The construction of Moroni Architettura‘s RAW Studio in Sondrio did not end when the worksite was cleared — it ended when the architects decided the worksite was the room. The storage room conversion transforms a former storage space into a working architecture studio, retaining raw plaster that carries the visible traces of electrical routing, pipe connections, and structural scarring as its deliberate and permanent surface finish. Stone, iron, wood, and perforated concrete blocks complete a material inventory in which every element is either left in its industrial state or repurposed from its structural function into furniture — without concealing where it came from.
The decision to expose rather than conceal the construction process is not an aesthetic preference — it is a position. The walls of RAW Studio document the sequence of interventions that produced them: the channels cut for electrical conduit, the patches left by plumbing connections, the joints between old and new material. What would conventionally be read as incomplete or unresolved is here reframed as a construction record, a surface that carries the building’s own biography. The worksite, typically a transient condition, has been elevated to permanent architectural language.
The conversion of a storage room into a professional studio in Sondrio is itself a material argument. The existing envelope — industrial, imprecise, accumulative — becomes the starting condition rather than a problem to be resolved. Moroni Architettura works with that condition rather than against it, allowing the space’s previous life to remain legible in the walls, floor, and structure. The result is not a renovation in the conventional sense but a reframing: a room that has been edited rather than rebuilt, and whose authority derives precisely from what was not removed.
A sharp black diagonal redefines the volumes of the back wall, dividing the raw inhabited surface from a darker, more contained shell. At the center of this geometric intervention sits a monumental antique solid wood door — a found object that functions as the room’s pivot, simultaneously a working threshold and a sculptural presence. The contrast between the incised geometry of the painted diagonal and the worn mass of the reclaimed door produces a temporal collision: the precision of a contemporary design decision set against an object that predates the studio by decades.
The furniture program extends the material honesty of the walls into the objects that occupy the room. Perforated concrete blocks — standard structural components from the vocabulary of heavy construction — are reassembled dry into geometric seating and shelf surfaces along the window openings. No adhesive, no cladding, no transformation of surface: the blocks read as what they are, repositioned from their structural role into a domestic one without losing the industrial identity that makes them legible. The approach recalls the material logic pursued in Extrarradio’s Estudio Zissou in Madrid, where a single dominant furniture element anchors the spatial and conceptual identity of a design studio.
The iron table is the room’s central object. A monolithic piece designed and built by the studio, its surface carries the brushed, industrial finish of bent sheet metal — no applied coating, no softening of the material’s character. The table does not attempt to reconcile its industrial origin with the domestic scale of the room; it insists on the tension between them. At this scale and with this finish, a custom table becomes a manifesto object: the studio’s position on materiality stated in iron before a word is spoken.
The welded reinforcement mesh — standard rebar grid typically buried inside concrete — has been left to oxidize naturally and repositioned as a display surface for architectural models, maps, and drawings. The transformation is minimal: the mesh has not been painted, treated, or reframed. Its new function makes its former structural role visible rather than obscuring it. A material that exists to be hidden inside concrete is here placed at the front of the room, holding the work of an architecture practice in full view. The logic echoes the broader proposition of Zyva Studio’s Artus office in Paris, where a design studio’s own workspace becomes a direct expression of its design philosophy.
The rigour of the material palette is calibrated rather than absolute. A red vertical radiator, colored fabric on the bench, a vintage motorcycle, and timber logs used as seating introduce warmth and narrative without undermining the industrial interior design register of the space. These objects do not contradict the rawness of the room — they confirm that rawness as a considered choice rather than a constraint. A studio that could not afford better finishes would not also contain a vintage motorcycle and commissioned graphics. The combination of austerity and specificity is deliberate.
RAW Studio makes an argument about what an architecture studio’s interior should communicate. The conventional approach — a clean, neutral space that defers to the work displayed within it — proceeds from the assumption that the container should disappear behind its contents. Moroni Architettura takes the opposite position: the studio itself is a built manifesto, its every surface a statement about the practice’s relationship to material honesty, process, and structural truth. Whether a space this specific to one studio’s identity can function as a productive working environment over time, or whether the didactic intensity of its surfaces eventually exhausts the people working inside them, is the question the project leaves open.
RAW Studio by Moroni Architettura | Location: Sondrio, Italy — Year: 2026 — Key materials: raw plaster, stone, iron, perforated concrete blocks, welded steel mesh, reclaimed solid wood