Selection of articles in english

This interview with Sandy Attia and Matteo Scagnol offers a nuanced reflection on school architecture as a civic and cultural act. Rooted in context, pedagogy, and typology, their approach resists standardization and reclaims architecture’s power to shape learning, memory, and collective identity.

School architecture is not just about buildings, but about shaping spaces that nurture, include, and build community. This issue explores the school as a civic, ethical, and social project—balancing freedom and belonging, responsibility and shared imagination.

The new Saleggi kindergarten pavilion blends into the existing park, with a modular layout centred around a central atrium. Flexible spaces, carefully calibrated skylights and essential materials create a bright and functional environment, complemented by Piazza del Noce and the playground.

The new school complex in Tesserete blends into the urban context with a linear volume overlooking a natural school park. The exposed concrete structure interacts with the landscape, enhancing light, flexibility and the relationship between the building and open space.

The extension of the Cadro school continues the existing composition with a new volume for collective functions and an independent nursery school. Open spaces and courtyards connect architecture, landscape and educational programme in a continuous and coherent dialogue.

The renovation of the school in Vezia brings the historic building up to modern standards while preserving its material and formal identity. New volumes and flexible spaces enhance the relationship with the square, integrating energy efficiency and educational functions into a coherent and sustainable project.

The new Molino Nuovo kindergarten transforms a fragmented block into a well-organised urban centre, with flexible teaching spaces, an active green roof and a large public playground that strengthens the link between the school, the neighbourhood and the city.

The extension of the school campus incorporates a reinforced concrete base that enhances the existing structure. Modular spaces, metal structures and rhythmic façades ensure functionality and order, giving the complex a unified and contemporary image, rooted in the landscape.

A new pavilion expands the Manno nursery school, echoing its original layout and blending into the landscape with a sober and coherent design. Light, structure and space interact in a single classroom opening onto the garden.

Perched above the Gulf of Naples, Dolf Schnebli’s Swiss School (1964–67) is an architectural landscape: a terraced complex where Mediterranean light, Eastern memories, and pedagogical vision converge. A city within the city, where the school becomes topography and teaching becomes space.

The new kindergarten in Lamone fits neatly into a complex urban context, redefining spaces and relationships with sober, permeable architecture. A new boundary organises the balance between existing margins, open spaces and collective functions.

The San Vittore school complex is laid out like a small horizontal citadel, integrated into the open landscape. Flexible spaces and protected connections encourage educational interaction, while essential materials and natural light define a sober and rooted architecture.

In A Moratorium on New Construction (Sternberg Press, 2025), Charlotte Malterre-Barthes urges architects to face their role in ecological and social crises. Through nine action-driven chapters, the book calls for redefining value, resisting extractivism, and adopting care as a radical design strategy—especially in cities like Zurich, where building no longer ensures inclusion.

The restoration, carried out by Durisch Nolli Giraudi Radczuweit, does not alter the substance of Alberto Finzi's building but reinterprets it to give new life to the school structure.

What defines a school’s character today? This essay explores the evolving tradition of school architecture in Ticino and South Tyrol, tracing its roots, tensions, and typological continuities through exemplary projects and interviews with key architects.

The Rialto indoor swimming pool, built in Basel in 1934, has been extensively renovated. Reuter Architekten brought this avant-garde and architecturally striking building into the present day with a series of skillful interventions.

On the Giardini of the Biennale, the curators of the Swiss Pavilion are giving new life to the project of one of the first women architects registered in Switzerland, Lisbeth Sachs (1914-2002). In a subtle game of confrontation, the team reproduced fragments of an ephemeral art gallery (Kunsthalle) that she had designed in 1958 for the Swiss Exhibition of Women's Work (SAFFA) on and inside the rooms of Bruno Giacometti's pavilion.

When a client opts for exemplary and sustainable construction, they offer their project team a genuine field for experimentation. In Daillens (VD), a small municipality of 1,100 inhabitants, the local council sought to replace the changing rooms for FC Venoge. What appeared to be a modest programme turned out to be a remarkable architectural opportunity for the firm Localarchitecture.

Through science. By design. In place. Over time. Future Cities Laboratory adresses the complex challenges of sustainable and liveable urban development.

Why does FCL face up to the complexity of urban life? In this interview, the three directors explain what motivates – and challenges – them on a daily basis.

Reconcile, revitalise, revaluate: four FCL research modules investigate the complex interde-pendencies between cities and the hinterland that feeds them.

Trade-offs for higher availability: enough or scarce? Cities cannot supply themselves with energy and construction materials alone. Sustainable supply chains and more data are needed.

Navigating urban complexity with a holistic vision generates insights, methods, and tools that empower decision-makers to defuse conflicting goals.

Collaborative concepts for walkable cities, safe landscapes, sustainable mobility, and participatory design approaches are reliant on data analytics and multi-level modelling.

Cities are a work in progress, shaped by the future as much as by the past. Because we cannot assume the future form or character of cities, continued vigilant and strategic urban monitoring is imperative to creating and securing healthier, more sustainable places. Thanks to the work of projects like FCL Global, we now know more than ever about how to shape the urban transition.

The potential of the encounter between art and architecture is understood as a means to critically inhabit the present and transform space into a collective experience. An invitation to observe, recognise and protect the precious and often fragile plurality of the present.