Architecture News

Carlo Ratti Announced as Curator of 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale

Multi-hyphenate Italian designer and academic Carlo Ratti has been appointed as curator of the 19th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, which will run from May 10 through November 23, 2025, with the exhibition’s vernissage set to take place from May 8–9. Ratti’s appointment was recommended by Roberto Cicutto, outgoing president of La Biennale de Venezia, in agreement with his successor Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, who begins his four-year term next March.

Trained as an architect and engineer, Ratti is best known as founding partner of architecture and innovation studio CRA – Carlo Ratti Associati, which maintains offices in New York, London, and in his hometown of Turin, and as a professor at both the Polytechnic University of Milan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he leads the university’s Senseable City Lab. Ratti completed his PhD thesis at MIT as a Fulbright Scholar.

Ratti’s scholarly writings and essays have been published in hundreds of international journals and publications and his work has been widely exhibited at venerable institutions across the globe, including the Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona’s Design Museum, and MAXXI in Rome. He is also no stranger to stepping into chief or co-curatorial roles, including at the BMW Guggenheim Pavilion in Berlin, the Future Food District pavilion at Expo 2015 Milan, the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Shenzhen in 2019, and the 2021 Porto Design Biennale in 2021. Ratti has also served as program director at Moscow’s Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design.

Works by Ratti’s studio published by RECORD include the MEET Digital Culture Center in Milan (with Italo Rota).

Said Ratti in a statement: “We architects like to think we are smart, but real intelligence is everywhere. The disembodied ingenuity of evolution, the growing power of computers, and the collective wisdom of the crowd. To face a burning world, architecture must harness all the intelligence around us. I am honored and humbled to have the opportunity to curate the Biennale Architettura 2025.”

The 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Lesley Lokko and themed The Laboratory of the Future, concluded late last month.

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KEYWORDS: Venice Architecture Biennale

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Matt Hickman is senior news/digital editor at Architectural Record. Previously, he served as Senior Editor at The Architect’s Newspaper and has over a decade of experience as a freelance writer and editor specializing in historic preservation, public space, and the intersection of the natural world and built environment. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Matt holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from The New School.