The theme '
Sowing Dreams ', which will guide all
CASACOR exhibitions
in 2025 , was born from extensive research into macro trends that heard, among other important sources, the architect and engineer
Carlo Ratti , curator of the next Venice Architecture Biennale ( to be held between May 10 and November 23, 2025). Defender of transdisciplinarity and biomimicry student, he provokes: “The best designs are those that have evolved over thousands of years.
Will we ever be able to design a building as smart as a tree? ” Check out the interview he gave to
CASACOR below:
CC: What can be done to make cities more resilient and adaptable to climate change? CR: Addressing climate change is crucial and requires comprehensive action. Architecture and design are the ways to develop solutions for mitigation and adaptation. Architecture has always been a way to protect ourselves from a hostile environment, so it must play a fundamental role, as we will show at the next Venice Architecture Biennale. Regarding flooding in particular, our design firm, CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, was recently approached by the city of Turin in Italy to tackle a challenge related to the River Po. Our project, Floating Above The Floods, uses kinetic architecture to create community spaces that can withstand the river's recurring floods. While this offers a local solution, it also presents a more general strategy for maximizing the use of urban waterways in the face of climate change.
CC: What about houses? How can we make them a safe shelter in the face of climate change? CR: The concise answer, inspired by a line from Sir David Attenborough's recent documentary A Life on Our Planet, might be: we should collaborate with nature, not confront it. In essence, we must consider the ecological relationships between each house and its surroundings.
CC: Regeneration is a term widely used today when it comes to recovering degraded areas of large cities. What is your opinion about this approach, which considers plant biodiversity in the use of urban spaces? CR: You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagrees that biodiversity is important in cities. Trees and other vegetation have the potential to lower temperatures and improve public health. However, it is surprising that there is still little awareness about how different tree species affect the environment. Some are effective at mitigating floods, while others are excellent at capturing carbon. One of the main research objectives in the coming years is to develop a comprehensive catalog that categorizes tree species based on their impact on urban life and thus guides planting the most suitable trees in specific locations. At Senseable City Lab, we began this effort through projects like Treepedia, which uses visual AI to create a metric – called Green View Index – that allows the assessment and comparison of tree canopy coverage.
