Following a River to Draw a Forest | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Cineteca del Fiume is a cinematheque, café, film archive, and outdoor cinema sited on the Po River floodplain in Northern Italy, within an ongoing ecological restoration of a reconnected oxbow lake. The building’s geometry is generated by a parametric drawing tool built from satellite data along the entire river: the Po draws the architecture. A
Fragments of Wandering | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 How does movement through uncertainty become a tool for architectural production? Beginning with the figure of the wanderer, perception becomes a design method where lines of sight and fragments of spatial encounters are materialised. By acknowledging uncertainty as part of the design process, the unstable condition of moving through and remembering space defines the architectural conditions – routes, pauses,
Learning to Draw, Again | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Learning to Draw, Again translates hand drawing into architectural form through machine vision, point clouds, and physical modelling. The project asks how drawing changes when it is made for a visual system trained on photographs, where line, tone, density, erasure, and blank paper are read as spatial evidence. Depth-estimation software converts marks on paper into unstable digital terrains. Through
Nuove Nuvole | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Nuove Nuvole investigates how cloud formations emerge from a system: the weather. Systems like these produce emergent patterns out of unintelligible complexity. Turner and Constable both approached the cloud through distance; this project goes further, drawing parallels between cloud science, complex systems, and a method for generating architecture.The project proposes a botanical garden at the Tecnopolo di Bologna, Italy’s supercomputing
THE SYSTEMS BENEATH | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 This project proposes architecture as atmospheric governance. Where digital platforms reduce every environment to the same curated warmth, the same extracted behaviour, the same erased locality, sDOP governs back as a counter-platform that applies DOP food certification logic to space itself, protecting light, sound, heat, and scent as the conditions that make a place irreducibly itself.The site is Mercato
From Fragments to Folded Forms | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Beside the Teatro Comunale, the theatre’s own architectural fragments are deconstructed and remodeled into a Performing Arts Playground. What was once decoration and structure becomes a stage, pool and playground. Here, a new life of playfulness and art is moulded from the memory of the old. Drawn from the site’s layering of performing arts culture and leisure,
Autocheiromorph; Using skeletal joint tracking via computer vision as an intuitive drawing medium | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 This project proposes that motion tracking via computer vision can function as an active form-making instrument in architectural design: not as a means of recording the body, but of drawing with it. A design pipeline spanning skeletal joint tracking, computational geometry. The designer does not pre-specify form and then
L’architettura dipende | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Architecture Depends begins with Jeremy Till’s argument that architecture is fundamentally contingent: shaped not only by the architect, but by forces outside direct control — people, occupation, regulation, climate, institutional systems, memory, construction, and repair. Rather than treating this dependency as a weakness, the project uses AI as a method to expose and work with it.The research starts with a
Wave Field | London, United Kingdom | Unit 21 | 2026 WAVE FIELD proposes a new extension to the Laban Theatre in Deptford, London, using EEG data as a form of design agency to generate a more open, dynamic and responsive environment for performance and rehearsal. The existing theatre has a strong architectural rhythm: its reflective facade and curved form absorb the surrounding context, while its interior provides enclosed rehearsal
Catching Fog | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 How do we design for a boundaryless environment? Set in the fog-dense Po River Valley, “Catching Fog” translates fluid atmospheric phenomena into permanent architectural mass. It abandons rigid Cartesian intrusion for boundaries derived directly from environmental fluidity.A custom Arduino ultrasonic apparatus generates real water vapour, which is captured and analyzed by a YOLO computer-vision AI. The algorithm’s struggle to define
The Monomodal Assemblie | Berlin, Germany | Unit 21 | 2026 The Berlin-Staaken Regional Museum seasonally repositions itself within the imperceptibly entwined landscape of historical, political, industrial and regenerative significance of the former Berlin-Staaken airfield, where heritage now only remains in faint, almost indiscernible traces. The scheme has been conceived as a scenographic kit of Monomodal Assemblies that operate within this invisible ‘field’ of forces as a conscientious arrangement of
A Silva | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 This year, my project has developed from an interest in live information streams into a system for translating speech and text into architectural form. This led me to question how large language models process language and how their hidden operations might be made visible. The project now investigates LLMs not as tools for producing images, but as probabilistic language systems.
