{"id":34846,"date":"2026-11-05T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.archieinteriors.com\/?p=34846"},"modified":"2026-11-06T09:46:39","modified_gmt":"2026-11-06T08:46:39","slug":"best-architecture-studios-in-bergamo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.archieinteriors.com\/en\/best-architecture-studios-in-bergamo\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Architecture Studios in Bergamo: 9 Names to Know between Citt\u00e0 Alta, the Valleys and the Plain"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the sunken squares of the Piacentini centre to a stadium that opens up to its neighbourhood, from houses in the Val Seriana to industrial spaces brought back to life: 9 architecture studios in Bergamo working between Citt\u00e0 Alta, the valleys and the plain, across restoration, public space and a culture of reuse.<\/em><\/p>\n

Bergamo is best understood in section rather than in plan. At the top stands Citt\u00e0 Alta, enclosed within its Venetian walls; at its feet the lower city spreads out towards the plain; behind it lie the valleys, the Seriana and the Brembana, with their villages and their mills. Since 2017 the walls have been part of the Venetian Works of Defence between the 16th and 17th Centuries<\/a>, a transnational UNESCO site that Italy shares with Croatia and Montenegro and that brings together six components: the Bergamo component, the fortified city, covers some one hundred and twenty hectares. It is perhaps the first lesson for anyone looking at architecture studios in Bergamo<\/strong>. Here every project has to reckon with a change in level, a bastion to respect, an underground to bring back to light.<\/p>\n

The twentieth century added further layers. In the lower city lies the centre designed by Marcello Piacentini, with its squares and porticoes, which has returned to the heart of the debate thanks to a major regeneration project. In the 1960s Bergamo went through a season that Domus described as legendary, when architects such as Francesco Ginoulhiac, Giuseppe Gambirasio and Vito Sonzogni modernised its face. In those same years, between 1961 and 1965, Pino Pizzigoni built the church of Maria Santissima Immacolata in Longuelo, with hyperbolic paraboloid vaults in reinforced concrete just six centimetres thick: one of the most surprising religious buildings of post-war Italy.<\/p>\n

The present has its strong signs too. On the edge of the city, in Stezzano, the Kilometro Rosso science and technology park grew up on the former Brembo site and is recognisable by Jean Nouvel’s red wall, one kilometre long and ten metres high. The extension of the Accademia Carrara by Antonio Ravalli Architetti, completed in 2024, won the Premio Italiano di Architettura 2025. And GAMeC, the gallery of modern and contemporary art, is preparing to move into the former Palazzetto dello Sport redesigned by C+S Architects, the studio whose Noah’s Ark nursery school in Alzano Lombardo<\/a> we have written about: with works under way since 2023, the museum’s floor area will grow from around 2,200 to just under 6,000 square metres. In 2023, together with Brescia, Bergamo was Italian Capital of Culture.<\/p>\n

The contemporary scene moves on three fronts. There is heritage, from the halls of historic palazzi to the medieval towers of the province and the industrial archaeology of the valleys, where the project almost always coincides with a restoration or a change of use. There is public space, which in recent years has turned squares, lakefronts and even the stadium into places to be crossed. And there is the home, from villas on the hills to horizontal houses on the plain, down to interiors built with the stone and the craftsmen of the territory.<\/p>\n

This selection brings together 9 architecture studios based in Bergamo or its province<\/strong>. It is not a ranking, and the order does not assign positions of merit. It is an editorial reading of the Bergamo scene through studios that differ in generation, size and field of work: from practices active since the 1990s to those founded after 2010, from major urban transformations to interiors, from the city to the valleys.<\/p>\n

How we chose the architecture studios in Bergamo<\/h2>\n

As with the other cities in the series, the selection is not based on turnover or on the size of the studios, but on the quality and continuity of their design research<\/strong>. We considered built and documented projects, the recognisability of each studio’s language, the ability to work with existing buildings and the contribution to the quality of public space, in a city where the relationship with history is part of every commission.<\/p>\n

The editorial team also took into account each studio’s presence in the professional debate, through publications in Italian and international magazines, awards, competitions and consistent communication of their work. We preferred a shorter, stronger selection to a long list: Bergamo has a compact scene, and nine studios are enough to convey its variety, from restoration to product design. Some are based in the city, others in the province, between Albino, Vertova, Curno and Orio al Serio, because in Bergamo the line between city and territory is thinner than elsewhere. No studio has paid to be included in this list.<\/p>\n

