Carlo Ratti's appointment as the next Venice Architecture Biennale director raises questions about how architecture's most important event will be impacted by Italy's far-right government, writes Catherine Slessor.
Just before Christmas, somewhat overlooked in the festive haze of tinsel and eggnog, it was announced that Italian architect and engineer Carlo Ratti has been appointed to be the next director of the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Ratti will helm the 19th iteration of the international architecture exposition in 2025, a responsibility that combines intellectual prestige with a strong whiff of poisoned chalice. The challenge is considerable: to steer and make sense of an unwieldy cultural juggernaut with the potential to burnish or upend reputations.
It's been over 20 years since the architecture biennale had an Italian director. Massimiliano Fuksas was the last Italian incumbent, presiding over "Less Aesthetics – More Ethics" in 2000. Prior to that, in the biennale's very early days, it was essentially an Italian old boys' club, with Aldo Rossi, Paolo Portoghesi and Francesco dal Co all taking turns.
Ratti would seem to represent a reversion to architecture's business-as-usual
But since Fuksas, the focus has been outwards, beyond Italy to the world. From the turn of the millennium, a roster of international luminaries, including Rem Koolhaas, Alejandro Aravena and Kazuyo Sejima, the first female director in 2010, have been invited to sprinkle stardust on proceedings.
Widely acknowledged to have taken the biennale in a new direction, Lesley Lokko's transformative and ambitious curatorial programme of 2023 was themed around Africa and its diaspora. Dismayingly, Ratti would seem to represent a reversion to architecture's business-as-usual, with more than a whiff of institutional sphincter clenching. The timing of the pre-Christmas announcement, as people wound down for the holidays, seemed more under-the-radar than usual.
Ratti's appointment must also be seen in the context of the biennale's wider relationship with Italian culture and politics. Last October, it was announced that right-wing journalist and public intellectual Pietrangelo Buttafuoco will succeed film producer Roberto Cicutto as overall biennale president, to oversee the individual art, architecture, dance, theatre, music and film festivals that constitute the world's oldest and largest cultural showcase.
Historically biennale presidents were feted for their skills in arts administration, but Buttafuoco is more known for his extreme political views. He is a former national leader of the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a party established by Giorgio Almirante, who was a minister in the government of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
As a journalist, Buttafuoco worked on assorted right-wing magazines and the then MSI newspaper, Il Secolo d’Italia. When once asked during an interview if he was a fascist he retorted enigmatically, "I am not a fascist. I am something else."
As an ideological ally of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, now presiding over the country's most overtly right-wing government since the war, Buttafuoco will be tasked with addressing what Meloni's administration perceives to be the biennale's left wing proclivities.
Buttafuoco will be tasked with addressing what Meloni's administration perceives to be the biennale's left wing proclivities
Reacting to Buttafuoco's appointment, Raffaele Speranzon, a native of Venice and senator in Meloni's Brothers of Italy party, commented, "Another glass ceiling has been shattered. The left thought of the Biennale Foundation as a fiefdom where it could place friends and acolytes. Buttafuoco represents the kind of sea change the Meloni government wants to extend to every cultural and social institution in the nation: figures will be chosen for their depth, competence and experience alone."
Buttafuoco, whose latest book is a paean to Italy's brash and venal former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, takes up the biennale presidency in March. In the meantime, he has been coyly keeping people guessing as to his intentions. However, his elevation to the top job follows a populist playbook straight out of Poland and Hungary, where right-wing governments co-opted ideologically aligned polemicists to monitor and mould the dissemination of culture.
Ratti is also treading carefully for now, greeting the news of his apotheosis as architecture director with gnomic platitudes. "We architects like to think we are smart, but real intelligence is everywhere," he pronounced. "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."
Those attempting to fathom the style and tone of a Ratti biennale might begin with his most recent op-ed for the New York Times, co-authored with Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser. Headlined "Billionaire-Built Cities Would Be Better Than Nothing", it argues for the role of private investors and corporations in developing new urban settlements, focusing on a controversial attempt by a consortium of Silicon Valley's most powerful investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, to build a new city outside San Francisco for 400,000 people.
It's clear the biennale as a whole cannot help being impacted by the installation of a new president
Viewed as a supposedly safe pair of Italian hands, Ratti's appointment marks a screeching U-turn from Lokko, whose tenure was structured around narratives of decarbonisation and decolonisation. Ratti could not be more different. As well as his enthusiasm for billionaires as agents of change, he espouses a cerebral, tech-bro Ted-talk conception of architecture, where technology, however preposterous, is seen as a panacea for the world's problems.
In tandem with running his Turin-based practice, Ratti is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the Senseable City Lab, concerned with how "sensing technologies" and flows of digital data, including controversial practices such as facial recognition, can help to address the quality of life in cities.
When covid first struck in early 2020, before the scale and spread of the virus overwhelmed healthcare provision, Ratti was quick to propose idealistic but often impractical design responses. These included re-purposing shipping containers as intensive care units and a portable device to disinfect clothing using ozone. "Never let a crisis go to waste," he said at the time.
On a lighter note, among his various start-up projects is a robotic bartending system, now widely employed on cruise ships, which at least might be of some use in the cocktail hour scrums of the biennale's press vernissage.
Since the architecture biennale was formally established in 1980, its more successful iterations have involved directors going beyond the insular confines of architects talking to architects. And Lokko, of Scots-Ghanian heritage, also showed that representation matters. While it's still early days, it's clear the biennale as a whole cannot help being impacted by the installation of a new president and the accompanying, increasingly strident, political mood music.
The only hopeful intimation is that given the volatility of Italian politics, with 69 changes of government in the postwar era, who knows where things will be in 2025. But the direction of travel is not encouraging.
Catherine Slessor is an architecture editor, writer and critic. She is the president of architectural charity the 20th Century Society and former editor of UK magazine The Architectural Review. She has attended every Venice Architecture Biennale since 1996.
The photo is by Andrea Avezzù courtesy of the Venice Architecture Biennale.
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