Architensions

Architensions (ATE) is an architectural design studio operating as an agency of research led by Alessandro Orsini and Nick Roseboro and based in New York & Rome. The studio was founded in 2010 as a vehicle to investigate the city and its spatial form and was re-founded in 2013 with Nick Roseboro. Diverse in backgrounds and creative experience, the studio looks at architecture, design, and the city with a perspective rooted in site-specificity enabling us to explore new ways to connect history and culture.
Architensions works at the intersection of theory, practice, and academia, focusing on architecture as a network condition in continuous dialogue with the political and social context and aiming to create new possibilities for the contemporary city. Our search for an aesthetic is an ever-changing process grounded in drawings, collages, sketches, and models. We like discrete geometries and grids, but we constantly seek new interpretations of their spatial outcomes. Researching and teaching for us is a mode of practice, not just in the academic space but also in the studio. We believe in a pedagogical approach to practice: we design and we learn at the same time. We expand our practice through writing to critically connect the ontology of our work with the discourse and curate to index the diverse architectural trajectories of our time. We see design as a way to define fields of action for the built environment that reconnect urbanism and architecture through processes that promote inclusivity and challenge the paradigm of architecture as a financial tool.
Our work and research have been published in international magazines such as Domus, Frame, Wallpaper, Architectural Digest, and exhibited at the Casa dell’Architettura in Rome, the Van Alen Institute, The Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Center for Architecture, and the Java Project Gallery in New York. In 2015, Libria published the volume Forma Urbana, focusing on studio research through a selection of projects and writings. Architensions was commissioned to design a large public installation for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival 2022. In addition, the studio was profiled as the Next Progressives in Architect Magazine in September 2020, and in 2021, Cultured Magazine selected Architensions as part of their inaugural young architects list.