POSTCARD FROM THE FUTURE: THE LAST COMMON GROUND
There is an idea I keep coming back to: Retail may be one of the last common grounds we have left. Religion has lost much of its former collective solidity. Politics too. We no longer necessarily share the same ideology, the same idea of progress, beauty, family, work, or even what responsibility towards the environment […]
Don’t Be an Easy Client: 5 Questions to Ask Before the Concept Begins
by Mauro Moro I find the first kickoff with clients pretty difficult. Not because they are demanding. But for the opposite reason. They are not demanding. Or to be precise, they are demanding in the wrong directions. It is remarkable how clients manage to mix everything at once: scope, details, costs, structures, home automation, style, […]
Adrift in options.
Adrift in Options: AI, Facades, and the Postcard from the Future A note on AI in architecture, and the discipline nobody is teaching anymore. The office has stopped drawing. It generates. Every brief produces a thousand images before lunch. Endless variations on the same. The walls are covered in options. Nobody in the room can […]
Why Is the Most Important Part of Architecture Expected to Be Free?
Why Is the Most Important Part of Architecture Expected to Be Free? Let me ask you two questions. If you went to the dentist with a toothache, would you expect a free examination, and agree to pay only once the dentist actually fixed the tooth? Of course not. You pay for the diagnosis. You pay […]
Postcard from the Future
Postcard from the Future There is a generation of architects, mine, who learned by hand. We traced over drawings with ink. We built models out of cardboard and balsa wood and occasionally despair. We spent hours on a section that turned out to be wrong, then hours more understanding why it was wrong, then more […]
A Design Philosophy
A Design Philosophy If we zoom out, the lessons converge into a simple framework. Not a method. A position. What follows are not style rules, and they are not a checklist to run through before a project ships. They are the assumptions this practice starts from every time, whether the site is a single room […]
The Disappearing Drawing
The Disappearing Drawing The Disappearing Drawing A few weeks ago, I picked up a stack of architecture books. One of them was an expensive monograph of John Pawson: John Pawson: Making Life Simpler, published by Phaidon. I flipped through it looking for something specific, and it confirmed what I had realized a long time ago: […]
When Technology Prevails, Architecture Is Forgotten
When Technology Prevails, Architecture Is Forgotten The architect’s future role is not to add more systems but to design the threshold before compensation becomes necessary. A glass tower in Phoenix is not simply a design choice. It is a cultural diagnosis. The building presents itself through the familiar language of contemporary development: slab, grid, glass, […]
What Are Concept Architecture Services?
What Are Concept Architecture Services? What Concept Architecture Services Actually Cover Most clients arrive at an architect’s office with an idea. A site. A vision. Sometimes a napkin sketch. What they don’t yet have is a structured direction — one that connects their ambition to what is actually buildable, feasible, and worth committing to. That […]
The Vanishing of the Threshold. Now what?
What is the threshold of a shop today? For most of retail history, it was a door, a bell, or a person behind a counter who looked up. Now it might be a click — checkout-free retail compressed into an instant. It might be a delivery worker’s knock, mediated by an app that has already […]