WORK IN PROGRESS

On adaptive reuse, AMAA, and the rules of intervention

Happy Sunday — just got back from New Orleans, where I stayed at Hotel Saint Vincent, a former infant asylum from 1861. Full writeup coming soon.

A few new additions to the archive this week — Vipp’s Upstate Shelter, a hospitality-inspired coworking space in London, and a new hotel in Berlin.

This week, I’m pulling a project from the archive to look at what AMAA calls non-finito — unfinished.

In a 2021 lecture to students in the Syracuse Architecture program, the cofounders describe their process less as designing and more as uncovering. It’s a trap, they argue, to rely on drawings as a final truth. Spend enough time peeling back layers, reading traces, and the building begins to show you what it wants.

Caffè Nazionale is set inside the 19th-century town hall of Arzignano, the ideal place to build around a philosophy like AMAA’s. Unlike its more preserved neighbors, Arzignano has been shaped by 20th-century industry, uneven growth, and layers of history stretching back to the Neolithic. There’s no single dominant narrative to defer to, no obvious “correct” version of the building to restore toward. Its identity is exactly what AMAA works with.

There's an inherent temporality in this kind of intervention. To reveal the patina — to expose those layers — is to acknowledge that the building isn’t finished. Not now, not ever. Life goes on.

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Furniture borrows from the everyday. Referencing New York subway benches and Donald Judd, it folds familiar forms back into a space already shaped by time.

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Each room unfolds like a set, a self-contained theatrical moment, rather than part of a single resolved whole

Images are not the end state, but part of the work itself — a way of tracing the building as it continues to unfold

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We’re planning trips to Japan, Mexico City, London, LA, New York, and Palm Springs — concierge@linear-magazine.com