The permission to happen

As ARCHITECT@WORK Milan approaches, scheduled for 11 and 12 November at Allianz MiCo, this is an opportunity to introduce the discussion around the guiding theme of this year’s edition, Living Space, which is closely connected to the themes of evolution, adaptation, and the life of buildings before and after our intervention.

This debate, which resonates and finds expression internationally, is reflected in the words of Alessandro Scandurra of Scandurra Studio Architettura, through a distinctive vision articulated in his Manifesto, and in his interpretation of time and people as design materials.

Let us read together and, in the meantime, mark our calendars for the seminar with architect Scandurra: 12 November at 4:30 p.m.

Beyond tabula rasa: the new paradigm of reuse. Today, the themes of urban regeneration and the reuse of existing structures are central, both for reasons of sustainability and identity. Compared to the early years of your career, how has Scandurra Studio’s approach to working with existing urban fabrics and buildings evolved? Where do you see the boundary between preserving memory and introducing a new contemporary identity?

When I started, the existing building was a constraint: something to negotiate with in order to carry out your own project anyway. Today, for us, it is the starting point, and often the most intelligent part of the entire project, because it contains decisions that have already been tested by time.

When I stand in front of an existing building, the question I ask is not what it has been, but what it can still become. This is a position we put into writing in our manifesto: buildings are not what we inherit, possibilities are. Memory is not what we preserve; it is what we allow to evolve.

My work for the Palladio Museum, housed in a Palladian palace in Vicenza, and for the Piero Portaluppi Foundation has strongly influenced this perspective. When you spend time within a sixteenth-century palace or in the archive of a twentieth-century master, you come to understand a simple truth: a building is never a fixed state, but rather a sequence of adaptations. None of the buildings we now consider untouchable has reached us exactly as it was originally designed. Even Palladio himself began with an ideal model and then adapted it to the realities of each site.

For this reason, I would not place the boundary you refer to on a stylistic level. The real limit lies elsewhere, and it can be measured by this principle: do not reduce the possibilities available to those who come after us. An intervention that fixes a single use, closes off options, or makes another transformation unthinkable thirty years from now consumes future memory, even if it has preserved every stone.

And this principle also applies when building from scratch. There is always a pre-existing architecture, even if it has never been built. At Brescia Urban Living , a project where we have already completed the student residence and where the residential buildings are currently under construction, the podium and open space return a public park to the neighbourhood: the buildings give more back to the city than they take away. That is the part that will still be there in fifty years.

The impact of the digital construction site. One topic that generates great interest among professionals is the concept of the digital construction site. In what ways are new technologies, data management, and the digitalisation of processes transforming not only the design phase but also the actual life of a construction site? Do you believe that this technological approach offers a competitive advantage, particularly when working on the renovation and reuse of existing buildings?

The digital construction site is almost always discussed as a matter of efficiency. What interests me is its role as a tool for knowledge. When working with existing buildings, the advantage is obvious and very tangible: a digital survey is the first honest portrait of a building. Anyone who has worked on an existing structure knows that archive drawings almost never correspond exactly to reality, and that it is precisely in that gap that renovation projects fail, through variations, delays, and increased costs. Reducing surprises is not merely a technical issue; it is what makes reuse economically viable instead of demolition. In that respect, the competitive advantage is very real.

But the greatest value of the model emerges after handover. The model is the part of the building that is inherited: it is what we pass on to those who will transform it twenty years from now, enabling them to understand what can be altered and what cannot. In this sense, digitalisation does not serve our project. It serves the next project.

Data describe how a building is made, not what it will make possible. The digital construction site can tell us everything about the construction itself, and nothing about the life that will take place inside it. That still requires the least technological thing imaginable: going there, observing, counting, and returning at different times of day.

Innovation and technological solutions. ARCHITECT@WORK is an event closely linked to technical and material innovation. When working with the reuse of existing buildings and the layering of historical elements, how do you select materials for your projects? Do you seek a clear contrast with the existing structure, or do you prefer a more discreet integration?

I do not make choices based on that distinction. Contrast or mimicry are matters of style; the real issue is understanding how a building is composed, which parts it consists of and how those parts are ordered in hierarchy, and then respecting its deeper nature. An intervention that blurs those distinctions fails to make the structure of the existing building legible, and is therefore destined to fail.

The criterion I use is how a material behaves over time. I am interested in the body of architecture: the aspect that speaks to our bodies in a synaesthetic way. Materiality and durability are the means through which a building responds to and connects us with the natural elements, light, humidity, heat, and wear.

For this reason, I do not focus on how a material looks on the day of inauguration, but on how it will look in its fifth year, after thousands of hands have touched it. In the student residence at Brescia Urban Living, the choice of an XLam timber structure was made with precisely these considerations in mind: performance, construction process, environmental footprint, and the way that material visibly ages over time.

My background is in set design; I worked with Giorgio Barberio Corsetti. There, a material must function under use, withstand distance, and be replaceable quickly. It is a school of thought that has never left me.

Our manifesto contains a phrase that summarises this approach: beauty is the visible form of care. It can be recognised in the places where no one expects it, junctions, thresholds, back areas, handrails. And it is the only aspect of quality that cannot be simulated in a rendering.

Looking to the future of the profession. In November, you will give a talk during the event in Milan. Without revealing too much in advance, what is the main message you would like to share with the architects who will come to hear you speak? What are the essential skills that the architecture practice of the future will need to master in order to address tomorrow’s urban challenges?

The message is a single sentence, and it is the principle on which my studio’s entire approach to design is based:

the value of architecture is measured by what it makes possible.

It is a challenging criterion. It means that a building should not be judged by its form, image, or cost, but by the relationships it generates, the transformations it enables, the behaviours it produces, and the futures it opens up. It also means accepting that our work should continue to be measured by these standards even after completion. We call this the Architecture of Possibilities.

As for the skills required, I would identify three.

The first is knowing how to work before the project begins. Observing a place, returning to it at different times of day, understanding what it is already becoming on its own. This is a phase of work with its own duration, people, and written outcomes, not merely a matter of intuition. In our practice, this is the domain of Scandurra Backstage.

The second is designing for uses that we do not yet know how to name. Not flexible spaces, because flexibility is too often nothing more than a postponed decision. Instead, adaptive frameworks: well-designed structures, ceiling heights, access systems, and services, because these are the elements that cannot easily be changed later and that determine how much everything else can evolve.

The third is the rarest: going back to observe. Revisiting projects a year after opening and documenting what is happening within them that was never part of the original programme.

And there is one further skill that is not technical at all: the ability to work with people who are not architects.