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BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

“Intelligens” is the title of 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2025) curated by Carlo. Read here

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Atlas of the Senseable City, Carlo Ratti's new book, tackles how the growth of digital mapping, is affecting cities and daily life.

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Hortus @ FICO Eataly World


2017

International design and innovation office Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA), in collaboration with FICO Eataly World, has designed “Man and the Future – Hortus,” an interactive pavilion where people can engage with digitally-augmented farming and grow their own food on-site. The project pairs hydroponic practices with online data collection, paving the way for a new type of collaborative, in-store cultivation system in which anyone can become a food producer.

 

With its disruptive vision for the food industry, the project is among the highlights of FICO Eataly World, the 100,000 square meter edutainment park opened on November 15th, 2017 in Bologna, Italy.

 

Visitors enter the “Hortus” circular pavilion – one of FICO’s six multimedia carousels – and follow an immersive route that leads to a vast indoor hydroponic vegetable garden. Here, anybody can choose to plant seeds in a hydroponic tank and start monitoring their growth.

 

Moving through the space of the pavilion will be like moving through time,” says Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and founder of CRA: “As you walk through, you will observe the progression of plant growth: from seeds and sprouts at the entrance of the farm to fully developed plants after a few meters.”

 

By utilizing sensors that measure the plants’ status, visitors are connected to the farm digitally and are able to access it remotely, from the “Hortus” web app (www.hortus.eatalyworld.it). Once a person plants a seed in the hydroponic farm, an Internet-of-Things device will match his or her profile with that of the corresponding plant. Using the web app, the visitor can then track the state of the plant’s biological data, its level of growth, and even share it on social media. At “Hortus,” you can sow seeds of basil, curly lettuce, wild rocket and butter lettuce. Once the plant is finally ripe, it will be collected to be eaten.

 

Those of us who grew up on a farm know the feeling of planting a seed and then obsessively checking on its progress each day. It’s like discovering the magic of life as it progresses. We wanted to make such an experience accessible to everyone, even those who live in the depths of the city,” adds Ratti. “This sort of urban farming will probably never be able to satisfy all of our cities’ feeding needs. But it does allow us to create a more direct relationship between urbanites and nature. As in Kurt Tucholsky’s old poem “The Ideal,” in which the German writer dreams of a house where one side faces the bustling center of Berlin and the other side faces the Alps, we might have future cities that better combine urban life and nature.

CREDITS:
“Man and The Future – Hortus”
A project by Carlo Ratti Associati for FICO Eataly World ;
CRA team: Carlo Ratti, Giovanni de Niederhausern, Saverio Panata (project lead), Alessandro
Tassinari, Chiara Borghi, Aunie Frisch, Gary di Silvio, Valentina Grasso, Giulia Maccagli, Michele
Versaci, Andrea Riva, Andrea Pedrina, Andrea Galanti, Emanuele Protti, Damiano Gui, Freddie
Hong ;
General Contractor: CWS (Luca Passini, Luca Amerio, Fabrizio Bottino, Marco Fogazzolo, Emanuele Grosso, Bharat Gupta, Andrea Romanello, Samuel Salvatico, Gian Franco Tibaldini, Gianluca Tufarolo, Danilo Versino);
Hydroponic Consultancy: Ceres srl – Paolo Battistel; Indoorline srl ;
Image Recognition: Tabula Natural Interfaces S.a.s. ;
Photography: Max Tomasinelli, Daniele Iodice ;
Videography: Setteventi snc ;
Plant Beds: Tekspan S.p.A. ;
MEP: Marco Gavioli ;
Camera Dolly System: Asso Sim ;
Pavilion Construction: Paolo Castelli S.p.A. ;
Technical Sponsor: Valoya; Masserdotti ;