2026
Re-Claim x Festival des Cabanes 2027
Académie de France à Rome, Villa Médicis
Competition Entry
Informal Persistence Borgo Mezzanone is Italy’s largest informal settlement: a city that officially does not exist, built by thousands of migrant farmworkers on the edge of the Tavoliere delle Puglie. Its shelters are assembled from whatever is at hand, with no water, no sewers and no connections. Here, building is not a choice but a form of insistence; to inhabit is to exist where you are denied.
A Faithful Copy The project takes one of these shelters and rebuilds it, faithfully, in the gardens of Villa Medici. It does not reinterpret or quote the original. It is built with timber salvaged from the 2025 edition of the festival, following the same logic through which those structures come into being: recover, assemble, inhabit.
The Chain of Transformations The copy is not inferior to the original; it continues its process. There is no untouchable point of origin, only a chain of transformations, and the cabane arriving at Villa Medici is one link in that chain. The project finds its meaning in the gap between precarity and monumentality.
Precarious Monument Placed within the Carré des Vestiges, beside the remains of Roman columns, the shelter makes visible the tension between solemn stone and provisional timber. It is not a simulacrum to be observed from a distance but a fully accessible, inhabitable space of 3.83 × 5.70 m, built in fir battens and phenolic pine plywood assembled only with screws. Inside, light filtering through the lattice evokes the isolation, intimacy and daily resistance of the place it comes from.
Circular Return After the festival, the structure would have been dismantled and returned to Borgo Mezzanone, donated through INTERSOS. The timber would have become material for a self-building workshop with the community: not built for them, but with them.
In collaboration with Chiara Tomassi
Design Team: Emma Bianchi, Chi Wai Vincent Chuk
Sponsor: INTERSOS
Architect based in Milan. Previously at andreacaputo.com (2018–2025). Teaching Assistant in Architectural Design at Politecnico di Milano and Lecturer at NABA.
Architect based in Milan. Previously at andreacaputo.com (2018–2025). Teaching Assistant in Architectural Design at Politecnico di Milano and Lecturer at NABA.