Portfolio MR

PORTFOLIO

Mila Ratto Architect MLA

University of Buenos Aires ‘17 Harvard GSD ‘23

Selected Work 2019 - 2023

.1

PH Scalabrini Ortiz

.2

Soler 14

.3

BH House 18

.4

Soil. Venice Biennale Pavilion

.5

Arevalo 28

.6

Growing The Near Future City

34

.7

Reassembling Fractured Landscapes

44

.8

Wetland Education Center

50

04

22

Milagros Ratto

PH Scalabrini Ortiz 2019 AUTHOR Milagros Ratto, Brian Kohan TYPE Residential STATUS Built PRESS Domus, Arch Daily, Design Boom, Dezeen, Afasia YEAR

PH Scalabrini Ortiz consisted in the intervention of a 820 sq ft ‘PH’ house, a historical Buenos Aires typology of the early 20th century where different housing units, each with their own patio, are located on the same lot and connected through an open air circulation. The small footprint of the lot forced the house to grow in four levels, each establishing a different connection with the patio and the urban landscape, graduating throughout the seasons a sense of time and intimacy.

I was exploring a space that could be lived as an exterior. To capture a portion of nature, as small as it may be, in the context of a very dense urban fabric.

4

Scalabrini Ortiz Urban Dwelling

5

Milagros Ratto

6

PH Scalabrini Ortiz

7

Milagros Ratto

Level 1. Access patio, living room, kitchen

Level 2. Studio

Level 3. Bedroom

Level 4. Terrace

8

PH Scalabrini Ortiz

9

Milagros Ratto

10

PH Scalabrini Ortiz

11

Milagros Ratto

12

PH Scalabrini Ortiz

13

Milagros Ratto

Soler 2021 AUTHOR Ana Smud, Alberto Smud TEAM Milagros Ratto, Camila Jalife, Sasha Molczadzki, Leila Matzkin, Agustina Falcon TYPE Commercial Offices ROLE General design, acade design, main space design, construction detailing STATUS Built YEAR

Soler entailed the reconversion of an historical industrial warehouse typology in Buenos Aires, to house the headquarters of a textile design company. The intervention firstly consisted in liberating all space under the industrial nave, resulting in a luminous three-story void that articulates the open-plan surrounding offices. Both facades are buffered by green intermediate spaces, sheltering the building from the dense urban environment and creating a world of its own.

14

Soler

15

Milagros Ratto

Ground floor

Offices floor

Transversal sections

16

Soler

Longitudinal section

17

Milagros Ratto

BH House 2021 AUTHOR Milagros Ratto TYPE Residential STATUS Unbuilt YEAR

BH House is an unbuilt project located in Beccar, a suburban residential area in the north of Buenos Aires. The project explores the spatial possibilities of a rigid compact, modular plan by emptying, veiling and obscuring elements, in search for the greatest amount of mediations between parts. By means of these operations, the inital precisison and geometry of the plan and section become a source of spatial ambiguity.

18

BH House

19

Milagros Ratto

6

1

2 3 4 5

20

7

8

BH House

.03 New accessible green roof

.02 Extension on former rooftop

.01 Existing apartment

21

Milagros Ratto

Soil. Venice Biennale Argentina Pavilion YEAR TEAM TYPE ROLE STATUS

2023 Mila Ratto, Valeria Jaros, Charlotte Bovy, Ana Smud Competition for Argentina’s pavilion Co-Author Unbuilt

‘Soil’ proposes to explore in the extension of our landscapes for those techniques that recover the deep bond between architecture and earth. We see the soil as the origin and foundation of architecture because from it grow and are extracted all the materials that allow us to inhabit the world. It is a continuous living space, a complex web of relationships between minerals, plants, animals and humans; without it there would be no community, no culture, no life. In search of this ground-sensitive architecture, we imagine a pavilion of raw earth brick walls, supporting a photographic exhibition of Argentine landscapes, each one telling a story regarding the relationship between soil, ecology, culture and community.

22

Soil. Venice Biennale Argentina Pavilion

*Visualization: Franco Gilardi Studio

23

Milagros Ratto

3 1

2 5 4

6 The pavilion portrays a selection of 9 sites that present different forms of building with, cultivating and regenerating the soil in Argentina. Each recording would deal with topics such as the recovery of ancestral knowledge of cultivation and construction, the defense of the territories and the recovery of land by historically excluded communities, the regeneration of soil and native ecosystems, as well as the link between the collective care of the earth and the generation of a community.

Argentina - Selected Sites

1. Misiones

Agroforestry and soil regeneration

24

2. Salta Nomadic indigenous practices

3. Santiago del Estero

Vernacular earth construction

4. Mendoza

5. Cordoba

6. Buenos Aires

Inca irrigation infrastructures

Ecological restoration of the ‘sierras’

Wetlands and urbanization

Soil. Venice Biennale Argentina Pavilion

*Visualization: Franco Gilardi Studio

25

Milagros Ratto

Longitudinal Section

Plan

Rebar support

Earth block wall

Entrance

Photographic exhibition

Hanging system

Gathering space

26

Exhibition table

Photography

Soil. Venice Biennale Argentina Pavilion

*Visualization: Franco Gilardi Studio

Every industrialized material is intrinsically associated with an extractive landscape. The pavilion is constructed, therefore, with borrowed prefabricated earth blocks from a local company in Italy, which have significantly less ecological impact and that can be reused or recycled after the pavilion is dismantled.

References 1. Extraction of material (soil/earth) 2. preparation: Mixing with other materials 3. Mixing / kneading 4. Shaping 5. Drying 6. Assembling of panels 7. Disassembling/retrieving parts in good condition for reuse 8. return to the floor

27

Milagros Ratto

Arevalo YEAR TEAM TYPE ROLE STATUS

2020 Ana Smud, Daniel Zelcer, Milagros Ratto Residential Associate Architect Built

Arevalo is an apartment extension on a building rooftop in Palermo, Buenos Aires. Our intention was to recreate a small domestic world, inviting to intimate contemplation and leisure in the middle of the city. The proposal doubles the existent’s apartment surface, with a central nucleus that allowed us to liberate the perimeter and maximize the incoming natural light; the patios offer each room a direct relationship with an exterior space. On the third level, we projected a green terrace as an expansion and reflection space of abundant native rioplatense vegetation, an urban oasis surrounded by the highrise urban landscape of Buenos Aires.

28

Arevalo

Level 1. Bedroom and studio

Level 2. Terrace

29

Milagros Ratto

30

Arevalo

31

Milagros Ratto

32

Arevalo

33

Milagros Ratto

Growing The Near Future City 2023 AUTHOR Milagros Ratto TYPE Academic work - Harvard GSD TUTOR Jill Desimini YEAR

This project imagines new collective ways of living in the city in Fields Corner, Boston: a new urban model of cohabitation, where residents take on the task of collective food production, soil regeneration, and waste and water recycling. By reclaiming underutilized spaces in the neighborhood and unifying the center of the residential blocks, the project makes space for lush communal vegetable and medicinal gardens, permaculture orchards, rain alleviation gardens and natural bio-treatment systems that recirculate the waste water back as irrigation. Through the implementation of ‘modular devices’, the neighborhood is able to build a self-sufficient localized economy under permaculture principles, while helping root the neighborhood’s residents to the place.

34

Growing the Near Future City

35

Milagros Ratto

The project consists on a set of devices at different scales (household/block/neighborhood) and functions (food / energy/rain harvesting/waste water treatment/soil building) These devices have a modular construction logic, allowing for easy assemblage and adaptability to the needs and desires of the community and their spatial requirements. A productive, permaculture network emerges when many of these devices are implemented, relocalizing and downsizing the urban metabolism to ecological limits.

36

Growing the Near Future City

Devices. Tool kit.

37

Milagros Ratto

Land reclamation strategy: Parking Lot Buildings

42

Growing the Near Future City

Block Assemblage Systems

43

Milagros Ratto

Reassembling Fractured Landscapes 2021 AUTHOR Milagros Ratto TYPE Academic work - Harvard GSD TUTOR Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich YEAR

The project imagines a new contract between the people, the land, the soil and the ecology in Wareham, Massachusetts: a counter model for the current extractivist system of monoculture cranberry production. The increasingly abandoned cranberry bogs are reclaimed as a network of permaculture cooperative communities. A system of circular infrastructures absorbs all middle-density housing, manufacturing, retail and educational programs, overlooking the central communal spaces of production and shifting away from an individualistic urban sprawl model. The previously ditched, bermed land of the bogs is weaved back again into a continous carpet sustaining diverse permaculture activities while fostering wildlife habitat.

44

Reassembling Fractured Landscapes

45

Milagros Ratto

1. Coastal Cooperatives

2. Upland Cooperatives

46

Activities

Reassembling Fractured Landscapes

1.3. Productive Saltmarsh

2.3. Permaculture Orchard

47

Milagros Ratto

Coastal cooperative. Productive Salt marsh

48

Reassembling Fractured Landscapes

49

Milagros Ratto

Advancing urbanization Rio de la Plata Escobar Wetlands

Wetland Education Center YEAR TEAM TYPE STATUS

2021 Ana Smud, Milagros Ratto, Florencia Lin Education Center Unbuilt

Over the last thirty years, a large part of the wetlands of the coast of Buenos Aires have been facing development pressures, seeing the transformation of these precious ecosystems into private neighborhoods and nautical clubs. This project is located in a former wetland in Escobar, adjacent to a huge area of private neighborhoods and facing a biodiversity reserve. The owner acquired a small fraction of an abandoned development project halted by environmental organizations, and asked us to design a regenerative landscape project that would serve as a Wetland Education Center for the community of Escobar.

50

Wetland Education Center

51

Milagros Ratto

General layout. Wetland Education Center

The project entails the recovery of the original hydrology of the lot, reestablishing a water system of numerous ponds that will retain rain water and help with the irrigation of the native plant species. A system of paths and pavilions provide de visitors with a recreational and educational promenade through various stations with different programs.

A. Recreation

52

B. Education / work / housing

C. Wetland botanic garden

Wetland Education Center

Water Systems

01. Rain water 02. Retention pond 03. Natural filtering 04. Irrigation on organic vegetable garden

53

Mila Ratto Cambridge, MA +6178003512 milagrosratto@gmail.com