The best architecture studios in Bergamo: 9 names to know<\/h2>\n

CN10 Architetti<\/h3>\n

Born in Bergamo in 1967, Gianluca Gelmini<\/strong> graduated from the Politecnico di Milano in 1996, completed a PhD in Architectural Composition at IUAV and specialised in the restoration of monuments. He has taught at the Politecnico, the University of Parma and the Accademia di Mendrisio, has written monographs on Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto and co-edited the catalogue Pino Pizzigoni. Sei sedie e un tavolo. In 2004 he founded CN10 Architetti, which today works between Viale Vittorio Emanuele II in Bergamo and Sotto il Monte Giovanni XXIII, on design and restoration at different scales.<\/p>\n

The studio’s most visible work is the regeneration of the Piacentini centre, born from the competition won by the Fl\u00e2nerie group led by Gelmini. Works began in January 2020 and were completed in 2023; in the summer of 2026 ArchDaily published the project with photographs by Giacomo Albo. The boldest gesture is in Piazza Dante: a sunken circular square, with a staircase some thirteen metres in diameter, brings light back into the former underground Albergo Diurno. Around the Donizetti monument an elliptical basin in white cement has been designed, the paths are in porphyry setts and an illuminated metal grid hosts the market in Largo Belotti. The declared principle was not to introduce new materials, working with decorative concrete, brushed steel, ceppo stone and granite.<\/p>\n

Restoration remains at the heart of the practice. In 2017 the studio designed the new layout of the Sala delle Capriate in the Palazzo della Ragione, five hundred square metres in the heart of Citt\u00e0 Alta. In Villa d’Adda it turned a medieval tower, the Torre del Borgo, into the civic library, with ramps and walkways supported by an all-iron structure, a project published by the German magazine Baumeister. Among the most recent works is the restoration of the rooms on the piano nobile of Palazzo Furietti Carrara in Presezzo, dating from 2025.<\/p>\n

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De8 Architetti<\/h3>\n

Founded in Milan in the early 1990s by Mauro Piantelli, Carlo Vailati and Massimo Bressanelli<\/strong>, all graduates of the Politecnico, together with partner Cristian Sangaletti, De8 Architetti later moved to the Bergamo area and is now based in Orio al Serio. Its motto, architecture without boundaries of scale or type, sums up a career that ranges from spas to art spaces, from lakefronts to stadiums. The studio won the eighth edition of Europan with two projects, in Bergamo and in Kemi, and in 2011 was nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award.<\/p>\n

The project that brought it to a wider public is the transformation of Atalanta’s stadium, which the studio now refers to as the New Balance Arena. Between 2020 and 2025, with SCE Project, De8 rethought the ground first built in 1928 over some forty-nine thousand square metres, keeping the historic fa\u00e7ades on Viale Giulio Cesare. The guiding idea is the shift from boundary to edge: the stadium stops being an enclosure and becomes a porous, accessible urban space, with a square that Domus, in 2024, put at more than six thousand square metres. The project was a finalist at The Plan Award 2025 in the Renovation category and was shown at MAXXI in Rome in the exhibition devoted to stadiums.<\/p>\n

In the city the studio also designed GRES Art 671, the art space promoted by Fondazione Pesenti and Italmobiliare: three thousand square metres with a six-hundred-square-metre garden designed with landscape architect Laura Gatti, a golden metal fa\u00e7ade and a ramp that pays homage to the oblique function theorised by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio. The project, the studio writes, moves in the opposite direction to the tabula rasa. On Lake Iseo, in Lovere, the Verso l’acqua lakefront, built between 2012 and 2015, opened two sunken squares at water level, where, as the designers explain, the lake can be touched; in San Pellegrino Terme the studio designed the Terme Nuove, conceived as a monument to water.<\/p>\n

Studio Capitanio Architetti<\/h3>\n

Born in 1976 and a graduate of the Politecnico di Milano in 2003, Remo Capitanio<\/strong> trained at Auer+Weber in Stuttgart and since 2000 has led the studio on Via Montello, initially founded together with Alberto Capitanio. His chosen field is public space, with a particular focus on cycling mobility, and his relationship with the city began early: in 2004 the studio won first prize in the ideas competition for Piazza dell’Accademia Carrara.<\/p>\n

Piazza degli Alpini, built between 2018 and 2020 with OSA architettura e paesaggio, turned thirteen thousand square metres into a large civic space. The polished and exposed concrete is mixed with aggregates from Orobic quarries, while a diagonal traced in the paving recalls the course of the Nuova and Morlana irrigation channels, now buried. The project, photographed by Stefano Tacchinardi, won the BIG SEE Architecture Award 2021. In 2022, near the railway station, the studio built the city’s first bicycle station, one hundred and fifty square metres in steel that light up after dark.<\/p>\n

