Alessandro Orsini is an architect and founder of Architensions, operating between practice, research, and academia. He studied in Rome at RomaTre School of Architecture where he graduated summa cum laude and received his Masters in Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP and coordinated second-year undergraduate at the New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Architecture where he is the director of the Summer Study Abroad Program.
Architensions is a research agency that focuses on social behaviors and architecture, both in continuous dialogue with the context and aiming at creating new experiential scenarios. The practice aims at reconnecting urbanism and architecture through the design of spaces capable of establishing a narrative within our cities opposing the tendency of the paradigm of architecture as a financial tool. The studio is a collective of professionals from different disciplines and backgrounds and is led in partnership with Nick Roseboro. The work and research have been exhibited internationally at the “Casa dell’Architettura” in Rome, at the Van Alen Institute, The Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Center for Architecture, and the Java Project Gallery in New York. Alessandro Orsini’s writings have been published in Plot Magazine, Artribune, CityVision Magazine, and Area. In 2015, Libria presented the volume Forma Urbana, a focus on the practice’s research revolving around the concept of Fifth Dimensional Cities.
Before founding Architensions, Alessandro worked with Steven Holl Architects as a project architect of the Sunslice House and in the team of many projects such as the Herning Museum of the Art in Denmark and the Cite’ de l’Ocean and du Surf in France.