About the studio
Founded in Paris by Antonio Virga in the early 2000s, the studio now brings together around fifteen architects. Its founder embraces a generalist approach rooted in his italian cultural heritage, taking him “from the spoon to the city,” in the words of Gio Ponti. He nurtures this openness by working across a broad spectrum of programmes and contexts, developing a comprehensive approach that brings together different scales, from the intimate to the territorial.
Through public facilities and housing, mixed-use programmes and interior design, Antonio Virga champions the timeless elegance of the right gesture, placing comfort and quality of use at the heart of his work.
elegance
What first stands out when discovering Antonio Virga’s architecture is the delicacy of its architectural language. Through it, the architect demonstrates how an attentiveness to places and uses can give rise to an aesthetic of harmony.
timeless contemporaneity
Antonio Virga grounds his architecture in a close attention to places, to their identity as revealed through their memory and materiality. His buildings find their place within existing contexts with a sense of precision and appropriateness. Their discretion and restraint stem from a strong desire to recognise what is already there and to blend into the ordinary, while enhancing its latent qualities.
His architectural language does not seek to be shaped by time, but rather strives to contribute, quietly and without fanfare, to a narrative that precedes and transcends it. In this sense, Antonio Virga’s architecture embodies a timeless contemporaneity.
From this emerges a certain grace: the discretion and humility of an architecture in the face of something that transcends it - the elegance of the timeless.
poetry of the ordinary
Antonio Virga grounds his architecture in close attention to the ways spaces are used and to the quality of the spaces that accommodate them. Attentive to the needs and desires of future users, he places functionality and ergonomics at the forefront of his designs, drawing on his italian cultural heritage and his experience in design.
Beyond this concern for comfort and quality of use, he engages with the programmes and places entrusted to him to create sensory experiences and evoke emotions. He thus imbues his architecture with evocative qualities, composing with light and material, colours and scents, sounds and silences, to create a deeply sensual architecture.
Antonio Virga also creates fertile spaces, open to possibilities and open to interpretation by their users. These spaces invite spontaneous appropriation, the unexpected, even the improbable… They encourage proximity, encounters and sharing. Antonio Virga creates settings for life, enhancing the qualities of use of both intimate and shared spaces.
From this emerges a certain grace: a generous and poetic aesthetic of everyday life — the elegance of the ordinary.
the art of the bespoke
From this attention to places and uses can emerge the right gesture. Each building and each intervention derives its relevance and precision from a sincere understanding of what already exists, as well as from experience. Antonio Virga embraces a bespoke approach, whether for the exceptional or the ordinary.
Sensitive to harmony and simultaneity, Antonio Virga champions an aesthetic of balance, carefully attending to the equilibrium of his compositions, their proportions, and the harmonious pairing of elements.
His gesture is precise and controlled. Every detail matters: the pattern of a layout, the thickness of a handrail, or the head of a screw... Each detail contributes to the balance of the spaces and to the harmony of the whole.
Precision also lies in the economy of the gesture and the restraint of the architectural language. He distils, simplifies and unifies. His architecture thus possesses a restrained expressiveness of forms and materials.
This rigour is driven by a desire to simplify the reading of spaces and their functions, making them legible and facilitating their appropriation.
From this emerges a certain grace: that of harmony and simplicity - the elegance of precision.
