Talking about masters does not mean speaking only of academic figures or great names written into history. A master is someone who teaches us how to see better. Sometimes they do so with words, other times with gestures, and other times still by showing a method, a rigor, an attitude toward their craft.
Masters can be found everywhere: in a university classroom, in a studio, on a construction site, in a mountain village, or in a field seemingly far removed from architecture. Recognizing a master means realizing that something, after that encounter, has shifted direction within us.
Before moving on to more widely known inspirations, our studio has a particular distinction: most of the founding partners and not only them had the good fortune to meet Remo Buti during their university years. Some were his students, some even his assistants, but all were influenced by him.
It was a decisive encounter, not only for what he taught, but above all for the way he narrated architecture.
With Buti, architecture was never just design: it was storytelling, vision, critical thought. His minimalism was profound, far removed from contemporary aesthetic simplifications. A minimalism born of conscious subtraction and deep knowledge.
For him, furnishings should not be protagonists, but companions to space; and those who were lucky enough to visit his home will remember how essential the dialogue with the outside already was for him at that time. His house was long and narrow, extremely minimal, with built-in, custom-designed furnishings, yet from one end you could see the cathedral in all its splendor. His references ranged from art to design, within a broad and transversal vision that has left a lasting mark on our way of designing.
Alongside him there were other Lucchese masters, perhaps less well known but extraordinarily profound figures such as Piero Menichetti and Mario Mariani. Ironical, cultured personalities, capable of inhabiting the project with both lightness and depth. What truly made them inspiring was not only what they did, but the way they spoke about it: projects, furnishings, choices. They were aware of what they wanted, what they were doing, and what they were saying and it was this clarity that turned them into everyday masters.
When speaking of influences and inspirations, however, it is limiting to confine oneself to architecture alone. Designing, first and foremost, means changing one’s point of view. To do so, one must look toward other languages. There are people capable of reinventing the way reality is narrated, represented, staged.
Think of Dario Fo: his language was entirely personal, lateral to the canon, yet he spoke of the same timeless themes. He restaged them from another angle, showing that the way something is told can radically change its meaning.
The same applies to Pink Floyd, who invented a new way of making music and spectacle, transforming the concert into a spatial, immersive, narrative experience. They revolutionized their field not by adding, but by changing structure.
Or Francesco Nuti, with his fragile, misaligned characters, capable of breaking the scene with apparent lightness. A different way of inhabiting the narrative, one that shifts perspective and opens new possibilities.
In short, wherever we look, among those who have made history we find people who were able to see differently something that was in front of everyone’s eyes. And this is exactly what we ask of architecture as well.
This line of thought also takes shape following a recent interview with Renzo Piano, in which the architect strongly reaffirmed how architecture always has a social role and how beauty is never separate from goodness. For Piano, making architecture means working on a project that never truly ends: there is always something that could be improved, corrected, refined. But absolute perfection is unattainable.
It is precisely in this distance that beauty is born. A project can be beautiful because it is imperfect, human, alive. Because it carries with it the marks of time, of choices, of the hands that shaped it. This is an idea we feel deeply connected to.
You find it, for example, in the floor of Siena Cathedral or in many mosaics of ancient churches: there is always a point that doesn’t quite align, a slight irregularity, a detail out of axis. And it is exactly this that makes them unique, precious, memorable.
True masters are such because they take their craft seriously. Because they research, deepen, question. And by doing so, they manage to expand the boundaries of what is possible.
But perhaps the most extraordinary masters are the anonymous and silent ones. There are, in fact, many masters who never wrote treatises nor taught in university classrooms, yet left an immensely powerful knowledge inscribed in space.
The historic center of Lucca is a good example: an organism born spontaneously, without a single unifying design, yet incredibly coherent. Streets, courtyards, solids and voids construct a balance that still works today. It is not the result of an authorial gesture, but of a sum of practical intelligences, sedimented over time.The same happens in the villages of the Garfagnana. Isolated places, without schools of architecture, manuals, or continuous exchanges yet capable of generating extraordinary structures. Houses leaning against one another, thick walls, ingenious solutions such as the metati. Who designed them? Farmers, shepherds, ordinary people who built by observing climate, terrain, and available resources. An architecture born of necessity, but governed by a profound intelligence of place.
When today we find ourselves restoring rural buildings or historic structures, we are often struck by the structural and spatial quality of these architectures. Behind them there was no explicit theory, but an implicit method, transmitted through experience, imitation, and trial and error.
If we widen our gaze further, the same holds true all over the world. Studying or standing before the remains of civilizations such as the Maya leaves one breathless. The Maya were indeed a society backward in many respects, yet they were capable of building with extraordinary complexity and symbolic power. Their structures demonstrate that architectural capacity does not depend on technological progress, but on a deep knowledge of space, matter, and the relationship with nature.
And indeed, it is nature the true great master.
Many of our deepest and often instinctive references come from it.
Ettore Sottsass once said: “I like to build a house not on the hill, but in the hill”: a statement that concerns not only landscape insertion, but a precise design attitude. Not imposing a form, but listening to what already exists. In the same way, Galileo Galilei stated that nothing is invented that nature has not already invented. A principle that still holds true today.
Moreover, nature works on multiple scales simultaneously, just like architecture: from the very large to the detail. It teaches us rhythm, proportion, the balance between solids and voids, between closure and openness. It teaches us that every element has a function and that nothing is superfluous.
When we design, especially in Tuscan contexts, dialogue with the outside becomes central. Today, creating beauty no longer means simply designing a refined interior or façade, but building a balanced relationship between inside and outside, between built form and landscape. Nature is not a backdrop: it is a true master, capable of guiding design choices with a coherence that time continues to confirm.
Today, masters seem rarer not for lack of talent, but due to a profound change in the cultural and disciplinary context. For centuries, architecture moved within a system of shared rules: the same proportions and construction principles spanned the fifteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Differences lay in style, not in method.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, rationalism arrived and swept away those historical rules. It was a necessary, powerful revolution, guided by a strong logic: function, structure, clarity. The masters of rationalism did not deny the past; they questioned it methodically. But over time, that revolution turned into a progressive demolition of every shared reference.
Today we often find ourselves without common rules. And without rules, it becomes harder to recognize masters. Contemporary architecture is increasingly tied to the figure of the architect and their signature, rather than to a movement, a territory, or a historical period. Anyone can do anything, anywhere.
Added to this is the role of technology. Once, windows were small to protect from cold and wind; today we can afford large glass surfaces everywhere. Once, materials were few and local; today they are potentially infinite. This technical freedom, if not guided by a method, risks producing architectures detached from context, interchangeable.
The result is a discipline extraordinarily rich in possibilities, but poor in shared references. And here the doubt arises: will the architecture we are building today still be able to speak five hundred years from now? Or does it risk belonging to a logic of rapid consumption, where even space becomes disposable?
Perhaps today more than ever it is essential to return to transmitting methods and processes, rather than finished solutions. Teaching how to look, how to listen, how to design.
To be a master means sharing what one knows. Because communicating one’s knowledge is the most powerful way to endure, even beyond one’s own existence. More than building a single building, more than building a city, transmitting a way of thinking is what still today is capable of crossing time.
