Blog
This section features a selection of articles published in magazines and online platforms, alongside personal reflections and commentaries on student projects.
Archive of essays and texts here: AplusTexto: Stefano Ferracini / Architectural Writings (Italian).
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Stefano Ferracini
Venice Biennale 2026: Beauty as a Condemnation
Arriving in Venice in June 2026 is a jarring experience, with 38-degree heat pinning you against damp walls while every step becomes an exhausting negotiation between the desire to observe and the primal need to breathe.
The city appears as a Babel-like organism, a machine spinning aimlessly, lubricated only by the excess of our expectations, where the new "dynamic toll"—which modulates entry fees based on crowd density—is merely the final piece of a total commodification: the right to the city transformed into a premium subscription, a luxury service for those who can afford the privilege of breathing its air.
In the Giardini, the silence of the pavilions desperately attempts to impose itself over the external roar, with the Holy See Pavilion evoking a fragile spirituality and Chile bringing water inside the halls to denounce drought, forcing us to face the very element that threatens Venice’s survival.
Yet, the contrast is brutal, because works born of pain and memory, like Dana Awartani’s precious tiles, are consumed in the time of a compulsive selfie, making us all, simultaneously, critics and accomplices in a choreography that never stops spinning. When the lights go out in November, what will remain?
The city will stay, with its chronic problems: depopulation, homes emptied to make room for B&Bs, and a cost of living that drives out those who would simply like to live there, turning beauty into a condemnation, the perfect alibi behind which its progressive emptying is hidden.
The 2026 Biennale, with its title "In Minor Keys," seems an obstinate search for low notes, for whispered sounds amidst a din that threatens to drown out everything; yet, there is an underlying hypocrisy in this whisper, as the Biennale is not an event that truly ends, but an infinite cycle, an eternal return that knows no epiphanies.
When the curtain falls, city life does not return; only the void of an abandoned set remains, waiting for the next act, in a loop where the city does not live but constantly performs. The season changes, the exhibition changes, but the wear and tear remain constant, and seeking the "minor" in a system built for the "major" is a fragile gesture, destined to be reabsorbed, every year, by the very machine it promised to denounce.
#VeniceBiennale #Biennale2026 #Overtourism #InMinorKeys #FragileVenice
Architecture of Breath in a Burning City
The sun is out. Not the pleasant June sun; it’s the kind that is turning Brussels into a hot plate. You walk down the street and feel the asphalt pulsating.
I wrapped up the "Le Trait de Réconfort" workshop at Saint-Luc six months ago. We spent days talking about "cooling corridors" and "suspended breathing." It sounded therapeutic. But then you leave school, and reality slaps you in the face.
Yesterday, I passed one of those "redeveloped" squares. Concrete everywhere, three scrawny trees looking like they were apologizing for existing, and a sun bouncing off every surface. I asked myself: where is the corridor? Where is the breath?
The ideas we developed are necessary. Of course we need green facades. But as we proposed them, I felt the contradiction. Planting trees costs; taking space from cars infuriates the neighborhood; and local bureaucracy seems designed to neutralize any poetic intuition before it hits a site.
We draw beautiful renderings where people walk happily in the shade. But the real city is made of narrow alleys where the wind won't pass, and AC units blasting hot air onto the sidewalk. It’s a cycle. The hotter it gets, the more we run our machines, the more the outside turns into an oven.
During the workshop, I pushed the students to seek a "poetic dimension." But is it realistic? Am I asking a 22-year-old to design a "climate refuge" when the market only wants them to maximize floor space?
We try to solve everything with "smart technology." Reflective materials, sensors. These are just technical shortcuts to avoid admitting we built unlivable cities. We paved for decades, ignoring the climate, and now we’re applying band-aids.
Some projects, however, abandoned the pretense of "solving" the climate and focused on how to inhabit it. They imagined micro-devices and temporary shadows. They aren't the ultimate solution, but they change how we perceive our own bodies.
Maybe the most urgent corridor is the one we build in our own heads. Accepting to slow down. Accepting to change our rhythms. It’s hard to sell to an urban planning office, but perhaps it’s the only way, before architecture becomes nothing more than a shell to barricade ourselves in, waiting for the world outside to stop burning.
#UrbanResilience #ArchitectureOfCare #CoolingCorridors #SustainableDesign #ESAStLuc
The other day, I was walking near Central Station. It was raining—that thin Brussels drizzle that gets into your bones—and I was waiting for a colleague. I looked around for a place to sit, just for five minutes, and I struggled to find one.
In reality, if you pay attention, the matter here in Brussels is more subtle. You don’t always see the blatant iron armrests on benches like you do in London or Paris, though a few pop up in the metro or around Gare du Midi. Often, the hostility is more bureaucratic, almost invisible.
The trend in many downtown squares, for instance, is simply to remove benches altogether. Disappeared. Think of the area around the Bourse and the beginning of the major pedestrian boulevards. A massive redevelopment took place there, and on paper, the idea was excellent: returning space to pedestrians. However, if you walk through certain stretches, you realize that your only real option to sit down is to buy something at a café terrace. The old traditional public benches are gone, replaced if anything by stone ledges or steps where lingering is tolerated, but not encouraged.