The work extends to industrial architecture and interiors. For Trafilerie Mazzoleni the studio completed one thousand square metres of offices on two levels in around eight months, with a roof made of prefabricated steel cassettes that Floornature described as the first application of its kind in Italy. The Pisoni Dental Clinic, from 2024, organised around a full-height hall with a spiral staircase and exposed steel portals, received the Grand Prix of the BIG SEE Interior Design Award 2025. The most recent project is the Un mondo di relazione nursery in Romano di Lombardia, 845 square metres completed in 2025 and published by ArchDaily in 2026.<\/p>\n

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A post shared by Studio Capitanio Architetti (@studiocapitanioarchitetti)<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Edoardo Milesi & Archos<\/h3>\n

Born in Bergamo in 1954, Edoardo Milesi<\/strong> graduated from the Politecnico di Milano in 1979 under Franca Helg, after beginning his studies at IUAV. Alongside his practice he founded the magazine ArtApp and, in 2014, the Scuola Permanente dell’Abitare. The Archos studio is based in Fiobbio, a hamlet of Albino at the mouth of the Val Seriana.<\/p>\n

The project that best sums up his research is the Roccolo Abitato in Clusone, from 2017, which reinterprets the roccolo, the traditional bird-netting structure of the valleys, as a place designed to escape the pressures of urban life; in 2020 it received the German Design Award in the Excellent Architecture category. Casa Yakisugi, completed in 2023 in Sorisole, on the hills north of the city, is a square-plan villa on a single level: an exposed concrete base supports a prefabricated timber volume clad in larch charred with the Japanese shou sugi ban technique, while the interiors are in birch. The studio describes the envelope as a vibrant, black, shimmering skin.<\/p>\n

Beyond the province, Borgo Banditaccia in Magliano in Toscana, completed in 2025 with local stone, reclaimed brick and through-coloured concrete, received the Premio R\u0113gula 2025, the LIV Hospitality Design Award 2026 and, in the same year, an award at the Premio Barbara Cappochin. Yet the bond with the territory remains strong: in Lovere, on Lake Iseo, the studio had already worked on the lakefront in 1999, a project that won an award in 2008.<\/p>\n

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A post shared by Edoardo Milesi & Archos (@edoardomilesi_archos)<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Officina Magisafi<\/h3>\n

Officina Magisafi was founded in 2012 by architect Debora Bordogni<\/strong> and designer Claudio Acquaviva<\/strong>, who comes from the building site and from work as a house painter. The studio is based in Vertova, in the Val Seriana, inside a former cotton mill, and works with a network of some fifteen local suppliers and craftsmen. Speaking to Lampoon in 2022, Acquaviva named concreteness as the studio’s strength. Projects are identified by a code, a D followed by a number, like the cards in an archive.<\/p>\n

D029, in Colzate, is the project that brought the studio to international magazines. A 1970s house, empty for around fifteen years, was stripped out and recomposed: the old stairwell became a double-height space crossed by a bespoke steel truss, Ceppo di Gr\u00e9<\/a> clads the fa\u00e7ade and part of the interior, the kitchen is in grey marble, the staircase in basalt and the walnut parquet is laid in herringbone. An oak wall contains the kitchen and services, while a pivoting wall-door replaces the corridors. Yellowtrace published it in August 2023, with photographs by Alessandro Saletta.<\/p>\n

D114, an apartment featured in C41 Magazine in January 2024, starts instead from Jasper Morrison’s idea of super normal: objects and materials chosen to last, a simplicity the magazine called precious. The rest of the work remains largely in the valley, from a wellness centre in Gazzaniga to a concept store in Fiorano al Serio, and shows how a provincial territory can produce a language recognised well beyond Italy.<\/p>\n

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A post shared by Officina Magisafi (@officina_magisafi)<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Marco Acerbis<\/h3>\n

Born in 1973 and a graduate of the Politecnico di Milano, Marco Acerbis<\/strong> worked in London from 1997 to 2004 with Foster + Partners, where among other projects he followed a research building at Imperial College and the Capital City Academy, before a brief spell with Mario Bellini and the opening of his own studio on Via Previtali in Bergamo. Architecture, interiors and product design coexist in his practice with the same obsession for detail.<\/p>\n

In 2024 he won the ADI Compasso d’Oro with MrX, the extruded aluminium shading system designed for Talenti, whose Compasso d’Oro win<\/a> we have covered. His Vertigo lamp for Fontana Arte is part of the permanent collection of the Vitra Design Museum, and in recent years his product work has extended to high fidelity with Aeroline, the hi-fi rack system developed with Bassocontinuo.<\/p>\n

