PORTFOLIO
Mila Ratto Architect MLA
University of Buenos Aires ‘17 Harvard GSD ‘23
Milagros Ratto milagrosratto@gmail.com +6178003512 Cambridge, MA EDUCATION 2023 2017 2015
Harvard GSD. Master in Landscape Architecture FADU University of Buenos Aires. B.Arch/M. Arch (Highest Honors Diploma) FAUP Universidade do Porto. Portugal
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE 2016-2021 2019-
Architect at Ana Smud Architects Own practice
TEACHING 2015-2020
University of Buenos Aires. Architecture Core Studio Instructor
PUBLICATIONS Afasia - Plataforma arquitectura - Domus Web - Archdaily - Design Boom - Dezeen AWARDS 2020 2020 2019 2017 2015
Dean’s Merit Scholarship. Harvard GSD. Amalia Lacroze Fortabat Academic Merit Scholarship Selected for architecture exhibition Open House Buenos Aires. Ph Scalabrini Ortiz High Honors Diploma. University of Buenos Aires. International Fellowship Santander for Academic Excellence– Study abroad at FAUP, Universidade do Porto.
SOFTWARE Autocad / 3D Rhino / Adobe Photoshop / Adobe Illustrator / Adobe InDesign / ArcGis LANGUAGES Spanish (Native) / English (Fluent) / Portuguese (Intermediate)
Selected Work 2019 - 2023
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PH Scalabrini Ortiz
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Soler 14
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BH House 18
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Soil. Venice Biennale Pavilion
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Growing the Near Future City
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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.
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Scalabrini Ortiz Urban Dwelling
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PH Scalabrini Ortiz
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Milagros Ratto
Level 1. Access patio, living room, kitchen
Level 2. Studio
Level 3. Bedroom
Level 4. Terrace
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PH Scalabrini Ortiz
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Milagros Ratto
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PH Scalabrini Ortiz
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Milagros Ratto
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PH Scalabrini Ortiz
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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.
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Soler
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Ground floor
Offices floor
Transversal sections
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Soler
Longitudinal section
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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.
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BH House
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2 3 4 5
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BH House
.03 New accessible green roof
.02 Extension on former rooftop
.01 Existing apartment
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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.
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Soil. Venice Biennale Argentina Pavilion
*Visualization: Franco Gilardi Studio
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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
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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
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Milagros Ratto
Longitudinal Section
Plan
Rebar support
Earth block wall
Entrance
Photographic exhibition
Hanging system
Gathering space
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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
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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.
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Growing the Near Future City
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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.
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Growing the Near Future City
Devices. Tool kit.
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Mila Ratto Cambridge, MA +6178003512 milagrosratto@gmail.com