In a new Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Second up: the tiny Microlino car, a lesson in design, driving and keeping things compact.
Carlo Ratti's 'Objectify' explores the Microlino
In a summer that promises to be scorching, what could be better than opening the door of a refrigerator and clambering inside? Welcome to the Microlino, two and a half metres long, one and a half metres wide, weighing less than five hundred kilos. Two seats, and a front door that opens on to the city as a fridge door opens on to a kitchen.
We are in Turin, at Cecomp, in the same industrial district that once produced the Fiat 500. If the original 500 motorised postwar Italy, the Microlino asks whether Italy still needs to be motorised quite so much, and with this much metal per person. Because today, on our roads, its nemesis reigns supreme, the SUV, two tonnes of sheet metal snarling itself up while searching for a parking space.
The Microlino as part of our feature on tiny electric cars
Call it the Ozempic of the automobile. A vehicle stripped of everything the twentieth century had prescribed. Reduced to an essential dose, a bubble, two seats, a door, and enough range to cross a city twice. Ozempic works by intervening in the feedback loop between appetite and satiety. The Microlino does something similar with the feedback loops of urban traffic.
Its design lineage is the BMW Isetta, the bubble car of the 1950s, which was itself an Italian invention, licensed to the Germans by Iso of Milan in 1955. The Isetta was famously the car in which postwar couples could sit closer together than in almost any other vehicle on the market. The Microlino continues that line of thought and discovers that the intelligent car might also be the most romantic.
The Microlino was conceived in Switzerland by the Ouboter family, designed in Italy by Icona, and finally assembled in Turin. Its cultural logic, however, is entirely Italian. The Fiat 500 compressed family life into three metres of steel. The Microlino compresses it into two and a half metres of aluminium and a fourteen-kilowatt-hour battery.
At the Senseable City Lab, we conducted a study called Unparking, which showed how the shift to shared autonomous vehicles could reduce the need for parking in cities such as Singapore by more than seventy percent. The Microlino reaches a similar conclusion, but by simpler means. It occupies around a third of a standard parking space. Three Microlinos beam in the space where one SUV sulks. Here, the parking problem is answered by shrinking the car itself.
After all, how much car do you really need to move through Italian cities, designed for human bodies, built before cars existed, and governed by streets once measured in feet and arms? For most journeys, the answer is simple: very little. The Microlino has understood that the city does not need a smaller version of the old automotive fantasy. It needs much less car. With the self-assurance of someone who has just completed a diet, it wants everyone to know.
About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti
Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: “Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?” Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.
Carlo Ratti
Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: “Objects should keep us company.” Especially during this scorching summer.