Massa Lombarda, province of Ravenna, April 2021. In a field on the edge of town, two synchronised robotic arms turn for days, laying down a continuous bead of raw earth mixed with rice straw, layer upon layer, like a potter building an enormous vessel. At the end of the process, without a single brick laid by hand, two connected domes are born, just over four metres tall: TECLA, the world's first house 3D-printed entirely from local earth. It is designed by Mario Cucinella, together with the 3D-printing company WASP, and for him it is the late confirmation of an idea he has pursued for thirty years: sustainable architecture is not an accessory added to a building, it is the question the building must start from.
From Palermo to Paris, via Piano
Cucinella is born in Palermo in 1960 and graduates from the University of Genoa in 1983. From 1987 to 1992 he works at Renzo Piano's practice, first in Genoa and then at its Paris office, an experience that shapes him on internationally scaled construction sites and on an approach in which technology and environment are designed together, not in sequence. In 1992 he opens his own practice in Paris, Mario Cucinella Architects, later moved to Bologna, where its main office is today. In 2015 he founds in Bologna the SOS - School of Sustainability, an independent, tuition-free postgraduate school on sustainable design, a sign of a commitment that for Cucinella has never been only professional but also educational.
One of the first projects to bring him international notice is the Sino-Italian Ecological and Energy Efficient Building (SIEEB), on the campus of Tsinghua University in Beijing, completed in 2006: an office and research building that cuts energy consumption by 65% compared with an equivalent building built to the Chinese standards of the time, thanks to a double glass skin acting as a thermal buffer, adjustable sun louvres and an assisted natural ventilation system. It is one of the first large integrated-energy buildings built in China by a Western practice, and becomes a case study for Italian-Chinese cooperation on environmental research.
A church born from an earthquake
On September 26, 1997 an earthquake strikes Umbria and the Marche, seriously damaging the church of San Giacomo Apostolo in Foligno. Cucinella wins the reconstruction competition with a design that does not replicate the historic building, but reinterprets the idea of shelter: a compact reinforced-concrete volume, protected by an external envelope of timber slats that opens and closes like a filter between inside and out, with a geothermal system for heating and cooling and a natural shading system calibrated to the local sun path. Completed in 2009, the church becomes a frequently cited case for showing that a religious building, traditionally the most conservative in its materials, can also be a laboratory for environmental technologies.
In Africa, the One Airport Square project in Accra, Ghana (2017), tackles the opposite problem: how to cool an office building in a humid tropical climate without relying solely on air conditioning. The tower has a perforated double façade, in concrete blocks pierced with patterns inspired by traditional West African decorative motifs, which shades the glazing and lets air pass through, cutting the load on mechanical systems. It is one of the first large office buildings certified EDGE (Excellence in Design for Greater Efficiencies) in West Africa.
Building with the earth underfoot
TECLA (the name blends «technology» and «clay») starts from a question as practical as it is radical: can a house be built using only the material found on site, without transporting cement, steel or bricks from distant factories? Cucinella designs the form — two connected domes, inspired by the nests of certain insects and by ancient pottery kilns — and WASP supplies the printing technology: two synchronised Crane WASP printing arms that deposit local raw earth, mixed with rice straw for strength, in continuous layers, coordinated by software that optimises the two arms' movements and prevents collisions between them. Construction takes about 200 hours of actual printing, spread over a few weeks, and the result is a house with zero transport emissions for its structural materials, theoretically replicable almost anywhere in the world with the right earth underfoot.
The first skyscraper
In 2024 Cucinella completes in Milan, in the Porta Nuova district, his own first skyscraper: the Unipol Tower, headquarters of the Bologna-based insurance group, 124 metres tall over twenty-three floors. Built between 2017 and 2023, it has an elliptical plan wrapped in a double glass skin, with a ventilated cavity that cuts cooling needs by circulating air between the two layers like a tree exchanging heat with its surroundings. A steel lattice structure, visible on the façade, draws a diamond pattern recalling a nest, and integrates the shading systems without the need for additional sun louvres.
It is the project with which his practice, founded in Paris in 1992 and grown over thirty years mostly on schools, museums and smaller-scale offices, tests its own principles — local climate, double skin, reduced consumption — at the scale of a real skyscraper for the first time. The tower nonetheless remains an exception in Cucinella's output, as he continues to regard the retrofit of existing buildings, rather than new vertical construction, as the more effective path to reducing architecture's environmental impact: a principle he restates every year to the students of his SOS - School of Sustainability, founded in Bologna in 2015 to train professionals in an approach to sustainability that is not limited to energy certifications but considers a building's entire life cycle.