of meeting rooms.

The building management system (BMS) can tell the lights to switch off if a room is empty, and heat meeting rooms just before they are due to be occupied.

By tailoring the heating and lighting to the needs of individuals and groups, the firm believes the office could cut significantly energy use.

"Today, a lot of energy is wasted heating or cooling empty buildings," said Ratti, who is also the director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT.

"By synchronising energy usage and human occupancy within buildings, we can create a more sustainable and responsive architecture – theoretically slashing energy consumption by up to 40 per cent."

Occupants can also set their preferred temperature via a smartphone app. The fan coil units situated in the false ceilings will be activated by human presence, so a "thermal bubble" will follow individuals around the building.

When an occupant leaves a space, the room will automatically return to "standby mode" to save energy.

The system is designed to learn daily routines and usage patterns, which will allow the workplace to be adapted accordingly over time.

The Agnelli Foundation's offices will feature movable glass walls, sound-absorbing curtains, and foldable partitions made of wooden panels – all of which will allow for reconfiguration from large open spaces to series of smaller rooms.

The offices occupy a historic building in Turin. The fitout is set to commence on 6 June 2016, and the renovated Agnelli Foundation will be inaugurated in spring 2017.

It will also feature a co-working space, a Fab Lab educational research centre, workshop areas for students and entrepreneurs, and a cafe.

Ratti's teams worked with the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles group, which has close ties to the foundation, on the project. Fiat was founded by Giovanni Agnelli.

"Sensors and localised climate control are already established features in the car industry," said John Elkann, vice chairman of the Agnelli Foundation and chairman of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. "With Carlo Ratti Associati we are now exploring how such solutions can impact architecture, using the Internet of Things."

Carlo Ratti Associati hopes that the internal positioning system it has developed – which works similarly to GPS – will provide a platform for a range of applications in the future.

"This open platform for occupants, employees, and guests will further evolve over time, through crowd-developed apps and software updates," said Ratti.

The architect's previous work with sensor technology has resulted in a ceiling-mounted installation that directs personalised "clouds" of water vapour at anyone walking beneath.

More recently, Ratti launched the "world's first Internet of Things sofa" – a system of smart modular seats that can be adjusted with an app or hand gestures into different configurations.

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Milan 2016: Italian architect Carlo Ratti has created a system of smart modular seats that can be adjusted with an app or hand gestures into different configurations (+ movie).

Carlo Ratti Associati's Lift-Bit furniture system, which the studio claims is the world's first Internet-of-Things sofa, is part of a range of new interactive products created with the support of Swiss furniture brand Vitra.

"At Milan design week we're really exploring how the Internet of Things enters the physical space," Ratti told Dezeen.

The Internet of Things is made up of smart products that communicate with each other over Wi-Fi, and can be controlled and monitored by digital devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Examples of these products include a thermometer for checking a child's temperature remotely, and a security system that allows users to let visitors into their home when they are not in.

Lift-Bit is made up of upholstered hexagonal seats that can be used alone as stools or tessellated together into larger sofas.

"The idea was for a system that is based on elements, each element has a linear motor so it goes up and down," said Ratti, who is also a professor at MIT and director of the institution's Senseable City Lab.

"All the elements talk to each other and you combine them just by putting them next to each other. You can control them digitally with your iPhone."

Each stool includes a mechanism that lifts the seat up and down its central stand. This motion can be controlled either with a smartphone app, or by activating embedded sensors that recognise gestures.

When the user hovers their hand over the seat, they can raise or lower it with the same movement.

Placed in different configurations, the stools can be adjusted to form chairs, chaise longues and sofas.

With even more modules, users can form large "landscapes" of undulating geometric sections that look like the Giant's Causeway rock formation in Ireland.

The system also gets "bored", and begins shape-shifting on its own to engage users when it hasn't been adjusted for a while.

Carlo Ratti Associati works across a range of digital design and technology fields. The studio created a digital supermarket for last year's Milan Expo and designed a ceiling-mounted installation that directs personalised "clouds" of water vapour at anyone walking beneath.

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In his role at MIT, Ratti also recently released plans for a slot-based system for driverless cars at road intersections, which his team believes could spell the death of the traffic light.

Lift-Bit will be on show as part of the Rooms – Novel living concepts showcase at the Milan XXI Triennale International Exhibition.

Taking place during Milan design week from 12 to 17 April 2016, the exhibition will present work from 11 Italy-based designers and studios including Fabio Novembre and Alessandro Mendini.

