DANIELE
LAURIA
Immediately after graduating with first-class honours, Daniele Lauria joined the design team led by Renzo Piano for the restoration and adaptive reuse of the former Murate prison in Florence, and the team led by Leonardo Benevolo for the regeneration plans for Florence’s outer districts. In 1999 he founded Studio Lauria . Its first project, a temporary pavilion in Piazza della Signoria in Florence, was presented at the 2000 Venice Architecture Biennale directed by Massimiliano Fuksas.
Early in his career, he designed, among other projects, the building that housed “La Sterpaia”, the creative laboratory founded and directed by Oliviero Toscani in San Rossore Park, with whom Daniele Lauria worked as both a partner and collaborator. His commitment to art and culture later led him to direct the Florence Festival of Creativity from 2006 to 2010 and, in 2011, the Festival of Europe, promoted by the European University Institute and the European Commission.
Beginning in 2009, he gradually shifted much of his design work to South America, where, for approximately a decade, he developed public- and private-sector commissions in Brazil, Chile, Peru and Ecuador.
Following the difficult period marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, he renewed his presence in Italy. He had already won the 2019 design competition for the restoration of the former Sant’Agostino convent together with Corvino+Multari. Between 2021 and 2023, he collaborated with Zaha Hadid Architects on the Al-Nouri Mosque in Mosul, Iraq, and with Kengo Kuma on Florence Stadium and Turin’s Egyptian Museum. Also in 2021, a dialogue with Pritzker Prize laureate Balkrishna Doshi led to an exhibition during the Venice Architecture Biennale at the celebrated Olivetti showroom, with a bespoke installation inside the building designed by Carlo Scarpa.
In 2024, as the practice resumed its work in South America and won the competition for the rehabilitation of a former factory in Palermo, Lauria was appointed by the EIB — the European Investment Bank — to design the Museums Master Plan for Shkodër in northern Albania.
Daniele Lauria has contributed to Il Giornale dell’Architettura, IQD and the Feltrinelli Foundation. He has taken an active part in lectures, conferences and events in many countries around the world. He has also taught Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism at Florence University of the Arts and Exhibition Design Management at IED di Firenze.
