MIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING, CAMBRIDGE, MA, USA

Most of the places we have visited and chosen to design preserve traces manifesting that of which heritage values have resisted. In some cases they appear strong, permanent and consolidated features, in others, they appear just as a thin filigree.

We approach the places we decide to design in a similar way of how the translators approach the texts they love- investigating, listening, building with them an empathetic dialogue, whilst bridging them to a different time.

What we have defined TranslationArchitecture is more a dialogue suspended in time, a disciplined sensitivity towards the contexts, which in-forms and con-forms our spaces.

Our design critically evaluates the context, understanding the potential energy of the built, the unbuilt environment and the people, searching for moments of accumulation of value, knowledge, desire.

We design a map of potentials - a tool, which reveals the intersections and interferences between a series of different layers and directs the choice of our action into these very special moments of accumulation.

We design our grafts as interferences suspended within and between the space and time stratified on the built and un-built landscapes, combining the past, the present and the future.

Their formal resolution becomes a sort of durable frame, open to future transformation, often leaving the sites themselves and the programmes (or part of them) open to manipulation and adaptation.

A continuous and vital transformation of the context is for us its identity. 

We mould the future heritage and this is a fundamental responsibility of our work.