"We Are Trendy": reinstating the central role of people through architecture

The mission of 3ndy Studio is to excite. “Each project must be imagined as if it were a work of art inhabited by people, because art allows everyone to see their own soul in the mirror.” But the true objective is to build “a piece of the public city,” beginning with the question, “As well as satisfying the private needs of the client, what benefit does the building bring to the public?”

Published by THE PLAN, part of the Maggioli Group, and entitled We Are Trendy, a new monograph has been released that tells the story of 3ndy Studio’s approach to architecture and the practice’s growth into an international firm. In its 160 pages, the book examines 16 projects through the accounts of clients, artists, and photographers who’ve met the architects from the studio based in Vigonovo in Italy’s Veneto region, including Giorgio Milani, Fernando Guerra, Paolo Simoni, Stefano Amerio, and founders Marco Mazzetto and Alessandro Lazzari, who opened the practice in 2002 and were joined in 2007 by Massimiliano Martignon.

“What is frequently notable about the studio’s work,” writes professor and critic Valerio Paolo Mosco in the preface, “is the desire to demonstrate – in what, until at least a few years ago, was an entirely hostile environment – the reasons for modern architecture, while transmuting it so that it can be placed in particular settings. This desire encompasses the value of a project – a project understood in the broadest sense as a promise of the future.”

Among the firm’s most significant designs is the restoration of Palazzo di Vigonovo, which saw it working in close collaboration with Giorgio Milani and Philippe Daverio. It’s been symbolized by the artwork Eco di passi nella memoria (Echoes of the past in the memory), created by Milani to recall the building’s previous skin in a kind of backdrop formed by 190 weathering steel panels engraved with thousands of words.

“Public squares are places for dialogue par excellence,” the artist writes in the new book, “and this is possibly why my works, which are based on words, lend themselves to being used in public places. Working in a public space is very different from working in a studio. It means becoming part of the local activities alongside designers with various skills and sensibilities, and engaging in relationships with public and private clients, as well as skilled craftspeople, from whom there’s often so much to learn.”

And it’s recognizing this value in human and professional relationships that is the driving force behind all of 3ndy Studio’s work, from repairing social fabric to urban planning that reflects on spaces and functions before forms and standards. It’s no coincidence that the practice works hard to create alliances with public administrations so they can co-plan areas in terms of a building’s design. This applies to public places but also to the many residences it has designed (Casa Roca, Diamond Tree, and The Frag, to name a few featured in the book), as well as its industrial and office buildings (such as Faeda).

“In recent years, three elements have contributed to consolidating our way of understanding the creative and design processes: the Covid pandemic, a renewed and deep environmental awareness, and the skyrocketing cost of traditional energy sources,” say the architects. This has increased the importance of private homes having adequately designed spaces, sites that respond to a both environmental and functional awareness, modern energy efficiency, and self-generation technologies.

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