In the densely-packed cityscape of Hong Kong, some people see confinement. No room to think, no room to grow, no room to breathe.  

 

Not Carlo Ratti. For the Italian-born architect, engineer and MIT professor, Hong Kong is like a living laboratory, filled with the potential to think about new ways of urban living. “It’s able to bring together so many different experiences, ideas and worlds,” he says. “It’s an incredibly rich place where I get a lot of inspiration.” 

 

Ratti has visited the city a number of times to deliver lectures, and he became especially familiar with it when he was curator of the Shenzhen side of the Shenzhen–Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (UABB) in 2019. He’ll be back later this year as the opening keynote speaker at the 2025 Business of Design Week (BODW) Summit.  

 

For now, though, he has his hands full as curator of the 15th edition of the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the world’s largest architectural exhibition, which runs until November 23. For Ratti, the biennale is a bit like Hong Kong: a lab. For the event’s main exhibition in the old rope weaving factory of the Arsenale, a historic Venetian naval base, Ratti put out an open call for projects and received over a thousand submissions. He chose about 300 of them, involving more than 750 participants. 

“A biennale is a lab,” he says. “A lab is without boundaries by definition. You blur one project with another. The denser the better. the richer the better. It’s about generating new ideas by collision.”  

 

 

Different kinds of intelligence 

The biennale’s theme this year is “Intelligens,” with the goal of exploring how different types of intelligence — natural, artificial and collective — can improve our built environments while addressing fundamental challenges like climate change. Visitors to the main exhibition are greeted by a sweltering room full of disassembled air conditioning units; a not-so-subtle critique of our reliance on mechanised climate control, something all too familiar to Hongkongers. From there, they are confronted by an almost overwhelming array of exhibits.   

 

During the biennale’s opening days, Ratti laid out the goal of this panoply of architectural initiatives: “To face a burning world, architecture must harness all the intelligence around us.” There are plenty of examples of architects trying to make that happen. Many embraced the potential of artificial intelligence to interact with the natural world. “Talking to Elephants” by South African architects Marc Sherratt, Lance Ho Hip and Franco Schoeman uses AI-driven infrastructure to help elephants migrate across 1,000 kilometres of public and private land. “Earthen Rituals” by Israeli architect Lola Ben-Alon and Columbia University's Natural Materials Lab used AI to 3D-print earth-fibre tiles from construction waste, creating a beautifully decorated adobe pavilion. Others were more interested in natural processes: New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro created a bio-filtration system that cleaned Venetian lagoon water enough to make espresso. Gimmicky? Yes, but imagine if such a system could be scaled up to serve an entire city. 

 

 

The critical response has been as lively as the exhibition itself. Many observers were sceptical of the amount of AI involved. Art Review labelled the show a “tech bro fever dream,” describing it as a “claustrophobic mess of bio and techno theatrics, relying on expensive machines to solve problems that didn't need fixing in the first place.” The Guardian’s architecture critic Oliver Wainwright acidly noted that the main exhibition “might leave you with indigestion.”  

 

Wainwright did acknowledge, however, that the wide net cast by Ratti did “give some more marginal, occasionally critical, voices a seat at the table.” Among these is a display criticising the harsh working conditions of many architects, a film documenting the renovation of public housing in Europe and a network of interconnected treehouses created to protest the destruction of a vulnerable forest in Germany. 

 

Other critics were more sanguine. Architects’ Journal described the exhibition as “surprisingly optimistic.” And that’s likely how Ratti would describe his outlook. He was amused by how many critics zeroed in on the AI-generated summaries that accompanied each project. It was simply an attempt to make such a vast, varied and science-heavy exhibition more digestible, he says. “I’m surprised this started so much of a conversation. Critics probably [felt] threatened.” 

