Your design approach focuses on creating “pure aesthetic experiences” rooted in extreme functional specificity. Can you give us an example where this philosophy led to something truly innovative?

One of the clearest examples is the Bocconi University campus. Bocconi, to its credit, acted like an enlightened client. They held proper international competitions – but crucially, didn’t stack the jury with local bureaucrats or friends of friends. Instead, they brought in real critics, like Kenneth Frampton, arguably the most important architectural thinker of our time.

The result? Two extraordinary buildings: one by Grafton Architects and the other by SANAA. These are, without question, two of the most remarkable pieces of architecture built in Italy in the past 20 years. Yes, they’re expensive – curved glass, complex structures – but Bocconi is a top business school. They could’ve played it safe and built another anonymous box, and they didn’t.

Sadly, this kind of ambition is the exception. Today, most public competitions are rushed, underfunded, and handled poorly – launched over Christmas or August, judged without a single architect on the panel. It’s like awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature using a jury of petrol station owners. Architecture requires time, understanding, and cultural investment. Without that, you just get soulless buildings – and missed opportunities.

One of c-b a’s core principles is to avoid rushed decisions and to give each solution the time it truly needs. In a field driven by tight deadlines and financial pressure, how do you manage to uphold this reflective approach without sacrificing operational effectiveness?

You do what you can. Sometimes a competition lands on your desk on 18 December with a deadline of 10 January – you’ve got two options: either you pass, or you try to patch something together. But let’s be honest, great architecture rarely comes from panic mode.

This approach works far better with private clients – say, a private home or a university like Bocconi, which has the resources and the vision to give projects time. But public competitions? Or anything involving property funds? That’s another story.

A colleague recently told me he was mid-discussion with two fund managers about a complex project. At some point, they simply said: “That’s it, we’ve used up all the hours allocated for this.” As if it were a spreadsheet – as if creativity had an hourly rate.

That kind of thinking might work in finance, but not in architecture. You can't tell Picasso, “Have the painting ready by tomorrow at 9am.” Good design takes time – not just for quality, but for meaning.

You’ve worked across cities as different as Milan, Berlin, New York and Rome. How have these contrasting contexts shaped your design approach? And how do you root a project locally without losing sight of a broader, international vision?

Working in such varied cities has been a lesson in contrasts – not just in aesthetics or regulation, but in mindset. Take Germany, for instance: deeply structured, a culture shaped by rules and systems. In Italy, we invented the entrepreneur during the Renaissance – the merchant who took risks, got his hands dirty, and changed the game. It’s a completely different energy.

Being immersed in radically different environments forces you to question your own assumptions. You adapt – but you also reflect. It creates an internal dialogue: what works here, what doesn’t, and why? It sharpens your understanding of both the foreign and the familiar.

To truly embed a project in its context, you have to learn the local "rules of the game" – not just zoning laws, but cultural codes, unspoken rhythms. At the same time, living and working internationally gives you the tools to see your own culture from the outside, with fresh eyes.

It’s like playing cards – unless everyone agrees on the rules, there’s no game. And that’s the heart of it: designing with local sensitivity, but with a global perspective in your back pocket.

Your design approach combines critical inquiry with a kind of ‘naïve’ exploration – exposing problems at their root to rethink typologies. What have been the key moments of discovery in your practice, and how have they shaped your way of working?

One pivotal shift happened early in my career. I graduated in the US in 1996, just as the profession moved from a largely analogue craft – ink, tracing paper, rapidographs – into full-blown digital. Within two years, we’d gone from hand-drawing to modelling entire buildings on screen.

3D software completely changed the game. It allowed us to “build” digitally – doors, walls, finishes – and get automatic quantities and surface areas. It’s powerful, but it also pushed architecture into a more rigid, efficiency-driven space.

The problem is, these tools are brilliant for refining an idea, but not for finding it. They don’t leave room for uncertainty, for that messy, intuitive trial and error that’s so vital early on. That’s why, after 25 years, I returned to freehand drawing. No purpose, no outcome in mind – just the act of drawing as a form of thinking.

It’s a bit like cycling with no destination. You’re not going to the supermarket – you’re just riding to ride. And in that open, purposeless space, discoveries happen. It might seem inefficient, but for me, it’s essential. That’s where the real ideas emerge.