His most important architectural project in the city is the headquarters of Santini Cycling, which between 2022 and early 2023 moved from Lallio into the former Perofil building, designed in 1960 by Giuseppe Gambirasio. On a site of twenty-four thousand square metres, with fourteen thousand square metres of green space, Acerbis removed the partitions to reveal the reinforced concrete beams and pillars, kept the two 1960s spiral staircases, fitting them with new curved metal balustrades, and opened a new central skylight. Interni published it in November 2023, with photographs by Marco Introini: an example of how Bergamo’s modernism can come back to life without losing its identity.<\/p>\n

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A post shared by Marco Acerbis (@marco_acerbis_architetto)<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Francesca Perani Enterprise<\/h3>\n

Founded in Albino in 2007, Francesca Perani Enterprise<\/strong> is the studio of an architect who trained in Italy, Belgium, Australia and the United Kingdom and who has taught at IED since 2011 and at the University of Bergamo since 2014. Perani is also one of the founders of RebelArchitette, the collective that since 2017 has campaigned for a professional stamp in the feminine form, that in 2018 gathered 365 biographies of women architects in a book conceived for the Biennale and that in 2021 had a section in the Italian Pavilion curated by Alessandro Melis. This is why she also appears in our selection of Italian women in design to follow<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Her most recent project is Piazza Confindustria Bergamo, completed in 2025 at Kilometro Rosso in Stezzano, next to Jean Nouvel’s red wall. Across around one thousand square metres the studio raised a 456-square-metre platform in recyclable composite timber, heated by radiant coils, with tiered seating for ninety people, a cloud of vapour and three sweetgum trees, with landscape consultancy by Sara Carrara. The studio describes it as a super square, a square above a square.<\/p>\n

Her small-scale work is just as recognisable. Urban Cabin, from 2019, turned a 1950s portico next to a 1968 villa by Armen Manoukian into a twenty-five-square-metre micro-apartment, with OSB panels, blue resin and a perforated metal screen inspired by Persian arches: a theme, the transformation of spaces built for other uses, that we have explored in our piece on whether a commercial unit can be turned into a home<\/a>. The project was included in Dwell’s Top 9 Small Spaces and won the BIG SEE Architecture Award 2020, an award the studio received again in 2023 with ON-OFF, a reversible shop. In the city Perani also designed Elav Kitchen & Beer, from 2018, with Marg studio.<\/p>\n

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A post shared by Francesca Perani Enterprise (@fpenterprise)<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

OKAM Studio<\/h3>\n

OKAM Studio was born in 2014 from a degree thesis on the former Tesmec site in Curno, the town on the edge of Bergamo where it is still based. It was founded by Michele Bonetti, Luca Cerinza Pettreca, Emanuele Maria Munaretto and Claudio Rossi<\/strong>, who within a few years earned recognition such as New Italian Blood in 2017 and AAA Architetti Cercasi in 2016. To celebrate ten years of activity the studio treated itself to a sports jersey made by Santini, a detail that says a lot about its ties to the local manufacturing fabric.<\/p>\n

The project that best represents the studio is Daste, in the Celadina district: a former thermoelectric power station that came into operation in 1927 and has been turned into a sociocultural hub of more than three thousand square metres. In 2021, with Studio Daniele Fazio, OKAM handled the design and site supervision of the bistro, some four hundred square metres of double-height space where sound-absorbing lamps and a counter with an eight-metre strip of light converse with the industrial structure. Interni featured it in June 2021.<\/p>\n

Alongside reuse, the studio works extensively on the home and on post-war modernism. Villa B in Ponteranica, from 2022, is the renovation of a 1972 villa designed by the architect Alcaini, carried out in keeping with the logic of the original layout. Villa R is a single-family house on the Bergamo plain organised on a horizontal plan, while in Endine, in the Val Cavallina, the recovery of the former Pezzoli blanket factory has been under way since 2025, with new roofs and floors and the conservative restoration of the fa\u00e7ades.<\/p>\n

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A post shared by OKAMstudio (@okam_studio)<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Manzoni Architetti<\/h3>\n

The studio led by Giorgio and Mario Manzoni<\/strong> has been active since 1996 and works between its office on Via Lochis in Bergamo and a second office in Brescia. Its defining trait is the breadth of its outlook: the team includes an interior designer, Valentina Cassader, and an urban planner, Federica Bellini, and the work moves from architecture to landscape, from planning to interiors. In 2026 the studio is drafting the general revision of the territorial plan of Costa Volpino.<\/p>\n

