Carlo Ratti
Overview
 
Carlo F. Ratti is an Italian architect and engineer who practices in Torino, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

, and he is the Associate Professor of Practice and Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

, USA, where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab
MIT Senseable City Lab
The MIT Senseable City Laboratory aims to investigate and anticipate how digital technologies are changing the way people live and their implications at the urban scale. Director Carlo Ratti founded the Senseable City Lab in 2004 within the group at the , as well as in collaboration with the MIT...

. This lab studies the built environment of cities -- from street grids to plumbing and garbage systems -- using new kinds of sensors and hand-held electronics that have transformed the way we can describe and understand cities.
Quotations

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Mixed Opinions and Maxims, aphorism 370, “The Danger in Admiration,” (1879).

It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Speech, January 1842, at the Masonic Temple in Boston, repr. in The Dial (1843) and Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1849).

It’s the quality of the ordinary, the straight, the square, that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation. It’s a quality to be proud of. But it’s a quality that many people seem to have neglected.

Gerald Ford, Time Magazine|Time (January 28, 1974)

Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.

Rupert Murdoch, Address, 1989, to the Edinburgh Television Festival. quoted in Guardian (London, Jan. 1, 1990).

One cannot develop taste from what is of average quality but only from the very best.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann (February 26, 1824).

One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.

William Hazlitt, Complete Works, vol. 9, ed. P.P. Howe (1932). Characteristics, no. 162 (first published anonymously in 1823).

People of quality know everything without ever having learned anything.

Molière, Les Précieuses Ridicules, sc. 9 (1659).

So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands, ch. 2 (1987).

Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.

Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition, aph. 25 (1973).

The measure of your quality as a public person, as a citizen, is the gap between what you do and what you say.

Ramsey Clark, International Herald Tribune (Paris, June 18, 1991).

 
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