The Studio

3C + t, Capolei Cavalli Architetti Associati, is a Rome-based architecture design practice founded in 1960 by architects Francesco Capolei, Giancarlo Capolei and Manlio Cavalli.

The studio’s activity started with works that were part of an innovative and visionary cultural movement, the Radical Design movement, and its interpretation in the Roman context, at the time of the economic boom of the 1960s, the student movements and the research for a new way of living, “new spaces” for a “new time”. An architecture of its times, which has been able to anticipate, interpret and innovate the intellectual traditions through the “train of history”.

An architecture made of concrete, a Roman interpretation of the Brutalist experience of the 1970s in Europe and the United States, characterized by a new way of thinking residential and office spaces, between research and material experimentation. An architecture that is inspired by the great references of the twentieth century, but tends towards innovation and change.

This is the story of the Rome-based design practice until the early 1990s, when the baton passed from one generation of architects to the next.

The “turn of the century“, the new design approach of the studio, interprets the change in architecture and contemporary society, the new demands, needs and the new look towards the future. The studio’s vision wisely integrates into different contexts, starting from its Roman centre of gravity up to an increasingly international panorama.

Large-scale projects now find their place alongside the studio’s traditional design themes. In addition to the design of residential, commercial or retail spaces, more complex issues are addressed that bring the studio closer to the exploration of waterscape design.

Ports, marinas and waterfronts are some examples of this new world, where attention to the design process passes from micro to macro while maintaining the same approach, between versatility and sartorial attention.

An architecture focused on the place, capable of interpreting and altering it, while respecting its intrinsic nature, where the power of the sea and the water becomes the driving force of the project. The water becomes part of the design, an element through which to model architecture, with the aim of designing places intended for humans and their well-being.

An architecture attentive to the historical identity of places, and aimed at regenerating and recovering a thousand-year-old city: Rome and its history, but also Rome and its changes.

An example of this are the interventions of urban restoration and regeneration, from small to large scale, where parts of the city are reread and rewritten through a language that interprets new uses and new functions of a territory under transformation, between memory and future.

Another example are the numerous social housing complexes built outside the consolidated city, places where the transformation of the city and of the way of living – conceived in a tension between ancient and contemporary – takes place.