Campo Incompiuto ‘Unfinished Field | Modena, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Campo Incompiuto ‘Unfinished Field’ reinterprets Aldo Rossi’s unfinished field of San Cataldo Cemetery through weaving, machine learning, environmental data, and Modena’s identity as an internationally recognised city of media arts. The project begins with craft as a form of inherited intelligence, using weaving to explore interlacing, repetition, deformation, and variation. These logics are translated into a Pix2Pix GAN
Holding Conditions | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Holding Conditions explores how architecture can be generated through balance, tolerance, and material constraints rather than predetermined form. Using a functional object as a behavioural datum, the project develops a methodology based on centre of mass, fabrication feedback, and equilibrium. This approach is then applied to the Po Valley floodplain, where materials recovered from the decommissioning of the Caorso Nuclear
Bologna Museum-Lab | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Bologna has a long industrial and academic history, being the site of the oldest university in Europe – the University of Bologna, founded in 1088. Once the centre of silk production and textiles for its advanced canal systems, it eventually fell into crisis towards the end of the 18th century. However, industry was revived through a focus on knowledge and
Grounds of Absorption | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 ABSORPTION is a flood-responsive ceramic production and research facility located within the Reno River floodplain near Bologna. Rather than resisting seasonal flooding, the project transforms water and sediment into productive resources. Floodwater is captured and filtered through a series of settling basins where mineral-rich sediments are collected and processed into clay bodies and glazes. These materials are then fired,
Decoding Al Madam | Al Madam, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates | Unit 21 | 2026 This project explores how architecture can be formed and derived through the utilisation of iterative coding processes. Based in Al Madam, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates the project primarily investigates how the desert itself can become a tool in the design of the building. The Plant Research Facility is derived from the site itself, and this
Do You Want To Join EGG PARK? | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 The Egg Park translates Bologna’s maps, lost towers, and vanished fragments into a distorted public terrain. Using the egg as a fragile curved surface, city lines are stretched, broken, and reassembled into slopes, cracks, voids, and curved ground.Inspired by Arakawa and Gins, the park creates perceptual instability while still supporting orientation, accessibility, and safe movement.
Pressing An Architecture: A Centre For Balsamic Vinegar | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Sited over the historic Reno Canal in the old town of Bologna , the project proposes a centre for balsamic vinegar designed through a process undertaken between physical making and digital feedback and draws on the agentic behaviour of the buildings own materiality to form an architecture. The design process begins with a carving
HELD GROUND: the extension of Bologna’s civic collective | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Held Ground, a civic production and research facility is located in the heart of Bologna’s University District, reframing participation as a learned, collective, and spatial practice. Replacing the former university library, the project draws from Bologna’s tradition of collaborative governance and considers existing policy structures, to build an infrastructure where students observe, articulate, prototype,
How to Curate Porticoes? | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 The Galliera Museum of Porticoes presents an architecture of AI co-authorship through forensic scanning of Bologna’s porticoes, the city’s defining framing device. Designed using a customised digital latent space, the project establishes a framework for curating portico fragments and retelling their histories, when agency is shared between designer’s intention and AI interpretation.The museum combines exhibition spaces, artefact and
Recomputed Bibiena: An Algorithmic Anti-Ocularcentrism | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Recomputed Bibiena explores how visual illusion can be transformed into an architecture of embodied perception. The project begins with Bibiena’s scenographic drawings, whose angled perspectives and layered stage flats were designed to deceive the eye and produce impossible depth. Through Depth Anything 3, CLIP, point-cloud reconstruction, mesh classification and reinforcement learning, this illusion is not corrected but
Where Water Rests | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Located within Bologna’s abandoned Fonte Remonda cistern, Where Water Rests transforms forgotten water infrastructure into a refuge for stray cats and a place of quiet encounter. The design is guided by a site-specific coordinate system derived from the cistern, terrain and movement patterns. VR testing allows spaces to be experienced and adjusted from within. Shelter, veterinary care and public
The Culinary Institute of Foraged Ingredients: An Architecture Measured out of a Meal | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 To forage is to read a landscape, to negotiate what is visible against what stays hidden, to weigh the instinct to search against the decision to commit.Bologna already moves this way beneath its portici, the covered passages that order the city between inside and outside. A series of walks
Chromoteca | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Chromoteca is a Contemporary Material Archive proposed for Via di San Vitale, Bologna, a building developed through a computational tool of my own making.The project began with the construction of a slit-scan instrument on TouchDesigner that captures material colour data and translates it into three-dimensional form. Initially tested on foraged studio materials, the tool was later applied to objects from the