In a guest essay for designboom, the Italian architect and MIT professor muses on his latest installation for Milan Design Week 2026 and the connection between food and design.
carlo ratti designs house of polpa from mutti cans
At the University of Milan, beneath the historic Portico Richini, stands House of Polpa, an edible structure about thirty metres long. It resembles the house from Hansel and Gretel. But there is no witch here, and instead of gingerbread and sugar windows, it is made of thousands of cans of Mutti Polpa. At the end of the event, visitors will dismantle it and take the cans home in shopping bags to cook.
Here, design becomes a playful, fleeting moment between the shelf and the stove. But it also points to something deeper that links cooking and design, a method built on constant evolution. The cans arrive as structure and leave as ingredients, and the project dissolves into a meal. Yum.
all images by Saverio Lombardi Vallauri, courtesy of INTERNI
milan design week installation connects food and design
But the connection between food and architecture runs deeper, and it may suggest new directions for design. Think about what happens in a kitchen. You try, taste, adjust. Some add acidity, others lower the heat, others let the onions cook longer. A dish improves through handling. It evolves through repetition and variation. Recipes are what Umberto Eco would have called an ‘open work.’
This logic is not just metaphorical. In projects like Quisimangia, an award-winning company canteen developed by CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati with Mutti and the Cerea family of Da Vittorio, food and design literally share the same table. Even waste becomes part of the process, with tomato byproducts transformed into finishes for floors and walls. Here too, the project is not fixed, but part of a continuous cycle of transformation.
house of polpa, an edible structure about thirty metres long, is made of thousands of cans of mutti tomato polpa
architecture shaped organically often brings ingenious results
Architecture once worked like this, too. The architect Christopher Alexander spent years studying what he called the art of ‘timeless building,’ based on cycles of trial and error. You build, you inhabit, you fix what does not work, and you begin again. In a similar spirit, in 1964 Bernard Rudofsky curated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York the landmark exhibition Architecture Without Architects. He was fascinated by structures shaped by climate, topography, and the accumulated intelligence of people without formal design training, often producing solutions more ingenious than those of professionals.
Things changed with the rise of the Modern Movement and the ideal of the finished project, crafted by the almost Promethean hand of the designer as a complete, untouchable object. This gave us the era of starchitects and design stars, but it also had its limits. It made design less responsive to process, to leftovers, to the messiness of things once they leave the studio.
projects like house of polpa push back against the idea of design as a complete, untouchable object
house of polpa as a case study for flexible geometries
Projects like House of Polpa push back against this idea. The building becomes a stop along the way, not a final destination. The same is true of OLTRE, a kitchen that moves beyond rigid domestic geometries to engage with the irregular logic of nature. Its continuous curves follow the ground and surrounding greenery, adapting to different levels and conditions, while a reflective, movable skin dissolves it into its surroundings. Developed by CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati with Veneta Cucine, it can be installed in a garden, around a tree, beside a rock. In traditional homes, nature enters through the kitchen. Here, the kitchen enters nature as a fluid, shifting system.
These projects, and many others on show this year, challenge the idea of design as a finished object. Instead, they take cues from cooking, a process studied mathematically by network scientist László Barabási, who has shown that successful recipes rarely appear fully formed. A ragù requires countless small adjustments between cook and pot. A vernacular building takes shape through ongoing negotiation between builder and environment. Both demand patience, allowing the outcome to be shaped by forces beyond any single author.
carlo ratti investigates the role of designer as part of a whole
In this context, the role of the designer also needs to be rethought. What is needed is a more collective approach, one that can bring different voices into harmony. This is something we explored in Architettura Open Source Reloaded (Einaudi, 2025), and at last year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, through exchanges across disciplines. Milan Design Week is a different kind of arena, more commercial and more hedonistic, but it is beginning to engage with similar questions.
In a little while, House of Polpa will be gone. The Richini portico will stand empty again. The steel structure will be recycled. The wood, coated with a tomato-based Mapei resin, will be reused. The cans of Mutti Polpa will scatter across Milan. A Tuesday night pasta, a Sunday sauce, a quick lunch eaten standing up. It is in this dispersal that the project’s intelligence lies, a form of design that continues to evolve while minimising waste. Just like in nature. And just like in cooking.
its dispersal is the project’s intelligence, a form of design that continues to evolve while minimising waste
project info:
name: House of Polpa
architect: Carlo Ratti Associati | @carlorattiassociati
brand: Mutti | @muttiinternational
An architect and engineer by training, Carlo Ratti teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the Senseable City Lab, and at the Politecnico di Milano. He is a founding partner of the international design office Carlo Ratti Associati and curator of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.
The post carlo ratti on edible structures and how food can fine tune design appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.