You see the exact same logic if you move toward the institutions, on the esplanade of the European Parliament near Gare du Luxembourg. The space is immense, but the amount of free, comfortable public seating is ridiculous compared to the volume of people passing through. Or again, near Place de la République de l'Équateur, close to Gare du Nord, where removing street furniture was a deliberate strategy to prevent gatherings in a complex area. Backrests are removed, seats are eliminated, and everything is replaced with empty space to force people to move along. Just another way to push the problem one neighborhood down.
When the space isn’t emptied out, street furniture is used as an obstacle. Another typical trick of our urban aesthetic is large planters or concrete flowerbeds strategically placed under arches or in the dead corners of buildings. At first glance, it looks like an attention to greening, an attempt to beautify. Then you look at the geometry of the layout and you realize the truth: they serve to physically occupy the ground to prevent anyone from taking shelter or sitting on the floor. We use "green" to exclude.
This is what we call hostile architecture. Or "defensive design," if we want to use the cleaner jargon of textbooks.
I often talk about this in class when showing students how the design of public space is never neutral. It’s just that sometimes, in books, the matter becomes too simple. It immediately turns into a fierce critique of capitalism, social control, and the exclusion of the unhoused. And that’s true, absolutely. There is an objective cruelty in the production line of a concrete block shaped specifically to tell someone: you do not belong here.
Yet, while I was standing there waiting, I was also thinking about the other side of the coin. And this is where students tend to stiffen up, because they prefer clear-cut answers.
The truth is that public space is a territory of permanent conflict. If you run a shop and have to clean the entrance every morning, or if you are a citizen who doesn't feel safe at night crossing an underpass where twenty people have settled in conditions of extreme marginalization, your perception changes. Those who adopt these barriers often do not do so out of sadism, but to respond to a demand for safety, or decorum, that comes from daily life. It is a temporary patch on a massive problem that social policies are failing to solve.
And here lies the strongest contradiction of Brussels: on one hand, there is a lot of experimentation with tactical urbanism, pedestrian squares, and temporary wooden furniture to foster social interaction; on the other hand, as soon as things get complex, the territory is armored with barrier-planters or emptied out around stations.
So, what do we do? Do we blame it all on architecture?
The doubt always stays with me. There is a fine line between protecting a common space and making it sterile. If we eliminate comfortable spots to keep someone from sleeping there, we end up punishing the elderly person who needs to catch their breath after grocery shopping, or the mother who needs to tie her child's shoe. We transform our cities into transit corridors. Places where you are only allowed to walk, produce, consume, and then leave. The very idea of pausing disappears.
Perhaps the real defeat of this trend is not so much ideological as it is formal. It is simply ugly. It reveals an inability to accommodate human complexity. When a designer is forced to use geometric tricks or obstructive planters just to keep people from stopping, it means the project has failed its primary function: giving form to an acceptable coexistence.
I don't have a ready-made solution to put on display. Every time I walk through the city, I find myself oscillating between annoyance at social control and a pragmatic understanding for those who have to manage the daily reality of a difficult neighborhood. The fact remains that walking our streets is becoming a less and less generous experience. And for anyone whose job is to design space, that is a deeply uncomfortable thought.
#hostilearchitecture #publicspace #urbanism #brussels #urbandesign
The Finitude of the Infinite: The Cynical Completion of the Sagrada Família
A few days ago, I happened to be looking at photos of Barcelona online, searching for the usual cranes. For the first time, they weren't there. Or rather, the massive...
The Dignity of Concrete: Why the Future of Cities Lies in Reuse, Not Demolition
Sometimes I look at the walls of my house and think: we’re surrounded by concrete drains, plaster that never sees the light of day, and materials that, once extracted, stay exactly the same until the day we tear them down...
Mushrooms, Algae, and the Messy Future of Living
Sometimes I look at the walls of my house and think: we’re surrounded by concrete drains, plaster that never sees the light of day, and materials that...
From Authors to "Algorithm Curators": How AI is Reshaping the Designer’s Role
A few weeks ago, I tried using Midjourney for an interior design project I’m currently working on. I was looking for ideas for a system of wooden partition walls.
Inhabiting the Mind: How the Built Environment Redesigns Our Brain
Imagine walking into a Gothic cathedral. Your eyes track upward, following vaults that seem to defy gravity; your breath deepens, your mind opens to abstract thoughts, and your sense of time slows down...
Relationship Architecture: Proximity Spaces Against Urban Loneliness
Urban loneliness represents one of the greatest contradictions of modernity: we have never been so densely packed into the same spaces, yet we have never been so isolated...
The Mirror Wall Shatters: The Bluff and Contradictions of The Line
The dream of the straight line has definitively collided with the harsh reality of the desert, exposing the true nature of The Line: not the ultimate manifesto of future urbanism...
The Illusion of Work-Life Balance: When the Office Owns Your Soul
There is a scene in Severance (the cult Apple TV+ series) that perfectly encapsulates the horror of modern corporatism. The protagonist, Mark, steps into an elevator...
The Gray Apocalypse: Concrete and the Erasure of CivilizationThe Gray Apocalypse
In Victor Kossakovsky’s documentary cinema, images speak for themselves, entirely bypassing the need for a narrator. In his film Architecton (2024), this stylistic choice evolves into a profound philosophical reflection...