Dezeen has picked the top trends to look out for in Milan this year, which include rethinking office furniture, design for children and products for compact living.

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Italian architect Carlo Ratti has unveiled plans to build a mile-high observation tower, envisioned as a vertical alternative to New York's Central Park.

Measuring 1,609 metres high, the tower would be almost double the height of the world's tallest building – the 828-metre-high Burj Khalifa. It would be covered in plants, and would feature a vertiginous viewing platform.

"Imagine you take New York's Central Park, turn it vertical, roll it and twirl it," said Carlo Ratti.

Carlo Ratti Associati worked with German engineer Schlaich Bergermann Partner and British design studio Atmos on the proposal, which was commissioned by an undisclosed client.

It is not planned for any particular location, although the team are in talks with officials from numerous cities interested in building it, according to a spokesman for Ratti's studio.

"We developed the concept initially for a client, but in this moment it's not specific for any city," he told Dezeen.

Named The Mile, the tower could become the world's tallest manmade construction. Visitors would ascend to the top via a series of glazed capsules that would spiral up around the 20-metre-wide central shaft.

A park would be located at the top, but the team also said that plants will cover the structure "from base to apex". The intention is to provide an ecosystem for hundreds of different species.

To achieve the record-breaking height, the tower is designed as lightweight structure supported by a network of pre-stressed cables – the result of a complex engineering study.

According to Schlaich Bergermann Partner associate Boris Reyher, the aim is to push the boundaries of what is possible and create a milestone in architectural history.

"The structural concept for The Mile is technically feasible because of its consequent and uncompromised lightweight approach, said Reyher.

"The architectural form and the spatial equilibrium of forces become one and the same thing," he explained. "On the one hand, this leads to an optimised usage of high-grade materials. On the other hand, the structural form and load paths become intuitively comprehensible by every spectator."

The Mile is the latest in a series of boundary-pushing projects by Ratti, who is also director of MIT's Senseable City Lab, set up to investigate the urban impact of digital technologies.

The architect has also developed a prototype for a supermarket of the future, and a motion-activated heating system designed to combat energy waste.

Ratti's studio will present The Mile at Cannes real-estate fair MIPIM next month, proposing a financial model based on those of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the London Eye. It anticipates "substantial profits" for the host city.

It is one of several recent proposals for towers of ground-breaking heights, following a vision for a mile-high skyscraper in Tokyo and a Dubai observation tower.

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Milan Expo 2015: huge mechanical arms are spray painting colourful data across the walls of this pavilion and supermarket that Italian architect Carlo Ratti has created at the Milan Expo 2015, which opens today (+ slideshow).

Working with supermarket chain COOP Italia, Ratti wanted to explore whether introducing digital information into food stores would affect the way that people interact with and select food.

The result is the Future Food District – a pavilion that functions as a real supermarket where visitors can purchase items. The difference is that the 1,500 products on display are positioned beneath digital mirrors that present information about the origins, ingredients and manufacturing of the foods.

"Every product has a precise story to tell," explained the architect, who is also a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Today, this information reaches the consumer in a fragmented way."

"But in the near future, we will be able to discover everything there is to know about the apple we are looking at: the tree it grew on, the CO2 it produced, the chemical treatments it received, and its journey to the supermarket shelf," he said.

As customers browse and purchase items inside the warehouse-inspired space, information about them is processed by a computer and reinterpreted as data, which is then fed to what Ratti describes as "the world's largest plotter".

The device comprises two mechanical arms that move in two directions across the pavilion's facade, using different-coloured spray paint to create fields of data. On the first day, faces of several customers adorn the walls.

More machines feature inside the pavilion – robotic arms are arranged at the centre of one stand, performing acrobatics as they move apples and cups into different places.

There is also a large wall of changing data that customers can watch while they shop.

"This project is an experiment," said Ratti. "Some parts of it will be more accomplished than others. However, our goal is to expose new forms of interaction with food to the hundreds of thousands of Expo visitors, who can in turn provide their feedback."

"We were inspired by Mr Palomar from Italo Calvino's book of the same name, who enters a fromagerie in Paris and thinks that he's in a museum," continued the architect. "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 civilisation that has given it form."

"We believe that tomorrow's markets will make us feel a bit like Mr Palomar," he said. "Every product will have a story to tell."

According to project leader Andrea Galanti, the aim was to create a seamless augmented reality without the "cumbersome interface" of products like Google Glass. "In a way, it is like a return to the old marketplace, where producers and consumers of food saw each other and had actual interactions," he said.

