THE PLAN 168, the first issue of 2026

THE PLAN 168, the first issue of 2026, includes a special section on Italian architecture. The cover features the Monteleone21 – Cantina Masi Agricola project in Valpolicella, designed by Studio Architetti Mar.

In the editorial “Rediscovering How to Inhabit the City: Housing and Shared Responsibility,” architect Gloria Cabral calls for a rethinking of contemporary living, promoting a walkable, inclusive, and sustainable city that – through redevelopment, equitable access to housing for young people, and responsible investment – reorients priorities away from market speculation toward use, community, and social value.

In the Viaggio in Italia column, Valerio Paolo Mosco traces Italy’s restoration tradition as a critical practice that balances new design with urban history and conservation. Measured interventions – such as the new steel stairs in the Architettura Tommasi project cited in the column – can bring historic buildings back into use while following a restrained, experiencebased approach to conservation.

In the Conversation column, Philip Jodidio interviews Lina Ghotmeh about the design of the British Museum’s Western Range.

For the Letter from America column, Raymund Ryan examines the Living Village at the Yale Divinity School as an expansion that reinterprets tradition through a sustainable and inclusive lens. The project combines typology, technological innovation, and formal sensitivity in timber and terracotta architecture that integrates past and present with a renewed historical awareness. The project is by Bruner/Cott Architects, Höweler + Yoon, and Andropogon Associates.

Michael Webb’s article for the Highlights column looks at the work of Pitsou Kedem, who has contributed to Tel Aviv’s architectural transformation through residences, mixeduse buildings, and office complexes, reinterpreting modernism with a rigorously minimalist language.

In the Ravet Pradhikaran district of Pune, the City Pride School by A Threshold reimagines the school as vertical, permeable architecture. Organized around a bright central void, it transforms intermediate spaces and open corridors into places for informal learning and integrates sustainability and social interaction within a dense urban context.

The Architecture section is dedicated to five Italian firms. Northwest of Bergamo, Floriani e Strozzi Architetti designed Ca’ del Bosco, a vacation residence conceived as a glassandtimber pavilion immersed in the landscape. The project uses the site’s topography to create a panoramic living area and a more intimate belowground level, employing natural materials and sustainable solutions to integrate discreetly and durably into the natural setting.

In AsnièressurSeine, east of Paris, Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia completed two residential buildings that establish an urban dialogue through geometric coherence and material variation. The design emphasizes horizontality, luminous façades, and a balance between autonomous identities and the construction of a new contemporary fabric.

In the former Richard Ginori industrial area on Naviglio Grande, Milan, Giuseppe Tortato Architetti designed a residential complex at 22/24 Via Watt. The project comprises two low, articulated buildings that, through careful volumetric composition, generous outdoor spaces, and sustainable strategies, transform an infill lot into a bright, minimal urban village that breathes new life into its setting and enhances residential quality.

A few kilometers from Noto, in the province of Syracuse, G’n’B studio’s Casa Calypso stands on hills overlooking the sea. In this project, the firm frames architecture as a material vocabulary, translating a Miesian grammar of slabs, partitions, and structure into a flowing, predominantly oneway spatial sequence. Integrated with the olive grove and terraced terrain, the house is a panoramic vantage point between land and sea.

Located in the municipality of Sant’Ambrogio di Valpolicella, Monteleone21 is Masi Agricola’s new winery and visitor center. Architetti Mar has translated the stepped landscape and local winemaking tradition into architecture that reinterprets the dry-stone terraces and guides visitors through an immersive experience culminating in the fruit loft – the “cathedral of wine.”

THE PLAN 168 closes with Durganand Balsavar’s tribute to Frank Owen Gehry, who passed away last December.