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THE PLAN 164 is the fifth issue of 2025. The cover features the Borgo Mascarella office and commercial building designed by Antonio Iascone & Partners.
It opens with the editorial “On Vernacular” by Sumayya Vally, founder of Counterspace. Rather than a nostalgic leftover from the past, vernacular architecture is a living and evolving design ethic that values listening, memory, and improvisation. It offers a sensitive, community-based alternative to the dominant urban paradigm, making it a tool for building a future based on collective wisdom and everyday resilience.
In his Letter from America column, Raymund Ryan examines the Frame 122 residential building designed by Brent Buck Architects. The project combines contemporary architecture and timber construction to create efficient, understated, and light-filled spaces designed for an evolving urban community.
A new exhibition space in the heart of Rome, PM23 was established by the Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti Foundation. Art, fashion, and architecture converge in a vibrant dialogue between past and present, in which philological restoration and contemporary interventions designed by Nemesi Architects create a fluid, light-filled backdrop.
In Shenzhen, Urbanus has designed the New Hakka Academy by reinterpreting the Hakka cultural identity within innovative school architecture that blends memory, landscape, and community. Permeable local infrastructure with a narrative dimension, the design approaches education as a shared spatial experience focused on the local area and China’s rapid urbanization.
Against the backdrop of Ontario’s landscape, Williamson Williamson has explored two different ways of home living with Cottage Dogtrot, a low-impact, prefabricated timber prototype inspired by vernacular architecture and designed for energy efficiency, and House of Monitors, a material-driven, light-filled volume that fuses timber and concrete in a home that reflects its clients’ lives and creativity in a perfect dialogue with nature.
With Laboratorio Farmacologico Milanese’s new Milan headquarters, Ilaria Nava’s INS studio has transformed an existing prefabricated structure into a functional, identity-driven building. Focused on transparency, comfort, and encouraging participation, the design embodies corporate values through rational spatial choices, calibrated materials, consistent color schemes, and an emphasis on the relationship between form, light, and user well-being.
Still in Italy, the new Fondazione Caterina Dallara headquarters in Varano de’ Melegari, the work of Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia, reinterprets the language of Emilian rural architecture through a contemporary lens, merging memory and innovation.
With Casa Cueva, Alejandro D’Acosta has given form to a poetic, radical architectural manifesto in which reuse, minimalism, and memory coexist. An ancestral, symbolic structure built using local resources, the home merges with the land, history, and indigenous communities in a deep dialogue with matter, spirit, and the future.
Designed by Jadric Architektur with 1990uao, the Photography Seoul Museum of Art is symbolic urban architecture that interweaves photography and built space, light and memory, translating the stratification of time into form and matter.
In Bologna’s TEK district, the new mixed-use office and commercial building designed by Antonio Iascone & Partners for Borgo Mascarella reinterprets the site’s industrial heritage in a contemporary language marked by rhythmic transparency through metal, glass, and timber.
For the expansion of Accademia Carrara, Antonio Ravalli Architetti employed a language based on architectural grafting and adjacencies to create an understated, functional building that dialogues with the existing museum’s classicism and reinterprets the Italian tradition of historical stratification to create a contemporary addition that organically extends the life of the building.
THE PLAN 164, the fifth issue of 2025, opens with the editorial “The Vernacular as a Design Approach” by Sumayya Vally. The featured projects include management centers, foundations, museums, academies, cultural facilities, and homes... Read More
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