Blog
This section features a selection of articles published in magazines and online platforms, alongside personal reflections and commentaries on student projects.
Archive of essays and texts here: AplusTexto: Stefano Ferracini / Architectural Writings (Italian).
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Stefano Ferracini
So, the other day I was looking at the renderings for one of these projects in Kansas. Survival Condo, it's called. They took an old Atlas missile silo and dug out these apartments inside that cost three or four million dollars. There was this photo of the interior: a kitchen with granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, and a fake window projecting a recorded video of a forest, complete with little birds singing.
This kind of thing makes my head spin. Not because of the luxury itself, but because of the absurdity of the detail. You’re preparing for the end of the world and you're worrying about granite in the kitchen?
Something doesn’t add up here, and it’s a very practical thing.
Let's say something actually happens. A nuclear catastrophe, a total pandemic, whatever you want. The doors of this underground condo close. Who’s inside? There’s the guy who made his money with hedge funds or an app, his family, and then the "staff." Because someone has to keep the air filters, the water pumps, and the pool running.
Now, I often ask myself: on day two, when it becomes clear to everyone that there’s no one left outside to collect taxes or send the police, what happens in that granite kitchen?
The billionaire paid his millions in dollars or bitcoin. But that money is now just numbers on a dead server somewhere in Frankfurt or New York. It’s worth literally nothing. The head of security, who’s maybe an ex-marine and has the keys to the armory, looks at the billionaire.
Then he looks at the technician who knows how to keep the hydroponic lettuce from rotting.
At that point, who’s in charge?
I don’t know, maybe I’m cynical, but it seems to me that the hierarchy just dismantles itself in five minutes. You don’t need a communist revolution or some grand political theory. It’s just that the guard has the guns, and the engineer has the skills to keep you from suffocating. The bunker owner, in the end, what does he offer to the group? Nothing. He becomes dead weight.
And yet, these guys keep buying them. Douglas Rushkoff, a writer who covers technology, said that during a tech-mogul conference they asked him quite seriously how they could maintain the loyalty of their guards after "the collapse." They were thinking about electric shock collars, or biometric locks that only respond to them. To me, it sounds like the plot of a B-movie, but they’re spending real millions on it. It really shows a kind of naive desperation: the idea that technology can replace the social contract. If I don’t trust people, I’ll just put in an electronic lock. But a technician has to install the lock, and we're right back where we started.
Then there’s the issue of spare parts. This is a very mundane observation a plumber friend of mine made. A bunker is an incredibly complicated machine. Pumps, filters, valves, circuits. Things break. In a normal house, you call the supplier or buy the part online. Inside there, after three years, if a circuit board in the hydroponic greenhouse burns out, what do you do? You can’t manufacture it in your basement. The bunker isn't a world unto itself; it depends on a factory in Taiwan and a truck driver delivering the part. Without global logistics, the bunker has an expiration date stamped on it, just like milk. It just becomes a very expensive, highly technological tomb.
Sometimes I think this whole race for luxury bunkers isn't actually a plan for the future. No one can be stupid enough not to see these flaws. It’s probably just a kind of anti-anxiety medication for the rich. It gives you the illusion of having control over something uncontrollable, like death or climate collapse. You buy the bunker so you don't go crazy today, not to live in it tomorrow.
Or maybe I’m wrong, and they’ve found a way I don’t understand. But if I had to bet, between the billionaire locked in his room with the screen showing the fake forest and his ventilation guy, I already know who’d hold the keys to the house after a week.
#bunkers #survivalism #capitalism #doomsday #techapocalypse
I was thinking about this the other day while walking here in Brussels, heading down towards the Place Flagey area. It was 36°C, with a heavy, stagnant humidity that hadn’t let up for ten consecutive days, and I stopped to look at the brick terraced houses and Art Nouveau facades. Nothing. Not a single air conditioning unit hanging outside. Just wide-open windows in a desperate attempt to catch a breeze that simply wasn't there. If you walk through Seville or Athens in July, the soundtrack is a constant, dull, almost reassuring hum of split units pumping heat out into the street. There, AC is just part of the vital infrastructure—you don't debate it, you install it. Up north, though, there’s still this sort of cultural reluctance, almost a moral barrier that associates air conditioning with wastefulness or an American vice.
The problem is that this mindset clashes directly with the physics of our current houses. Over the last fifteen years, driven by European energy efficiency regulations and EPC standards, we’ve designed buildings that have basically become thermoses. Walls with insulation jackets this thick, triple-paned windows, and perfectly sealed frames so as not to lose a single kilowatt of heating during the winter. It works beautifully in January. But when a heatwave like this settles over the city for ten days straight, the building envelope undergoes what we on-site call the greenhouse effect. The heat gets in—through those large windows that northern designers love so much for capturing light—and once it's inside, it stays trapped. The massive structural elements absorb that thermal energy and release it slowly throughout the night. But if the outdoor temperature at night doesn't drop below 22°C (those tropical nights that are becoming common even here), the house can no longer breathe. It becomes an oven.
