Healthy Building
For years, the construction industry has been driven by numbers: energy consumption, certifications, kilowatts saved. Measuring a building’s performance has become more urgent than asking who we are actually building it for.
We believe it is time to reverse this approach. To return to designing around the real needs of the people who inhabit a space — putting human beings before buildings.
Retrofit
A regenerating city calls on architecture to mend the imbalance between the built environment and nature, restoring equilibrium where consumption has taken its place.
Italy is the natural ground for this challenge. Home to the world's richest, largest and oldest building heritage, it faces the urgent task of adapting and repurposing its existing architecture.
What was once a creative and energy opportunity has now become a necessity, driven by the continued growth of the urban population.
Courage
Expertise, algorithms and tools are part of our professional DNA. Yet they are not enough to foresee the future.
What we also need is courage — from the Latin cor habeo, “to have heart” — the strength to leave measurable certainties behind and be guided by imagination, constructive disobedience and poetry.
Only then can we truly project: to cast forward, to imagine what does not yet exist, and to innovate. Otherwise, we remain mere decorators of reality.
Sound building practice
Soaring raw material costs and the urgency of the climate crisis demand an end to the era of disposable buildings.
This is where the material bank emerges: a circular building conceived as a flexible repository of materials, designed to be recovered, disassembled and reassembled at the end of its life into something new.
Research
Founded by FTA and curated by Julia Koropoulos, Studio Portaluppi is a transdisciplinary research laboratory dedicated to reconnecting architecture with the physical act of making and the culture of craftsmanship: construction, materials, artisanal expertise, and direct engagement with places and people. Its mission is to create value through the therapeutic power of imagination.
The title of the space’s cultural programme, C’est l’heure de bien faire (It Is Time to Do Things Well), launching in autumn 2026, reflects the humanistic philosophy that underpins Taidelli’s approach to architecture. Through exhibitions, conversations and research initiatives, Studio Portaluppi fosters a culture of building rooted in craftsmanship, the therapeutic value of beauty, and the healing potential of the built environment.
