PRACTICE PROFILE
Architects Carlo Cappai and Maria Alessandra Segantini, are co-founding principals of C+S Architects, with offices in London (UK) and Treviso (IT), since 1994. Their innovative and inquisitive approach to design, forward- looking but sensitive —unique in its pursuit
of expansion of the active role of designers in society, through new technical and material possibilities, combined with the sensitivity towards heritage and community engagement— have distinguished them as leading architects of their generation.
Drawing insight from ecological systems and translating the traces of tangible and intangible heritages, they create striking places that connect people with each other and communities with the environment. Carlo and Maria Alessandra name this approach to design TranslationArchitecture in search to find a new Aequilibrium between the built and unbuilt environment.
Their diverse, award-winning portfolio includes museums and cultural centers, public and private urban regeneration projects that connect citizens with ecology, high-rise towers, and public spaces that foster communities and enhance their sense of identity, installations that highlight the role of the designer in shaping the society. Notable among these are the Law-Court offices in Venice, which were presented at the MoMA in New York at the In Pursuit of Architecture Conference and won the Triennale Gold Medal of Italian Architecture (Special Prize), as well as the BigMat 2017 National Prize.
Award-winning completed projects include the 325 hectares of the island of Sant’Erasmo in the Venice Lagoon, the Piazza del Cinema, turning the red carpet of the star into a white carpet for all people, the affordable housing towers in Milan fighting against the gated-communities, the low-tech offices in Kortrijk where an algorithm explores the potential of passive design, the retrofit of the GAMeC Museum in Bergamo, where art is the tool to give back the community an underused part of the city and a series of school buildings, which have contributed to rewriting the recent codes for school building design in Italy.
Installations include the entrance of the 2003 Art Venice Biennale, with the project The Cord, the entrance of the 2003 Venice Film Festival with the project The Wave, and the Aequilibrium at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale 2016. Their ongoing work includes major cultural, residential, and civic projects throughout Europe and the Middle East.
Intertwined with built work, C+S Architects also work on research, exhibitions, publications, and community engagement events that foster the designer’s ability to create public awareness and give rise to change. During the design development, C+S Architects involved communities with workshops to push them to get involved in the processes of city transformation.
Founders Carlo and Maria Alessandra have challenged the status quo in architecture practices by closing the gender wage gap in their company.
C+S DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
C+S Architects act as translators of the contexts they decide to take care of. They take car of People and the Planet.
TranslationArchitecture™ aims to unpack the complexities of the environment through architecture.
Engaging and re-inventing the site itself, as a space rich in potentialities, reconfiguring the boundaries of the programs, re-writing the features of the place (materiality, topography, strata, culture, socio-political and economical expectations), cross-sectioning through the different specificities of the disciplines involved, engaging bottom-up approaches, architects are able to reinvent both the boundaries of their of interventions and their role in contemporary, dealing with the whole of the built environment.
Against both the imitation of the past and the temptation of the odd, fashionable and spectacular, TranslationArchitecture™ enables a contemporary as well as continuous form of urban development. Fashionable events and star architecture are considered the generators of a new global monotony. Instead, unfamiliar elements are introduced to add a new flavor to the whole atmosphere in the aim of solving the clients’ demands in creative and unconventional ways.
Carlo Cappai and Maria Alessandra Segantini, the founding partners of C+S Architects, believe that high quality design can be achieved by a constant dialogue in different directions, translating the desires of clients, consultants, contractors and the community, together with the landscape with its ecological demands and the other inhabitants of the Planet.
This attitude to dialogue and translation, which expresses through research, teaching, design, fabrication and communication, is the tool to merge concepts such as scale, materiality and detailed design together with budget constraints and project management ensuring the best results in a synthesis of functional, beauty and concept integration.
Understanding the fragments of the ordinary and allowing them to interfere in any new design, requires a great deal of empathy.
Biography
1991 Awarded Master Degree in Architecture at the University of Architecture of Venice IUAV
1994 Carlo Cappai and Maria Alessandra Segantini establish C+S ASSOCIATI architecture office in Venice
2003-2008 Maria Alessandra Segantini is Visiting Professor at the University of Architecture of Venice IUAV
2005-2008 Carlo Cappai is Visiting Professor at the University of Architecture of Venice IUAV
2007-2010 Maria Alessandra Segantini is Visiting Professor at the University of Architecture of Ferrara
2011 Maria Alessandra Segantini is Professor of Practice at Syracuse University, New York, USA
2011 Carlo Cappai is a Visiting Critic at Syracuse University, New York, USA
2012 Maria Alessandra Segantini is Visiting Professor at MIT, Cambridge, Ma, USA