Then you look at the flagship institutional projects, the ones that are supposed to lead the way, like the Olympic Village in Paris. On paper, the designers' plan was a masterpiece of applied ecology: zero traditional air conditioning to slash the carbon footprint, relying instead on a radiant floor system fed by cool water drawn from deep geothermal sources, paired with natural ventilation induced by the proximity to the Seine. They promised it would be six or seven degrees cooler than the outside. A flawless algorithm that completely ignored the reality of human biology.
When you put three 90-kilo athletes in a room, stressed and producing constant metabolic heat, the dynamic shifts entirely. Add the laptops, phones on chargers, and TVs. The internal heat load just collapses onto the structure. And then there is the thermodynamic limit of a cold floor, which anyone who has done a bit of practical work on-site knows all too well: the dew point. If it's muggy outside, with that typical summer storm humidity, and the indoor air is saturated, you can't run water that is too cold through the pipes under the floor. If you do, the moisture condenses right on the surface. The floor gets wet, slick, and dangerous. So the system has to throttle back and stop, leaving you with hot and, above all, humid air. The perceived temperature doesn't budge.
We all know how the story ended: the foreign delegations protested, and the organizers had to backpedal, cramming thousands of portable air conditioners into the rooms at the last minute. It’s the worst possible thermodynamic compromise—noisy, inefficient machines that use a flexible hose to expel heat, forcing you to leave the window ajar. You're practically cooling the room while letting hot air rush right back in from the outside. The ultimate ecological paradox.
I don't know, sometimes I feel like we’re stuck between two opposing rigidities. On one hand, there's this bureaucratic hypocrisy in the north, which rejects cooling technology just to keep theoretical green balance sheets clean or to protect historical facades at all costs. On the other hand, there’s the design laziness of the south, where we've lost the ability to orient buildings properly or use shading, because it's just easier to slap a unit on the balcony and hit a button on the remote.
Maybe we need to find a more pragmatic middle ground. We don't need to turn houses into 18°C refrigerators. It would be enough to rediscover the effectiveness of basic passive systems: old-fashioned shutters, movable outdoor louvers, and shades dropped outside the glass, not inside, blocking the sun before it even hits the house. And, at the same time, accept that a little mechanical help—maybe integrated into the ventilation system just to dehumidify the air—isn’t an ecological sin. It’s a biological necessity if the climate keeps changing at this speed. In short: fewer clean computer simulations, and a bit more common sense from the construction site.
#architecture #climatechange #sustainabledesign #eurobuilding #urbanism
There is something I always do when walking through Milan, or any other dense city: I watch where people choose to stop. I don’t mean at traffic lights, obviously. I mean those micro-moments when someone slows down near a rough stone wall, or chooses to sit on a step in the shade of a tree rather than on a shiny metal bench a few yards away. For years, we dismissed these choices as "a matter of taste" or, at most, architectural common sense.
But the truth is, there is far more biology beneath the surface than aesthetics.
Recently, I was looking through European funding calls—specifically Horizon Europe's Cluster 1 on health, which channels a staggering amount of money—and I noticed how heavily the focus is shifting toward post-pandemic urban well-being. There is this major framework called embodied cognition, the idea that the mind isn’t a computer locked inside the skull, but a system constantly tuned to the body and its surroundings. If you think about it, it’s obvious. If you walk for two hours between mirrored concrete high-rises, with the sun blinding you and traffic noise bouncing off smooth walls, you get home with a headache and your nerves frayed. That’s not an opinion; it's your nervous system going into defense mode.
The novelty, which is now catching the eye of developers and public housing managers, is that we can actually measure this stuff today.
Until yesterday, an architect would walk into a planning committee and say, "This design conveys serenity." And the response, understandably, was a shrug. Today, they put a portable EEG headset on you that looks like a fishing net, a pair of eye-tracking glasses, and send you for a walk around the block. Then they look at the charts. You can see exactly where your brain waves shift, where your eye strains to find a visual reference point on a monotonous facade, and even how your salivary cortisol levels vary after half an hour in a tree-lined courtyard compared to a paved one.
Here, though, a doubt creeps in, and I say this as someone who has been observing these dynamics for a long time. I wouldn’t want us to reduce architecture to a medical prescription. If an algorithm tells me that texture "A" reduces stress by 12% compared to texture "B," will we end up building cookie-cutter cities based on Excel sheets? The risk is real. Architecture needs a certain amount of unpredictability, even a bit of healthy chaos. A city that is too therapeutic risks being dead boring.
Still, when I look at certain social housing projects, where grey concrete and endless corridors seem designed specifically to crush the mood of the people living there, science is more than welcome. If biometric data is what it takes to convince a massive real estate fund or an agency like UN-Habitat to invest an extra million euros in natural light, porous materials that absorb noise, or planting real trees instead of plastic planters, then neuroarchitecture becomes a powerful political tool.
In the end, it’s not about creating the perfect city—that doesn’t exist. It’s about understanding, data in hand, that a wall isn't just a vertical divider; it’s something that actively interacts with our heart rate. PropTech firms and financial markets are catching on because they see the economic value of "corporate wellness" or reduced healthcare costs. The rest of us, perhaps, should understand it simply by watching how someone's face changes when they step out of a park and into a dark alleyway.
#Neuroarchitecture #EmbodiedCognition #UrbanHealth #PublicHousing #PropTech
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