Alessandro Orsini

Alessandro Orsini is an architect and co-founding partner of Rome and New York-based research and design practice Architensions. His investigations focus on architecture’s political, social, and environmental spatial networks with specific interests in the commons and the definition of new modes of collective living. His practice and research are intertwined with teaching, expanding collaborative modes of inquiry to respond to new definitions of ecologies and spatial ontologies.

Architensions’ work has produced an array of completed and ongoing projects at different scales, both internationally and in the US. Among them are “The Playground,” a public architecture for the Coachella Music and Art Festival 2022, “House on House,” an adaptive reuse design redefining domesticity, “San Ferdinando Vision Plan,” a project on the commons operating at the urban scale. The studio’s work has been exhibited at Modest Common in Los Angeles, a83 Gallery, and the Center for Architecture in New York City. Architensions was named the Next Progressives by Architect Magazine in 2020 and selected by Wallpaper for their 2022 Architects’ Directory and the USA 300, a list of people defining America’s creative landscape in the category of the new guard in 2023.

Alongside practice, Alessandro has been teaching design studios at Columbia University GSAPP since 2019 and has served as a guest critic in multiple architecture schools, including Yale, Pratt, Cornell, and Cooper Union. He has contributed to journals and magazines, including Vesper Journal of Architecture, Arts & Theory, Faktur: Documents and Architecture, and Studio Magazine, with essays on topics spanning from the collective, labor and leisure, and public space. Alessandro received his Master of Architecture “summa cum laude” at Roma Tre University in Rome and was a visiting scholar at Columbia University GSAPP. He holds architectural licenses in Italy (OAR) and the United Kingdom (ARB).