lecture > The Architecture of Contemporary Utopias – with Carlo Ratti

Carlo Ratti (MIT, Politecnico di Milano, and curator of the 19th Venice Biennale’s International Architecture Exhibition), introduced and in conversation with Elena Manferdini (SCI-Arc). 

This event opens the two-day symposium “Chimera: The Architecture of Contemporary Utopias,” celebrating the launch of Architectural Design Magazine (AD) Vol. 96.2, co-edited by Elena Manferdini and Damjan Jovanovic, with conversations taking place at the Italian Cultural Institute and SCI-Arc.

At the center of the talk and the magazine is a question shaping today’s architectural discourse: what if the most urgent task for architecture today is to reclaim the work of imagining? In a present shaped by predictive models, climate dashboards, and platform logics that cast the future as already known—appearing to foreclose not only the possibility of transformation but the very meaningfulness of pursuing it—the conversation underscores the continued necessity of utopian thinking within and against the systems that constrain us.

The second part of the program will take place on March 27, 2026, from 5:00 to 7:00 PM at SCI-Arc, W.M. Keck Lecture Hall (960 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013).