Associates is an architectural office based in Brescia, founded in 2017, and directed by the Italian - South African duo composed by Nicolò Galeazzi (Brescia, 1987) and Martina Salvaneschi (Johannesburg, 1989). The office works in the field of architecture in multiple scales and currently has carried out projects in Italy, Mexico and Portugal. Since 2017 the office was invited to give lectures in the main Italian architecture Universities and was also invited, as visiting professor, by Casa Da Arquitectura in partnership with Porto Academy in Porto, Portugal, and by Goa College of Architecture in Goa, India. In 2018 Associates received the prestigious nominations for the Medaglia d’Oro all’Architettura Italiana - Premio T Young Claudio De Albertis at the Triennale di Milano, for the Eu Mies Van Der Rohe Awards (the youngest of 17 selected Italian architectural firms) and for the Piranesi Award. In the same year the office won the Big See Wood Award, awarded in Ljubljana, in the City and Community section. In 2018-2019 the office was also invited to participate to the 16th Venice Architectural Biennial in the Italian pavilion Arcipelago Italia, to the 12a São Paulo Architecture Biennial Todo dia and to the 5th Lisbon Architecture Triennial in the exhibition Economy of Means.
Office profile
The office is conceived as a laboratory where practice meets architecture and craftmanship. We work with our collaborators through a process that we could define "archaeological" and that aims to investigate the primary and primitive idea of things, starting from understanding the place and the cultural context in which we are called to operate through the collection of visual, textual and material data. The process subsequently moves through a patient work in which these contributions intertwine with the first drawings and with the creation of multi-scale models through which we investigate the material, the spatial and formal possibilities of an architecture that we want to be the bearer of memory and identity of the place where we operate.