 

Natural feedback 

 

For Ratti, AI is simply a tool that can help us better understand the natural feedback we have long ignored. “Modern architecture has lost a lot of that feedback,” he says. Observing nature more carefully can produce “a building as smart as a tree,” a line that Ratti used in his curatorial statement for the biennale. “Usually with architecture it’s a linear economy – we build stuff and it ends up in landfill,” he tells us. “But the beauty of nature is that nothing is wasted. A tree is a beautiful structure that only uses local energy and resources. And at the end of life, everything goes back in the circle.” 

 

It’s a sentiment that reflects Ratti’s approach to architecture, which is as investigative as it is productive. “I have always been fascinated by how cities behave almost like living organisms,” he says. “That curiosity led me to examine the built environment through multiple lenses.” After studying engineering at the Politecnico di Torino and the École nationale des ponts et chaussées, he turned his attention to “architecture infused with computer science” at the University of Cambridge and MIT. “It also pushed me to explore data, networks, and emerging technologies as tools to better understand and shape the complexity of the built environment – not as something static, but as a living, responsive system.” 

 

You can see that in the two torches Ratti designed for the 2026 Milan Winter Olympics and Paralympics, which are dubbed “Essential.” Designed to be refilled up to 10 times, their streamlined design “is about minimising everything that’s not necessary,” says Ratti. “Sustainability means not using what is not necessary.” 

 

It’s especially clear in some of the work he has done through his own architectural firm, Carlo Ratti Associati. His AI Timber prototype, first showcased at an exhibition in Shanghai in 2023, is built using a new AI-guided method of creating cross-laminated timber structures – a recyclable alternative to carbon-intensive concrete. The AI cuts the timber in a way that preserves the original contour of each tree, reducing wastage by 30 percent over conventional cutting methods. 

 

 

Another experiment was unveiled In 2021, when Ratti released plans for the Jian Mu Tower in Shenzhen, a 218-metre-tall skyscraper that would have a 10,000-square-metre hydroponic farm installed on its façade. An AI-powered "virtual agronomist" would manage the farm's operations, with the goal of producing 270,000 kilograms of fresh produce every year.  

 

Much of the work at Ratti’s studio is grounded in research done at MIT’s Senseable City Lab, which Ratti founded in 2004. It's an interdisciplinary initiative that draws from architecture, urban planning, design, engineering, economics and computer and natural sciences to investigate urban problems. Ratti says the lab is currently investigating the “cooling power of trees” — which provide both shade and evaporative cooling — to develop alternatives to energy-intensive air conditioning.  

 

He also points to one of its most recent research projects, which draws from the work of American sociologist William H. Whyte. In the 1970s, Whyte filmed public spaces around New York City to understand how people actually used them. This was a time when many cities were in economic decline, subjected to vast urban renewal efforts that imposed new spaces and buildings that often weren’t well adapted to the places they were built. Whyte’s efforts to systematically understand public behaviour in urban spaces helped spearhead a more grassroots approach to urban planning and design; he is often considered the godfather of the modern placemaking movement.  

 

The Senseable City team reassembled Whyte’s footage, filmed new footage of present-day public spaces, and used AI to analyse it all. They discovered that, compared to the 1970s, people walk faster, linger less and do not socialise as much as they used to. For Ratti, this is a dangerous trend. “There seems to be a much more transactional nature to public space,” he says. “Public space is one of the few antidotes we have to digital polarisation. In digital spaces you can cancel everyone who doesn’t think like you. But in public spaces you are confronted by different people with different ideologies. If public space is losing this primordial function we need to study that in more detail.” 

 

What to expect at BODW 

 

Ratti still can’t say what he will be presenting at the BODW Summit, themed “Curiosity Ignites Design Innovation,” when he comes to Hong Kong later this year. “I’m still thinking about it,” he says. “One thing I’d like to do is try to blend [my talk] with this idea of feedback from the biennale.” He wants to tap into collective intelligence, in other words — and for a curious architect, who knows where that will lead.  

 

Writer: Christopher DeWolf  

Portrait by Stephanie Fuessenich, Photo courtesy CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati 

This column is produced in partnership with Zolima CityMag, an online magazine that explores Hong Kong’s arts, design, history and culture.