The School at the Center of the Future

The project “The School at the Center of the Future” aims to regenerate a central part of the city of Brescia. The masterplan includes constructing a primary school, a secondary school, a Community Hub, and a gymnasium. These are all connected by a park consisting of various activity zones covering approximately 9,000 square meters. The boulevards serve as vital arteries, opening the site on all four sides and connecting it to various surrounding areas.

The Community Hub, featuring a structure composed of a series of barrel vaults, houses the library, FAB LAB, and auditorium. It visually integrates with the park and boulevard. The schools are designed on a single level, facilitating access to outdoor educational activities. They present themselves as a “school open to the landscape.” The primary school is characterized by pitched roofs with an integrated system of photovoltaic panels, while the secondary school unfolds under irregular pitched coverings, allowing for the characterization of the space below.

AMPHYSIA is an innovative, intelligent, and sustainable maritime ecosystem, created through two new structures: the Kalavrìa House and the Wave Warehouse. These buildings are located in the port of Grazie, approximately 100 meters apart.

The Warehouse, positioned parallel to the Pinewood, aims to enhance users’ appreciation of this area and protect it from the parking zone. The parking spaces, now rationalized north of the building, host a field of photovoltaic panels that generate energy and reduce the phenomenon of the existing parking lot’s “heat island.”

The Kalavrìa House runs parallel to the port quay level and serves as the central point of the port’s pathway system. This structure consists of suspended glass boxes on reinforced concrete walls, creating a spacious ground floor area, shielded from the sun and covered by green roofs that significantly contribute to energy consumption reduction.

A new equipped green corridor extends north between the Wave Warehouse and the Pinewood, mostly shaded by pine trees. This corridor, spanning approximately 1500 square meters, provides a pedestrian area with a teak wood footpath that gradually transforms into a green grid equipped with small green areas, resting spots, and refreshment points, benefiting both the local community and sailors.

Similarly, beneath the Kalavrìa House, an approximately 500 square meter surface area is released, paved with teak wood slats and equipped with resting spots and refreshment points such as loungers, benches, tables, and stools, benefiting the local community and sailors. On the first floor, between the two suspended glass boxes, there is a large terrace of around 800 square meters at an elevation of +9.20, intended for socializing, refreshments, and observing the sea and its waves, as well as the entire coastline.

The project proposes a relationship between landscape and architecture that surpasses the traditional hierarchy of front/back and interior/exterior. The planivolumetric layout aims to frame the landscape and make it an integral part of the project. The volume is structured under a continuous roof that follows the existing topography, placing classrooms and connecting spaces along the slope. The internal courtyard, where other spaces overlook, creates a scenic promenade that culminates in a portion of green and accessible rooftop, open to the panorama. Inspired by a functional and pedagogical program that requires fluidity, transparency, and rootedness, the architectural principle that distinguishes the project translates into five main elements. These include visual permeability through connections at all levels of the intervention, the relationship with the landscape and the neighborhood, the longitudinal and transverse extension of internal and external spaces in the educational area, and the spatial articulation of the functional program within individual buildings.

A system of actions proposed for the “slow route” between Pergusa and Piazza Armerina is developed over three territorial areas that coexist in the territory and have interconnected environmental, physical, social and symbolic characteristics. The project aims to inhabit and equip the greenway of the old railway and to create a “walkscape” that dialogues with the landscape, imaginative and historical dimensions of Central Sicily. The mythological metaphor of the Rape of Persephone guides the development of the project areas, creating a system of cross-references and punctual interventions to connect, enhance and implement the natural and anthropic elements of the route.

Social Coliving 080 is located on the corner of a xamfrà in the Eixample district of Barcelona, overlooking Via de Les Cortes Catalanes. This project aims to create a community place with mixed private and semi-private, public and semi-public spaces: a place of community and connection.

The building is articulated around a central community courtyard, open and inclusive, surrounded by housing units distributed on internal walkways.

The most intimate spaces of the dwellings use different filters, fixed, mobile or vegetal protections, to measure the level of privacy.  Community spaces are created in the building’s distribution, with sequences of intermediate spaces, natural areas, verandas and communal terraces.

The lifestyle proposed in the project is the result of the dialogue between the local component of the team, CAA Arquitecta, and the more endogenous, yet Mediterranean experience of DONTSTOP.   For example, the kitchen is located in the centre of the dwelling, promoting gender equality, as the heart and centre of daily life, forming a central core that is also the distibutive space of the house, maximising the useful surface area and eliminating corridors.

Designing effectively a new residential intervention in Milan today requires a careful reflection on the transformations that are, for some time now, affecting city.

In this sense, the proposed project aims to define and develop an “elastic” device capable of responding to the demands of today and at the same time to react and transform over time, throughout the development of the project, until the construction phase. A project, therefore, that strongly defines a clear settlement system in which the park, at the center of the lot, is the pivot that articulates the distribution of residential buildings able, for their characteristics and modularity, to adapt their sizes and distribution in a progressive path of definition of the best possible configuration.

Corte Certosa is designed to host a community of inhabitants with heterogeneous lifestyles, who find in the central courtyard of the park the place to meet, even unexpectedly, to get to know each other and to collaborate.

Bergamo Prossima is an urban regeneration project that designs a new space for the city: a place for citizens to meet and for families, the elderly, and students to live. The commercial area on the ground floor is developed inside the preserved buildings while the residential volumes and the RSA draw two large connected green courtyards creating an urban and environmental axis along the north-south axis, which ends in the gardens of Via Martiri di Cefalonia crossing the building that houses the student residence. The project maximizes the use of the existing volumes for an SL of 25,000 sqm, reducing the footprint and increasing the green and social spaces.

The design for the R8 compound interprets the architectural type of the courtyard block, envisaged by the masterplan, developing a volumetric articulation that reacts to the context with height variations and opening towards the wide park. This strategy allows us to arrange the 28,000 square meters of housing required, creating a city fragment that incorporates linear buildings and towers of various sizes and which sets the experience of living in a rich system of landscape and open spaces (public, semi-public and private). The outcome is a typically urban scenario but enriched with strong natural values.

The project for the new headquarters of the judicial offices of Catania, designed with Progetto CMR, treats building and public space with a holistic approach, thus establishing an indissoluble relationship between these two elements together with the urban and natural context. A city waterfront embedded between the sea and Etna.  The shape of the open courtyard reinterprets a building typology typical of Catania’s historical center and declines it in the site by opening the block towards the landscape and lifting part of the volume from the ground. To the simple composition of volumes corresponds a clear organization of the program, designed to be extremely functional and meet the needs of efficiency, safety and separation of the public flows from those of the employees. Taking advantage of the topography of the site, courtrooms and gardens are arranged on terraces sloping down towards the sea. The strong integration of the building with the landscape and with the public space gives a new aura to the exercise of justice: while maintaining its authoritative and institutional profile, it is deprived of the most intimidating aspects by emphasizing its civic and collective value. 

The design concept is based on the development of a new housing typology, an apartment conceived in 10 size, that, combined in different ways, generates three types of buildings. The apartments have a structure based on a module aggregated according to the square meters of the typology. When the apartments are join together, they generate buildings in order to respect these values: sustainability and eco-compatibility, flexibility maximization of natural lighting, inexpensiveness, presence of collective spaces.