Architensions

Architensions (ATE) is an international architectural design studio operating as an agency of research led by Alessandro Orsini and Nick Roseboro and based in New York & Rome. The studio was founded in 2013 to investigate the city and its spatial form. The studio looks at architecture, design, and the city with a perspective rooted in site-specificity, enabling us to explore new ways to connect history and culture. The studio works at the intersection of theory, practice, and academia, focusing on architecture’s political, social, and environmental spatial networks with specific interests in the commons and the definition of new modes of collective living. Our search for an aesthetic is an ever-changing process grounded in drawings, collages, sketches, and models. We like discrete geometries and grids, constantly seeking new interpretations of their spatial outcomes. Our practice and research are intertwined with teaching, fostering a pedagogical approach to practice and collaborations outside the studio. We expand our collaborative modes of inquiry from designing to writing and drawing to respond to new definitions of ecologies and spatial ontologies that promote inclusivity and challenge the traditional architecture paradigm. The studio seeks to define fields of actions for the built environment reconnecting urbanism and architecture through spaces capable of establishing a narrative within the city and opposing the paradigm of architecture as a financial tool. Our work and research have been published and exhibited internationally at the “Casa dell’Architettura” in Rome, the Van Alen Institute, The Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Center for Architecture, and the Java Project Gallery in New York. In 2015 Libria published the volume “Forma Urbana” a focus on Architensions’ research on the fifth dimension of architecture, the experience.