“EVERYONE KNOWS THAT THE SOUTH BEGINS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF AVENIDA RIVADAVIA. DAHLMANN HAD OFTEN SAID THAT THAT WAS NO MERE SAYING, THAT BY CROSSING RIVADAVIA ONE ENTERED AN OLDER AND MORE STABLE WORLD.”
"EL SUR", JORGE LUIS BORGES
Reading this book from the outside — from the south of another south, from an architecture that also practices scarcity without having entirely chosen it — produces a productive recognition. These projects feel familiar to me in a way I cannot fully explain, and that familiarity is what obliges me to read them with more care than admiration alone would require. What I will attempt here is not evaluation.
It is reading.
Reading in the most demanding sense: searching for what the book makes possible without naming, and for what its structure produces beyond its declared intentions.
I. THE DEEP STRUCTURE:
A SYSTEM OF TRANSFORMATIONS
If we take four of the laboratory projects as a corpus — MogoroLab, Doors of Identity, OraniLab, SelegasLab — and arrange them not chronologically but morphologically, a structure emerges that no individual project exhibits in full but that all of them share.
It is a grammar: a set of transformation rules that generates variants from invariants.
The invariant is this: a porous enclosure, built from standard-section timber, that divides a public space without closing it, situated in a small-scale Sardinian territory, produced by collective student labour, and destined for ephemeral or semi-permanent use.
The transformations are the projects.
MogoroLab operates the horizontal
variant: the ground activates, platforms and pallets create a low topography, the space reads from above as an urban mat. OraniLab operates the vertical variant: the wall of boards rises, filters light, lets vegetation pass between its ribs, makes the boundary into a garden.
SelegasLab operates the oblique variant: the staircase becomes a belvedere, the counter converts into a threshold between plaza and view, the diagonal cut of the ensemble
generates a space that is neither interior nor exterior.
Doors of Identity operates the interior variant: the same constructive system is introduced into a historic vaulted interior in Cagliari and produces rooms within the room, identities within identity.
These four variants are not four distinct projects. They are four positions within the same system. The group does not experiment freely — it experiments within a grammar it has collectively built over ten years, and that grammar is its true achievement. Not the form of each project but the system that makes them all possible. This system has a clear binary logic. Each project works with oppositions it does not resolve but holds in productive tension: inside/outside, permanent/ephemeral,
built/natural, serial/unique, simple/complex. The manifesto enumerates them — serial but unique, simple is complex, poor but beautiful — as if the programme were to sustain contradiction without collapsing either of its poles.
This is the idea applied to pedagogy:
difference as engine, not as problem.
II. THE PEDAGOGICAL ACHIEVEMENT:
A TRANSMISSIBLE GRAMMAR
A grammar so coherent across ten years and dozens of projects is not built by chance.
The names that fill the lists at the end of each project – Giulia Cambatzu, Vladimir Karanevich, Elisa Firinu, Gloria Putzu, Melissa Sebberu, and many more – are the hands that gave the grammar its successive lives. They did not invent the system. They received it.
And the rarity of the achievement is precisely there.
A grammar that hundreds of hands can inhabit without it collapsing into formula is almost a miracle of teaching. Most pedagogical systems either constrain the student so tightly that nothing of their own remains in the work or release them so completely that no shared language ever forms.
Unica Space Force has found the narrow middle: a structure firm enough to be recognised across projects, porous enough to admit a different hand each time. The book documents the structure because the structure is what is teachable.
What each student brings to the encounter — the moment of doubt at the saw, the negotiation with a board that warped, the
decision made on the building site that no drawing had predicted – that remains with them.
There is a kind of knowledge – Aristotle called it phronesis, practical prudence – that cannot be acquired from books or in lecture halls, but only through direct engagement with things. A knowledge that presupposes having been put to the test. That is what the workshop transmits, and what the book by its nature cannot. It travels in the body of the architect the student is becoming.
III. THE MATERIAL AS TEACHER:
WHAT TIMBER KNOWS
The parts lists in the technical drawings – uprights: 2 at 4.00m; boards: 22 at 3.00m; from offcuts – contain the first lesson of the workshop.
From offcuts: from wood left over from another cut, another project, another economy. The student learns immediately that no material arrives neutral. Each board carries the
biography of an earlier intention. Architecture, here, is not invention from nothing – it is conversation with what was already cut. That is a profound piece of knowledge to transmit, and the parts list transmits it in three words.
Timber, the material, has its own intelligence. It has weight, temperature, smell, a tendency to swell with humidity and crack in the sun. It resists. And the grammar of Unica Space Force is designed to listen to that resistance, not to overcome it.
The student who has worked on this project has learned, with their hands, what no theoretical seminar can teach: that the best architecture leaves room for what it did not anticipate.
IV. THE TERRITORY AS INTERLOCUTOR:
SARDINIA AS CLASSROOM
The projects take place in Mogoro, Orani, Selegas, in squares and parks of inland Sardinian villages.
The territory is not background.
It is interlocutor.
The Nuragic archaeology, the rural landscape, the local cultural identity: all of this is already speaking when the project arrives.
When SelegasLab installs its timber structure in the village square, an encounter takes place between two grammars: the one the group has built at the university, and the one the territory has built over centuries.
The encounter is the curriculum.
The student learns there what no classroom can transmit: that architecture is a guest, that architecture always arrives at a place that is already speaking, and that the architect’s first task is to listen, to become a translator.
What the photographs show as integration is not concealment of conflict. It is the trace of that apprenticeship in listening. The conflict is
real – every meeting of grammars produces friction – but the friction has been worked through, on site, hand by hand, until the new and the existing find a way to share a sentence.
That working-through is the most valuable thing the workshop transmits, and it is necessarily invisible in the finished image because it lives in the bodies of those who did it.
V. THE GRAMMAR AS GYMNASTIC
A grammar transmitted is not a grammar imposed forever. It is gymnastic: an apparatus the body uses until it no longer needs it.
The students who pass through MogoroLab, OraniLab, SelegasLab learn a precise system – porous enclosures, standard timber sections, oppositions held in tension — and they learn it with their hands, which is the only way a grammar is ever truly learned.
But what they learn is not the grammar itself. What they learn is what a grammar is: a coherent set of rules that produces a world. That distinction is everything.
Tomorrow these students will be architects. They will face budgets that do not permit porous enclosures, clients who do not want them, materials that are not standard timber sections but whatever the truck delivered, sites that are not Sardinian squares but parking lots, infill plots, awkward geometries. At that moment they will be able to ask the question the school prepared them to ask: is the grammar I learned the only possible grammar, or could reality – with its costs, its commissions, its materials at hand – assemble another grammar, no less coherent, no less generative?
Only an architect who has internalised one grammar can recognise another as a grammar at all. Without that prior training, reality appears as chaos. With it, reality appears as what it is: a different system of rules, equally rigorous, that admits different invariants and authorises different transformations. Read in this light, the pedagogy of Unica Space Force is not the transmission of formal rules. It is the construction of the capacity to recognise formal rules as such – and therefore to choose it, abandon it, or rebuild it from another set of constraints.
This is the most demanding form of teaching: to give the student a grammar so coherent that, years later, they will be capable of leaving it behind without confusing departure with ignorance.
The structure Unica Space Force has built over ten years is real, coherent, generative in the most precise sense of the term: it produces more than it contains. Its openings are not defects – they are the places where the next version will begin to grow.
PUNTA DE LOBOS, MAY 2026