The architectural practice of Balsa Crosetto Piazzi began in Córdoba, Argentina, in 2015. This inland city is also where Juan Manuel Balsa, Rocío Crosetto Brizzio, and Leandro Piazzi first crossed paths, as undergraduate students at a local university. Those early encounters have since evolved into something of an intercontinental practice, in which each principal currently teaches at a different North American university—RISD, MIT, and Virginia Tech, respectively—while continuing to realize projects through their office of five in South America. Navigating these dispersed geographies is now central to the firm’s identity, contributing to what Crosetto describes as “a strong reciprocity” between academic inquiry and professional production. Ideas from the classroom influence practice and vice versa, and their work spans settings from rural Argentina to Chicago’s South Side. “What links them all,” Piazzi notes, “is an attitude grounded in common sense: thinking and building in ways that resonate with place, no matter the location.”

The practicality to which Piazzi, 40, refers is evident in the firm’s material choices. Balsa Crosetto Piazzi has developed a reputation for designing brick houses around Córdoba—minimalist structures with maximum impact. Three Courtyards House (2021) and Long House (2023) exemplify this approach. Simple yet striking in their geometric clarity, these projects use recessed mortar joints to emphasize horizontal courses. The buildings’ mass, punctured by precisely placed apertures, allows proportion and light to define the work.

Brick is not a stylistic preference but what Crosetto, 35, calls a “noble material,” deeply embedded in the region’s history and culture. “Ninety percent of the construction know-how in Córdoba involves brick,” Balsa, 37, explains. For nearly 500 years, fired brick—handcrafted from local soil—has characterized the built fabric, owing to its availability, affordability, thermal suitability, and the presence of skilled masons. To build in brick, then, is to participate in an existing ecosystem of knowledge and labor. “It’s about understanding the possibilities of where we build in terms of techniques, materials, resources, and people,” says Piazzi.

This logic has guided the firm since its first commission, Pavilion IX BIAU (2015), a winning competition entry for the ninth Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism in Rosario, Argentina. There, the architects paired bold geometry with a materially spare strategy: modular scaffolding. Lightweight and easily assembled and dismantled, the structure embodied its transience and waterfront setting, underscoring the firm’s commitment to appropriateness. This same pragmatic intelligence shaped Traces (2025), their installation at the sixth Chicago Biennial, which deployed 10,000 dry-stacked bricks to outline temporary buildings that once occupied the site during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, transforming memory into a provisional presence.

Far from a signature aesthetic, what emerges across these varied works is a disciplined sensibility that treats material, climate, labor, and context as generative constraints. Whether working in fired clay or rented tubular steel, Balsa Crosetto Piazzi approaches construction as calibration, a negotiation between local knowledge and transnational exchange. In an era when architectural identity is often equated with visual consistency, their practice offers a quieter proposition: that coherence can arise from method rather than form, and that commitment to place can produce architecture of lasting resonance.