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

Porta Dulce | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Bologna is the home of modern gelato yet has no dedicated space honouring this cultural legacy. Porta Dolce proposes a gelato museum at Porta Saragozza, Bologna’s medieval city gate, positioning itself as both civic offering and cultural archive.The site is treated as an active partner: a point-cloud survey of the existing structure informs the design directly, with a void sliced

Hydrological Algae Farm, Architecture Powered by Algal Metabolism | Bologna, Italy | Unit 21 | 2026 Hydrologic Algae Farm proposes an architectural model in which environmental remediation, biological cultivation, and material production converge within a living infrastructure. Situated within the flood-prone landscape of Bologna, the project responds to hydrological conditions by investigating how excess water can be transformed into a productive ecological resource through algae cultivation.Water extracted from the site’s