Davide Sacconi
- Associate Lecturer, ADS10 Studio Tutor
- Architecture MA Architecture (ARB/RIBA Part 2)
Davide Sacconi explores forms of buildings, cities, production and research through designs, exhibitions, books and pedagogical projects.
He is particularly interested in the political economic relationships that take place between architectural form and its modes of production, representation and use. Taking a position within this complex field of political and aesthetic relationships the architect has to take a position and rethink its role vis-à-vis the current planetary crises.
Davide graduated with honours at Università degli Studi di Roma Tre, earned his postgraduate diploma at the Berlage Institute of Rotterdam in 2011, and his PhD at the Architectural Association of London in 2022.
Davide has been teaching in UK since 2012 at the undergraduate and postgraduate level, including the MArch Urban Design at the Bartlett UCL, the BArch at University of Liverpool and the Syracuse University London Program, of which he has been the director for five years.
At the RCA he has run ADS10 since 2017. ADS10 explores the idea of a Savage Architecture: an architecture that is not merely shelter and comfort, nor display and reproduction of wealth, but rather the material and symbolic basis of mankind’s necessity to come together and engage in collective rituals. ADS10 searches for those unexpected urban conditions and collective rituals of knowledge production that, continuously surface as forms of resistance within the flow without end of urbanisation. ADS10 maintains that these practices demand a project: an architecture that could host and represent them in the public sphere as examples of another possible collective life.
More information
Practice
Davide has worked as architect and urban designer for internationally renowned offices, such as IaN+ and MVRDV, on a variety of architecture, landscape and urban design projects. His own work has been awarded in national and international competition and recently exhibited at the Seoul Biennale 2019.
He is co-founder of CAMPO, a space for architecture in Rome, for which he has curated exhibitions, taught workshops and organised events. His main works as a curator include Savage Architecture (2016), a traveling project showcased at the Architectural Association in London, the Polytechnic in Milan and the CIVA foundation in Bruxelles, and Dreams seen up close, the first monographic exhibition on the Brazilian collective Arquitetura Nova, guest of honour at the 2nd Biennale of Orleans in 2019.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
For the publisher Black Square, Davide has edited the books Interior Tales (2015), The Supreme Achievement (2016) and Savage Architecture (2016).
External collaborations
Davide has been a member of the editorial board of STOÀ, a double peer reviewed journal on architectural education, since 2021.
He also currently runs the Diploma 20 at the Architectural Association, and works as external examiner of the School of Architecture of the University of Liverpool.