The list of projects describes work spread across the whole territory. In Bergamo there is the Donizetti iSchool primary school, from 2017, designed with Sandro Ravasio; in Zanica the offices and warehouse of Tubiplast, from 2020; in Curno a commercial and office complex, from 2022; in Calvenzano the Aula Calvino, from 2023. On the residential side the studio has designed single-family villas in Sotto il Monte and Dalmine and, in 2024, an apartment in the city that the studio describes as a harmony built on contrast.<\/p>\n

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Architecture in Bergamo: a city designed in section<\/h2>\n

Looking at these nine studios together, the first impression is of a compact scene, closely tied to its territory. There are studios that work on heritage with a restorer’s patience, others that have transformed the city’s public space, and others still that have built in the valleys a language capable of reaching international magazines. And there is a thread linking them to the industrial past of the province, from the converted factories of Acerbis and OKAM to the stone and craftsmen of Officina Magisafi.<\/p>\n

But the most distinctly Bergamo trait of all concerns the way they work with levels. CN10 excavates Piazza Dante to bring light back into the Albergo Diurno, De8 lowers the squares of Lovere down to the water, Perani raises one square above another, Magisafi opens a double height in the old stairwell of a 1970s house, OKAM inhabits the double height of a power station, Acerbis gives Gambirasio’s spiral staircases back their leading role. In a city divided between upper and lower and linked by a funicular, the project almost always starts from a change in level. The best architecture in Bergamo works in section: it excavates, lifts, opens voids and brings light where it never reached before.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps this is the lesson Bergamo offers Italian architecture: in a territory that can no longer afford to consume land, quality is often found beneath and above what already exists. To continue the journey, our series on Italian studios includes the architecture studios in Milan<\/a>, as well as those in Venice<\/a> and Turin<\/a>, while for a broader overview we recommend our guide to the 10 most famous architecture firms in Italy<\/a>. Studios wishing to submit a project to the editorial team or propose a collaboration can do so from the Advertising and partnerships<\/a> page.<\/p>\n

Frequently asked questions about architecture studios in Bergamo<\/h2>\n

How do you choose an architecture studio in Bergamo?<\/h3>\n

It is worth starting from projects built in contexts similar to your own: working on a building in Citt\u00e0 Alta, a 1960s villa, a warehouse to be converted or a house in the valleys calls for different skills. It helps to ask who will handle the planning paperwork and dealings with the authorities, which builders and craftsmen the studio usually works with and how fees are split between preliminary design, detailed design and site supervision. Registration with the professional body can be checked on the website of the Ordine degli Architetti di Bergamo<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Do you need permission to renovate a building in Citt\u00e0 Alta?<\/h3>\n

It depends on the property and the type of work. If the building is protected under the Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape<\/a>, the works require authorisation from the relevant Soprintendenza; in any case building works must be notified to the Comune with the appropriate permit, signed by a qualified professional. In Citt\u00e0 Alta, where many buildings are listed and the Venetian walls are part of a UNESCO site, a studio’s experience in dealing with heritage authorities matters as much as the quality of the design.<\/p>\n

Which contemporary buildings should you see in Bergamo?<\/h3>\n

A good itinerary starts from the Piacentini centre regenerated by CN10 Architetti and continues to Piazza degli Alpini, redesigned by Studio Capitanio with OSA, and to the stadium transformed by De8 Architetti, which also designed GRES Art 671. At the foot of Citt\u00e0 Alta the extension of the Accademia Carrara by Antonio Ravalli Architetti is well worth a visit, while in Celadina Daste shows how a former thermoelectric power station can become a place of culture. Lovers of the twentieth century should not miss Pino Pizzigoni’s church in Longuelo; those with more time can head out to Kilometro Rosso in Stezzano, with Jean Nouvel’s wall and Francesca Perani’s square.<\/p>\n

Which Bergamo studios work on the renovation of existing buildings?<\/h3>\n

Almost all the studios in this selection work with existing buildings, in different ways. CN10 Architetti specialises in the restoration of historic buildings, from the Palazzo della Ragione to the Torre del Borgo in Villa d’Adda; Marco Acerbis brought Giuseppe Gambirasio’s former Perofil building back to life for Santini; OKAM Studio has worked on Daste and on post-war villas; Officina Magisafi has transformed 1970s houses in the Val Seriana; De8 Architetti built the new stadium while keeping the historic 1928 fa\u00e7ades.<\/p>\n