The Future Food District also features a plaza showcasing innovative methods of producing food, including vertical hydroponic systems for growing vegetables, as well as algae and insect harvesting.

"Such advancements in urban farming could really transform underutilised urban spaces into productive areas," said Giovanni de Niederhausern, another member of Ratti's team. "If urban farming manages to find its foothold in major urban centres, its effects could be disruptive, in terms of fostering new relationships between citizens and nature."

Photographs are provided by Carlo Ratti Associati, unless otherwise stated.

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This ceiling-mounted installation by Italian architect Carlo Ratti uses motion tracking to direct personalised "clouds" of water vapour at anyone walking beneath.

When the Cloud Cast detects someone walking beneath, a series of nozzles emit a cooling mist that is backlit by LED lighting.

The project was developed by Carlo Ratti Associati to offer an energy-efficient cooling system for tropical desert climates, such as in the United Arab Emirates, where the installation was presented this week.

The system is designed to save energy and water by only targeting people it detects, rather than pumping mist through an entire space.

"Evaporative cooling has been used for centuries in the Arabic peninsula and is still more energy efficient than, say, air conditioning," said studio founder Carlo Ratti, who is also director of MIT's Senseable City Lab. "It is based on generating a cloud of mist that cools the air around it while it evaporates."

"In traditional systems, however, a lot of energy and water are consumed for cooling outdoor spaces, even when sparsely used," Ratti continued. "In our project, we focus misting on people, gaining order of magnitudes in efficiency."

The jets of mist are expelled from an series of identical cylinders mounted on the ceiling. These "nebulisers" are controlled by a series of ultrasonic sensors embedded in the suspended structure, which detect passing pedestrians by interpreting the echoes from high-frequency sound waves.

This data is fed to a central control system that triggers the hydro-valves and LEDs in proximity to the detected target.

The Cloud Cast is intended to make cities like Dubai, where summer temperatures average around 40 degrees celsius, more liveable.

"We envision the city of the future to be a place designed for people, giving them a chance to actually shape their environment and to fully experience their everyday lives and interactions," said project manager Emma Greer, from Carlo Ratti Associati.

The installation was unveiled at the Museum of Future Government Services during the UAE Government Summit in Dubai on Monday. The project follows Carlo Ratti Associati's similar proposal for a heating system, which also uses motion sensors to focus beams of infrared radiation on people as they move through a building.

Project credits:

Design and conception: Carlo Ratti Associati – Carlo Ratti, Giovanni de Niedehausern, Pietro Leoni, Emma Greer
Software engineering and fabrication: Tonic Mind (team leader: Giovanni Malnati) and FGM Works (team leader: Fabrizio Milani)

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Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: architect Carlo Ratti claims the heating system he developed with MIT, which uses motion sensors to focus beams of infrared radiation on people as they move through a building, can be "one order of magnitude more efficient" than traditional methods.

"If you think about it, we waste a huge amount of energy to heat up buildings even when they are empty or if there are very few people in there," says Ratti, whose Local Warming project is on show at Rem Koolhaas' Elements exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale. "The idea was, what about concentrating heat just on people? To create almost like a bubble of heat around ourselves."

He claims: "When you look at places with not many people, or places where occupancy changes over time, you could actually get almost one order of magnitude more efficiency with this kind of heating."

Ratti's Local Warming System, which he developed with MIT's Senseable City Lab, consists of infrared lamps mounted on the ceiling, which tilt and rotate to focus beams of radiation onto people as they pass underneath.

"You create an infrared radiation that can be focussed and concentrated on people," Ratti explains. "As you move the infrared radiation will move with you. The lamps throw light in a parallel way, and they can rotate and focus on a person and then create a local climate around them."

The system relies on using motion tracking technology, which can be implemented in a variety of ways. One option, Ratti says, is to use the signals from people's mobile phones to track their position in a building, which means each person could choose their own temperature settings.

"Not only do you save a lot of energy, but you can have a more personalised climate around yourself," he says. "If you do the motion tracking using your cell phone, then you can record your personal information and have your own personalised climate."

Ratti believes that digital technology will radically transform the way we interact with our built environment.

"Our environment is becoming much more responsive, it's almost talking to us," he says. "Our interaction with space is changing. It can become more dynamic, more playful and fluid. The evolution of the built environment is becoming much more similar to the evolution of the natural."

However, Ratti says that this will not result in radically new architectural forms.

