Articles by Camilla Ghisleni

There is an ancestral gesture in shaping earth. Long before architecture was established as a discipline, clay was already being molded by hand and transformed by fire, turning raw matter into domestic utensils and cultural objects. Within the history of this craft, ceramic factories mark the transition from manual knowledge to serial production, expanding its scale without entirely severing its material origins. Scattered across different territories, these structures record the relationship between technique, landscape, and time. Over the decades, however, many of them lost their original function, replaced by more technological processes or absorbed by the urban development around them, entering an intermediate state between permanence and obsolescence.

In 1962, the architect Buckminster Fuller envisioned a floating city that would free humanity from its dependence on the Earth. The speculative project consisted of enormous geodesic spheres that would naturally levitate in air warmed by the sun and be anchored to mountaintops. Designed to house thousands of people, Fuller’s Cloud Nine aimed to ease land ownership pressures, address housing shortages, and contribute to environmental preservation.

Architecture can no longer be conceived as an isolated object, detached from the technical networks that sustain contemporary life — a condition that calls for new readings and approaches. It is within this context that, in March, ArchDaily’s monthly theme focused on The Technosphere, a topic both broad and inherently complex. Drawing on the concept of the technosphere, coined by geoscientist Peter Haff to describe the totality of human-made artifacts, a landscape emerges in which contemporary life is deeply intertwined with machines, data, and energy networks.

Architecture can no longer be conceived as an isolated object, detached from the technical networks that sustain contemporary life — a condition that calls for new readings and approaches. It is within this context that, in March, ArchDaily’s monthly theme focused on The Technosphere, a topic both broad and inherently complex. Drawing on the concept of the technosphere, coined by geoscientist Peter Haff to describe the totality of human-made artifacts, a landscape emerges in which contemporary life is deeply intertwined with machines, data, and energy networks.

Architecture can no longer be conceived as an isolated object, detached from the technical networks that sustain contemporary life — a condition that calls for new readings and approaches. It is within this context that, in March, ArchDaily’s monthly theme focused on The Technosphere, a topic both broad and inherently complex. Drawing on the concept of the technosphere, coined by geoscientist Peter Haff to describe the totality of human-made artifacts, a landscape emerges in which contemporary life is deeply intertwined with machines, data, and energy networks.

Architecture can no longer be conceived as an isolated object, detached from the technical networks that sustain contemporary life — a condition that calls for new readings and approaches. It is within this context that, in March, ArchDaily’s monthly theme focused on The Technosphere, a topic both broad and inherently complex. Drawing on the concept of the technosphere, coined by geoscientist Peter Haff to describe the totality of human-made artifacts, a landscape emerges in which contemporary life is deeply intertwined with machines, data, and energy networks.

Architecture can no longer be conceived as an isolated object, detached from the technical networks that sustain contemporary life — a condition that calls for new readings and approaches. It is within this context that, in March, ArchDaily’s monthly theme focused on The Technosphere, a topic both broad and inherently complex. Drawing on the concept of the technosphere, coined by geoscientist Peter Haff to describe the totality of human-made artifacts, a landscape emerges in which contemporary life is deeply intertwined with machines, data, and energy networks.

At a time when satellites orbit the planet, submarine cables sustain the global flow of data, and algorithms organize everyday life, a question emerges within architecture: at what scale are we actually designing today?

Viewpoints are structures designed for observing the landscape from elevated positions. Set within natural settings or urban environments, they act as devices that organize the gaze and establish a direct relationship between the body and the territory. At this threshold between observer and landscape, viewpoints can take on a wide range of configurations, from subtle gestures to monumental structures, always responding to their specific context. Regardless of scale, they are — to some extent — attempts to domesticate vastness: precise framings that make legible what, without mediation, might otherwise appear as excess.

Ambulance for Monuments is a first-aid initiative dedicated to safeguarding Romania‘s endangered built heritage, operating in a race against time to prevent collapse and irreversible loss. The project responds to the growing vulnerability of historic structures, from Saxon fortified churches and manor houses to wooden churches and rural landmarks, many of which no longer benefit from the community networks that once sustained them. In a country deeply affected by emigration since 1990, where nearly half the population still lives in rural areas, entire villages have lost the people, skills, and everyday care that once kept these monuments standing.