Two seated on either side with the third standing between them, the architects receive me in perfect geometric formation against the pristine white backdrop of their Roman studio. There is also a fourth human presence: little Stefano, just a few months old, who joins the conversation with the occasional soft coo and turns the scene into a curious contemporary Nativity. Or, in a different light, into a graceful allegory of the architectural profession: three designers tending to the future.

Marco Provinciali, Benjamin Gallegos Gabilondo, and Anna Livia Friel—each born in 1988 but in diverse places (Rome; Santiago, Chile; and Vicenza, Italy, respectively)—lead Supervoid. Since 2016, the office has emerged through projects that are modest in scale but precise in expressing a generational tension. On the one hand, the oeuvre demonstrates deep awareness of the historical context in which architects, particularly in Italy, often find themselves working. On the other, it articulates a transformative impulse arising from the recognition that something in our world is not quite working and therefore must be recalibrated.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the three first met as students in Venice, ensconced among Palladio and excessive tourism. Yet the lessons of the lagoon have been applied first and foremost to Rome. One of their earliest projects unfolded in the ancient Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, where, while renovating an apartment (2017), they staged a dialogue between past and present that would become a defining trait of their work. By inserting a vaulted backlit ceiling that echoes, without replicating, the original room, a new spatial condition is born—what the principals call a supervoid.

At the core of their projects, they explain, lies the idea of “abstract and simplified synthesis as a tool for creating spatial relationships and detaching from the materiality already in place.” Pure geometry is thus paired with industrial elements, vivid colors, and reflective surfaces to produce estranged contrasts and activated spaces. Color is the dominant motif in a farm complex (2022) in the Roman countryside, where different shades of red—traditional brick, painted steel, and translucent PVC—bring tradition and its adaptation into dialogue. Gridded metal panels—used as wall cladding, furniture, and chandeliers—define the grocery store Pizzicarola (2022), with blue accents on exposed concrete. Elsewhere in Rome, aluminum sheets reflect and distort surfaces in the San Saba Apartment (2024, with Adamo-Faiden), and in several set designs. Their honorable mention–winning competition proposal for the archaeological promenade of the imperial forums (2023, with Baukuh and l’AUC) stated their attitude toward the past: “responsibility and freedom, not reverence.”

Their practice now extends well beyond the Eternal City. In Cessy, France, at the Château des Cologny, Supervoid worked on the contrast between the imposing 17th-century timber structure and new volumes clad in anodized aluminum and mirrored partitions. In New York City they designed the Eleuteri jewelry store on 69th Street, and new projects are under way in Latin America.

Even if unbuilt, their school projects, envisioned for Sardinia and Tuscany, deserve mention. Unfolding around a circular plan, they embody the idea of a public, transparent, and open school in which “the surrounding urban and natural landscape becomes a didactic resource” through roof gardens and facades conceived as climatic devices and spaces of learning. Young Stefano does not know it yet, but this all concerns him.