Profile and Philosophy

Profile

P-U-R-A Platform for Urban Research and Architecture is an international firm of architects and researchers coming from different corners of Europe. Our offices and teams exchange ideas by exploring architecture and urban design capabilities connecting to a wider network of collaborators. Driven by the complexity of contemporary issues, we are keen on working with professionals coming from other disciplines. Our offices are based in London, Milan and Prague. Various education backgrounds and our multi-cultural team give us different perspectives on the design approach, leading the project to a sensible experimentalism.  Our work focuses on the importance of a multidisciplinary approach supported with researches carried out at different universities and institutions. Architecture is considered a narration and an open process susceptible to constant transformation.

Philosophy

P-U-R-A  is a platform. It is an experimental organism of ideas and working systems moving from the global to the local scale through shared and relational processes with common goals. Our office is a spread infrastructure where the software is continuously updated using new technologies and programs in order to process several data and synthetize them in new cutting edge projects, to prefigure innovative landscapes susceptible to transformations and mutations.

P-U-R-A  is urban design. “Cities are the material expression of a culture, the physical organization of a society in a spatial form. The form of the city is the construction of the physical way of staying, of sharing spaces, of working with others, of complex human interaction, the way of inhabiting this world. In the global context the synergistic relations between built-up spaces and society are subjected to overlapping influences”. Our work with different urban elements aims to design a continuous up-to-date “modus vivendi” in the public and common spatial platform of the global territory, with a special care to the individuals and to the place in which they live.

P-U-R-A  is research. Research means experimenting, exploring and creating innovative ideas to cross the line of economic, human and moral values. The overall ambition is to respond to the Zeitgeist with the consciousness and knowledge of the past and a special look into the future, reaching far beyond the present. Facing fragmentation and complexity of global territories P-U-R-A believes it is possible to define a “modus operandi” enabling mankind to rethink the current urban and architectural realities.

P-U-R-A is architecture.  “Architecture means revealing identities through spaces of gathering and interaction. Identity is given by the historical memory of the places, by the evolution of the form combined with the interpretation of existing needs”. The elaboration of new codes is the key to explore the complex interaction among urban dynamic systems. “Spaces are susceptible to changes, flexible, interconnected by short-mutable relations, clearly recognizable but sensible to the alteration of the form as in the generative gene of transformation, dynamism and experimentation”.