pfc. is an international partnership practicing design, architecture, urbanism, and cultural analysis. It was established in Milan in 2001 challenging clients and authorities to ensure that good design is valued economically, socially and environmentally. Activities include undertaking professional services, research, publishing, and holding lectures. pfc consultants’ team has been selected for high skills and experience of each member. They work closely with academics so as to produce high-quality, rigorous research that will be widely disseminated as well as to help define and then deliver to our client the best long-term solution for their organisation, one that will fulfil all the original aims and requirements of the project. Our practice is committed to design excellence and customer service. Design is research, Architecture is a political issue. Both affect people’s lives: how we live, how our children are taught, how we are treated when we are ill and the quality of our neighbourhoods. In history every human settlement has always had a peculiarity of its own. Maybe it was the slow pace of realization that brought with it a spatial intention, high, radical, and naïve: human settlements had to respond to common and recognized feelings and were meant to cross several generations. Therefore the challenge that urban designers have to face at present is the search of a new urban balance between single unrelated buildings and the need to give form to places by bringing the multiplicity to a whole. The singularity of volumes and spaces has to be reconsidered within a continuous urban texture: the attention to common space and its form is the key that will overcome the present incoherence of contemporary human settlements. pfc intends to operate in this frame of ideas, taking advantage of the different cultures of its members in order to reach a optimal integration of cultural patterns and therefore a specific ability in answering to the over mentioned challenge.