"I'm sorry to say that [buildings in the future] will not look incredibly different from what we know today. As humans we need horizontal floors, vertical facades, windows to protect us from the outside environment. But the life inside those buildings will be incredibly different."

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

The music featured in the movie is a track called October by UK Producer Jo Noon. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project.

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Milan Expo 2015: robotic tractors will create patterns across a field of crops on the roof of this pavilion that Italian architect Carlo Ratti has designed for the World Expo 2015 in Milan.

Working alongside engineering firm RecchiEngineering, Carlo Ratti Associati has designed the pavilion for agricultural brand New Holland, which plans to present an exhibition dedicated to sustainable farming at the international exhibition opening next spring.

Two self-driving tractors will be positioned on the gently sloping roof of the building, intended to demonstrate the growing role that robotics plays in agriculture.

"The idea of Earth Screening is not just about self-driving tractors that can draw patterns on the roof of the building," said Ratti. "It is about how we can sense and respond to the conditions of the soil to a degree that was impossible before. This points to a future where an agricultural field could be considered as a giant base for 'agricultural printing', with major advantages foreseen in terms of plant biodiversity and resource preservation."

Responding to the exhibition theme "Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life", the zero-emissions tractors will be powered entirely by electricity generated onsite.

"In the same way as self-driving cars are expected to revolutionise urban mobility, advanced robotic technologies are reshaping agriculture, with a new wave of innovations helping us to better respond to local terrain conditions," added the architect.

The interior spaces of the pavilion will present an exhibition of other agricultural equipment using large digital displays.

"While the roof uses real moving tractors, inside the pavilion we tried to reproduce the working conditions of other key pieces of agricultural equipment - from tractors to combine harvesters - in a physical and digital way," said Walter Nicolino, an architect at Carlo Ratti Associati.

The pavilion will remain in place for the duration of the expo, which takes place between May and October, before being dismantled and reconstructed in a new location.

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Milan 2013: Italian architect Carlo Ratti and his team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology installed three robotic bartenders in Milan last week (+ movie).

Ratti and the researchers and engineers at MIT's Senseable City Lab collaborated with The Coca-Cola Company and rum makers Bacardi to create Makr Shakr, a bar staffed by three robotic arms that mix customised drinks.

Above: movie by MyBossWas

Visitors to the Galleria del Corso were invited to download an app to their smartphone or tablet and create their own recipe before sending it to the robots to be mixed up.

"The number of combinations is almost infinite, especially if we take into account the machine's precision of measurement," said Yaniv Jacob Turgeman, project leader at Senseable City Lab.

The designers also programmed the robots' gestures by filming ballet dancer Roberto Bolle in action and using data from his movements.

The prototype Makr Shakr was being previewed ahead of its official launch at Google's developer conference in California next month.

At last year's Istanbul Design Biennial, Ratti programmed a printer to write out and continually update the Wikipedia entry for Open Source Architecture on the wall of the Adhocracy exhibition.

We've featured lots of robots on Dezeen, including a robotic arm that wound 60 kilometres of carbon and glass fibre filaments into a pavilion and a robotic 3D printer that creates architecture from sand – see all robots.

Other installations in Milan this year included Jean Nouvel's vision of future office environments and a courtyard filled with rotating cork platforms by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec – see all stories about design at Milan 2013 .

Here's some more information from the designers:

Researchers and engineers at MIT Senseable City Lab, Cambridge, in collaboration with The Coca-Cola Company and Barcardi rum, have designed a robotic bar, capable of preparing approximately one googol (equal to 10 power 100) crowd-sourced drink combinations. The project, called "Makr Shakr", was developed with the endorsement of “World Expo Milano 2015 – Energy for Life. Feeding the Planet”, and will be tested during Milan Design Week (April 9-14th, 2013) before being unveiled in its final form at Google I/O in San Francisco (on May 15th, 2013).

“Digital technologies are changing the interaction between people and products," says Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Lab and the design practice carlorattiassociati, Turin. “This is what we would like to do with Makr Shakr, as part of exploring the Third Industrial Revolution paradigm. People are given the power to invent their own drink recipes and digitally controlled machines make these recipes into reality. We can then enjoy the results of their production - sharing our experience and opinions with friends.” Ratti adds, “Makr Shakr aims to share this new potential - design-make-enjoy - with everyone in just a few minutes: the time taken to prepare a new cocktail.”

