19th International Architecture Exhibition
The core of Carlo Ratti’s thought and design is the future. His special vision transcends the contemporary – which is a time of divestment – to make architecture, man’s shelter since the dawn of time, the capacity to dwell in the world.
In the dialectical arena of the various disciplines, constellated with algorithms he’s been consulting as newly minted oracles, Ratti deciphers what we are and what we will be – as individuals and as society – in the digital flux that leads into our tomorrow, the time of all of us Gens provided with Intelligence.
In building his Exhibition, he calls upon the thinking communities of philosophers, architects, engineers, naturalists, sociologists and scientists to present a plurality of the proposals and possible solutions around a specific paradigm: Intelli/Gens. The network itself, understood as connection, intersection, ramification, is the labyrinth that Ratti is investigating. The network as the de facto common denominator of intelligence, human relationships, urbanity. Be it neuronal synapses, social networks, or the Internet, it is the rhizomatic structure that ensures the centrality of every periphery, the interchange between nodes, the different points of view. And it is the vision, – or better yet the pre-vision – that, as the poets say, allows us to advance through “the night of the world”. This is what pre-vision is for. To gear up and intervene. And thus to create the future.
Meaning and sign converge in the title Intelli/Gens.
While intelligence is the foundation of the individuals’ process of evolution, in the most noble sense of their being cives (a third declension noun, thus both masculine and feminine), architecture is the space in which it can unfurl, in a constant negotiation with the territory.
Enumerating functions, drawing symbologies, fostering relationships, intelligence builds architecture in ethical, aesthetic and above all ecological terms. It is a fact that, etymologically, oikos in Greek means home but also environment. And that is why in his own statement of intent, Ratti himself asks: “Will we ever be able to design a building as smart as a tree?
This question is the felicitous heresy of the architect who heads MIT’s Senseable City Lab in Boston, indicative of a pursuit in which circuits and silicon are just a means to return to the origin. Possibly, with greater awareness.
What Ratti gives us is the autobiography of Venice, this Hydropolis that no utopia has ever dared to imagine but that the ingenuity of a people was able to create – in the course of its own history –poetising with nature by virtue of architecture.
The city of water is therefore the local model to read at the global scale. A laboratory of complexity par excellence in which to find solutions useful to the entire world. The highest example of Intelli/Gens in which the nature vs. artifice duality has been superseded by the fusion between civilisation and environment.
An organism in the making, therefore, an admirable balance between human and natural history, in which one might perceive the city of refuge envisioned by the reigning Pontiff, Pope Francis, in his historic visit to La Biennale di Venezia, welcomed as “a place of encounter and cultural exchange”.
And from Venice the voyage reaches out all the way to Space, by means of natural, artificial and collective intelligence. An itinerary in the form of a mandate for the year 2025. In which every section is wilfully sealed with a question mark, the punctuation of possibilities and thus abode of the future.
The answers to these questions will lay the foundations for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition.