The Board of Directors of the Venice Biennale have appointed Carlo Ratti as the Director of the Architecture Sector, with the task of curating the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, which will take place from May 24 to November 23, 2025. Trained as an architect and engineer, Carlo Ratti teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at the Politecnico di Milano. He is also the director of the Senseable City Lab and a founding partner of the architecture and innovation studio CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, with offices in Turin, New York City, and London.

Among the various projects he has overseen, he served as the program director at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture, and Design in Moscow, a curator of the BMW Guggenheim Pavilion in Berlin, and a curator of the Future Food District Pavilion during Expo Milano 2015. He was also the chief curator of the eighth Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Shenzhen (UABB) in 2019, co-curator of the second Porto Design Biennale in 2021, and Creative Mediator responsible for the award-winning Urban Vision of the Nomadic European Biennale Manifesta 14 in Pristina in 2022. His work has been exhibited, among other places, at New York City’s MoMA, at La Biennale di Venezia, the Design Museum in Barcelona, the Science Museum in London, and the MAXXI in Rome.

Ratti has declared: “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 cover image is courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.