SERVICES
In Florence, as in each city around the world, Studio Lauria approaches architecture with a bespoke sensibility, combining close attention to context with a drive for innovation.
We design across scales: from the city, understood as a collective space that generates relationships, to interiors, conceived as environments for emotion rather than mere decoration. Over more than twenty-five years of practice, we have developed the ability to address complex issues and resolve the practical challenges of making architecture.
Urban Design and Planning
One of our first commissions was to collaborate with Leonardo Benevolo on the urban regeneration plan for the western outskirts of Florence. We later worked on the planning of the Anagnina-Romanina area in Rome and, in Brazil, on territorial regeneration for Cotijuba Island in the state of Pará and the urban restoration of São Paulo’s historic centre. More recently, the European Investment Bank appointed us to coordinate the Museums Master Plan for the Albanian city of Shkodër.
We believe that the city is where relationships and opportunities emerge and develop. The accelerating transformation of lifestyles, working patterns, production and commerce call for planning founded on adaptability and flexibility.
Building reuse and architectural restoration
We offer clients extensive restoration expertise, developed since our earliest days in Florence through an engagement with both complexity and beauty.
Our most important work in Florence includes the restoration of the former Santa Maria Maggiore convent and the Pagliere Reali, as well as the restoration strategy for the Orsanmichele complex. In Piacenza, we are working on the State Archives project within the former Sant’Agostino convent. More recently, we won the competition for the rehabilitation of Palermo’s former cotton mill, with a construction value of approximately €30 million. We firmly believe that the rehabilitation of existing buildings requires specialist know-how, strong problem-solving skills and the sensitivity needed to enhance the built fabric and its historic memory.
Spaces for Work, Culture and Sport
Our portfolio, together with that of FLOW, extends well beyond residential design and includes major projects for workplaces, museums and sports facilities.
We designed the interiors of the new Universidad Santo Tomás campus in Bogotá and Motorola’s São Paulo headquarters, and more recently prepared the preliminary plan for the Italian Customs Agency’s offices in Florence. All are functional environments, but above all they are places for relationships and for the pleasure of working together. Our portfolio includes projects for Florence’s leading museums and the proposal for Turin’s Egyptian Museum, developed with Kengo Kuma. In Albania, we are designing Shkodër’s Museum Quarter and the museum for the archaeological site of Bylis. Alongside our work in hospitality, with hotels currently being designed in Italy and abroad, we are particularly proud of our commitment to sports architecture, which has earned important awards and recognition and is embodied in the redevelopment and extension plan for Coverciano, the Italian national football teams’ technical centre.
Accessibility, Inclusion and Sustainability
We approach our work with passion, but also with responsibility. We strongly believe in the ethical value of architecture. For this reason, we reject greenwashing and address environmental, economic and social sustainability through careful choices of construction technologies, materials and energy use. Above all, we believe that architecture must be inclusive and that every project should be developed for the widest possible range of users: — from children to older people, regardless of gender, with particular sensitivity to people with disabilities.
In this context, we highlight our experience in preparing Plans for the Elimination of Architectural Barriers (PEBA), including those developed for several Florentine museums — among them Orsanmichele, the Bargello and the Medici Chapels — and, most recently, for the Laurentian Library. We also act as consultants to the European Investment Bank, supervising the rehabilitation and extension project for the National History Museum in Tirana.
