Carlo Ratti Associati reveals the latest project connecting the digital world and the architectural world to the natural environment...

The vision of a bike speeding through the trees.... It's not Elliot, the star of Steven Spielberg's masterpiece "E.T." zooming with the alien in the basket through the plant tops of the woods in the San Fernando Valley, but rather the most recent "effort" by CRA - Carlo Ratti Associati: an overhead cycling and walk path supported by more than a thousand trees.
The work, realized in collaboration with Office for Living Architecture (OLA) according to the Baubotanik technique that involves the use of trees as architectural elements in continuous mutation, leads to the Unesco site of Sabbioneta and is integrated with a system of sensors monitoring and processing various parameters such as air quality, growth and health conditions of the trees along with...

Carlo Ratti Associati reveals the latest project connecting the digital world and the architectural world to the natural environment.

The vision of a bike speeding through the trees.... It's not Elliot, the star of Steven Spielberg's masterpiece "E.T." zooming with the alien in the basket through the plant tops of the woods in the San Fernando Valley, but rather the most recent "effort" by CRA - Carlo Ratti Associati: an overhead cycling and walk path supported by more than a thousand trees.
The work, realized in collaboration with Office for Living Architecture (OLA) according to the Baubotanik technique that involves the use of trees as architectural elements in continuous mutation, leads to the Unesco site of Sabbioneta and is integrated with a system of sensors monitoring and processing various parameters such as air quality, growth and health conditions of the trees along with atmospheric agents.
"Imagine if one day we could 'grow' architectural elements like a tree? We are still far from such a future, but we want to explore the converging of what is natural and what is artificial, using digital technologies to learn more about the environment around us," comments Carlo Ratti, the Director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT.