The Organizing Committee of the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (Shenzhen) (“UABB (Shenzhen)”) announced the team of Chief Curators of 2019 UABB (Shenzhen), which includes Architect and Director of MIT Senseable City Lab Carlo Ratti, CAE Academician Meng Jianmin and famous curator and art critic Fabio Cavallucci.
Carlo Ratti Associati has unveiled the "Greenary," a renovated farmhouse designed around a 10-meter-high tree in the countryside near Parma, Northern Italy. The scheme marks the first step of CRA’s winning 2017 masterplan for the Mutti tomato company, driven by a closer integration between nature and the built environment.
The 50-year-old Ficus tree, situated within the main living area, is encircled by stepped areas rising to the treetop, creating six domestic spaces. The house will be coupled with a factory developed in close architectural continuity, due to their physical proximity.
Bio-Architecture Formosana (BAF) together with Carlo Ratti Associatti have won the international competition for the Southern branch of the Taiwan National Library and Repository in Tainan, Taiwan. With the concept of "Library as a Town", the team created a proposal for a new public building that will accommodate a library, book museum and a joint archives center. Selected among nine competitors, the winning design will be placed in the southern part of Taiwan in the XinYing District. The proposal is made to investigate the role of the library in the future.
Carlo Ratti Associati has released details of their schematic design for the University of Milan’s new science campus, featuring robotically-assembled brick facades, porous communal areas, and natural oases. Working in collaboration with Australian real estate group Lendlease, the “Science for Citizens” proposal will sit within a new Milan Innovation District, located on the site of Milan’s 2015 World Expo.
Located within this new district, and home to over 18,000 students and 2,000 researchers, the “Science for Citizens” proposal seeks to “put forward a vision for an open campus that becomes a testing ground for innovative education while fostering exchanges between the university and the surrounding innovation neighborhood.”
Carlo Ratti Associati, working in collaboration with Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, has unveiled their design for a modular paving system named “The Dynamic Street.” Intended to make streets “reconfigurable, safer, and more accessible to pedestrians, cyclists, and tomorrow’s self-driving vehicles,” the project will be on display at Sidewalk Lab’s office and experimentation space in Toronto throughout the summer of 2018.
Manifesting as a series of hexagonal modular pavers, the project explores the various patterns which can be created by reconfiguring modules, with a potential future “allowing a street to create an extra car lane during rush hour before then turning it into a pedestrian-only plaza in the evening.”
Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) has unveiled Scribit, a “writing robot” which draws images and text on any wall surface, turning office, living, and bathroom walls into a blank canvas for artistic expression. Using in-built engines, Scribit can draw, cancel, and re-draw new content an infinite number of times, allowing users to print different images, messages, or feeds every day.
Scribit is always connected to the internet, allowing users to download, upload or source any online content. Operating in real time, Scribit immediately reproduces any data sent to it by the user, be it a restaurant posting the day’s menu, a financial firm posting stock market updates in its lobby, or an art enthusiast projecting their own content on the living room wall.
Bjarke Ingels Group and Carlo Ratti Associati have broken ground on 88 Market Street, a new skyscraper at the heart of Singapore's business district. Transforming a site which was previously occupied by a parking structure from the 1980s, the 280-meter-tall building will include plentiful greenery both on its facades and internally. Inside, the building will include offices, 299 serviced residential units, and ancillary retail space.
Carlo Ratti Associati has teamed up with German engineer Schlaich Bergermann Partner and British design studio Atmos to design the world's tallest man-made structure. Nearly twice the height of the Burj Khalifa, the 1609-meter-tall tower was envisioned as a vertical "Central Park" clothed in vegetation and supported by a lightweight matrix of pre-stressed cables.
"Imagine you take New York's Central Park, turn it vertical, roll it and twirl it," said Carlo Ratti.