Users will download an app on their handheld devices and mix ingredients as virtual barmen. They can gain inspiration by viewing other users’ recipes and comments before sending in their drink of choice. The cocktail is then crafted by three robotic arms, whose movements reproduce every action of a barman - from the shaking of a Martini to the muddling of a Mojito, and even the thin slicing of a lemon garnish. Roberto Bolle, etoile dancer at La Scala in Milan and Principal Dancer with the American Ballet Theatre, along with Italian director and choreographer Marco Pelle, inspired the gestures of the robots. Roberto Bolle's movements were filmed and used as input for the programming of the Makr Shakr robots.

The system also leverages the revolutionary, touchscreen-operated beverage dispenser, Coca-Cola Freestyle, which offers more than 100 brands at the push of a button. “Coca-Cola Freestyle represents innovation at its best, combining revolutionary technology and inspired design to deliver unprecedented choice to consumers,” said Jennifer Mann, VP and General Manager, Coca-Cola Freestyle, The Coca-Cola Company. “This collaboration is another way we continue to find new ways to bring co-creation and social sharing to the next level.”

In Makr Shakr, the social connections woven through co-creation and the relationships between ingredients and people are shown on a large display positioned behind the bar. Consumers can also share these connections, along with recipes and photos on various social network platforms.

“Pioneering spirit has been at the heart of BACARDÍ since its earliest days, starting with a revolution in rum-making to inspiring today’s most drunk cocktails, first of which is the Mojito. This project embraces the same ambition,” said Giorgio Bertolo, BACARDI Marketing Manager, Italy & France “and we are proud to partner with Coca-Cola, once again, in this cocktail making innovation, as we did in 1900 with the invention of the Cuba Libre. Furthermore, this project is an experiment from the digital world asking people to step out and connect in a real human experience around a drink, exactly as we aim to facilitate with our cocktails.”

"Leveraging the great energy of this global design event, we are excited to explore new dynamics of social creation and consumption." says Yaniv Jacob Turgeman, project leader from MIT Senseable City Lab. “We've all been the home bartender at one point, and it's a lot of fun mixing for oneself or one's friends. Here the number of combinations is almost infinite, especially if we take into account the machine’s precision of measurement. With a domain of limitless possibility, the magic moment will be watching the formation of a bottom-up bar culture as we close the loop between co-curation and co-production in real time.”

Makr Shakr can mix both non-alcoholic and alcoholic drinks. The digital design system monitors alcohol consumption and blood alcohol levels by inputting basic physical data, something beyond what a traditional barman can do. Makr Shakr promotes responsible alcohol consumption by allowing people to self-monitor their drinking. A contribution is asked for drinks being produced by the Makr Shakr, with any gain generated from the project - after production costs - being donated to the Politecnico di Torino for a student fellowship on the Third Industrial Revolution.

A press preview will be held on Tuesday, April 9th at 6pm - Terrazza Martini, 7 Piazza Armando Diaz, Milan. The public opening will follow at 8pm - Galleria del Corso, Milan. Makr Shakr will be in action everyday until April 14th, from 1pm until 11pm.

Project concept and design by MIT Senseable City Lab.
Implementation by carlorattiassociati | walter nicolino & carlo ratti.
Main partners: Coca-Cola and BACARDÍ rum.
Technical partners: Kuka, Pentagram, SuperUber.
Media partners: Domus, Wired.
Event in collaboration with Meet the Media Guru and endorsed by Comune di Milano, World Expo Milano 2015 – Energy for Life. Feeding the Planet.
Video by MyBossWas.

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Istanbul Design Biennial 2012: this movie shows how a custom printer continually updates a copy of the Open Source Architecture Manifesto Wikipedia entry, written on a wall in the entrance to the Adhocracy exhibition at the Istanbul Design Biennial.

The project began over a year ago, when editor of Domus magazine and curator of the Adhocracy show Joseph Grima asked Italian studio Carlo Ratti Associatti to write a manifesto for open source architecture.

The studio decided to start a Wikipedia page about open-source architecture, so it could be continually updated by the online community.

For the biennial they have created a kinetic installation that demonstrates how the page keeps evolving as it is added to and altered.

They have installed a vertical plotter in the entrance of the Adhocracy exhibition that writes, erases and rewrites sections of the manifesto onto a whiteboard as it receives changing information from the Wikipedia page.

Find out more about the project in our previous story here and read our interview with the exhibition curator Joseph Grima here.

See all our stories about the Istanbul Design Biennial 2012 »
See all our stories about open design »

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