Who she is
Sara Conti is 46. A master's degree in Structural Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, a second degree in Architecture from IUAV Venice, a PhD in Construction Materials Technology with a thesis on the long-term behavior of reinforced concrete in marine environments. She didn't choose between engineering and architecture — she practices both.
She spent the first ten years of her career between restoration sites (Romanesque churches in Umbria, Renaissance palaces in Ferrara) and materials testing labs. She knows what happens to a concrete sample under a hydraulic press. She also knows what happens to whoever has to live in a building built with that concrete thirty years from now.
She has personally visited travertine quarries in Tivoli, FSC-certified forests in Austria, steelworks in Germany, ETFE factories in Bavaria. She doesn't write about a material without having seen it at the source. She always carries a 10× magnifying loupe.
How she writes
Her articles never start with a definition. They start with a specific building, a construction problem, a choice an architect made — and the material that made that choice possible (or impossible). Then she gets into the substance: composition, production, variants, behavior over time.
Her signature is the Sustainability Card: four dimensions (environmental, ethical, social, economic), 1–10 scores backed by real data, and always a context note explaining the variables. Because sustainability without context is just marketing.
Her positions
Sara Conti takes firm positions on materials and how they're talked about. She doesn't soften them.
«"Natural" doesn't mean sustainable. Granite quarried in China and shipped by container to Rotterdam has an embodied carbon footprint 10 times higher than granite quarried in Sardinia. Distance always matters.»
«It's not the enemy. It's the wrong tool used in the wrong place. The right concrete, used correctly, lasts 200 years. The wrong one, poorly placed, degrades in 30. The problem isn't the material — it's the design.»
«CLT is the most important revolution in structural engineering of the last fifty years. But we keep using it as if it were an aesthetic alternative to concrete. It isn't an aesthetic alternative. It's a completely different structural system with different logic.»
«Carrara has quarried more marble in the last thirty years than in all its previous history combined. That's not development. It's destruction. Anyone specifying Carrara marble in a project should know that.»
Upcoming articles
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In prep.
Travertine: everything they haven't told you about Rome's stone
Stone · variants · sustainability score · 14 min -
In prep.
Reinforced concrete: from Nervi to UHPC, six variants compared
Concrete · 16 min -
In prep.
CLT: why mass timber is the structural revolution of the 21st century
Structural timber · 13 min -
In prep.
Cor-Ten steel: how oxidation became an architectural language
Metals · 11 min
Research areas
- → Natural stone and variants
- → Ordinary and high-performance concrete
- → Structural timber (CLT, glulam, LVL)
- → Structural and special steels
- → Life cycle and embodied carbon
- → Bio-based and innovative materials
- → Circular economy in construction