OBR was founded in 2000 when Paolo Brescia and Tommaso Principi, united by a solid friendship that originated while both were working for Renzo Piano, decided to set up a network with other colleagues, commencing an exchange of ideas among Genoa, London, New York and Mumbai.
With their winning project presented at the international competition for the Pythagoras Museum, OBR defined a set of recurring themes in their practice: architecture as a means to promote a sense of community and the expression of individual identities, through a collective narrative unifying different generations, cultures, and forms of knowledge.
But it was yet another winning competition project that further expanded OBR’s research horizon: the Milanofiori Residential Complex. In this case the determination to combine the opposites — indoor and outdoor, natural and artificial, public and private — transcended in a more insightful reflection on the essential meaning of dwelling, in the sense of “taking care”, leaning into a new idea of relational architecture creating ever-evolving sensitive spaces that mutually interact with their inhabitants because of the dynamic exchanges between people and the environment.
Picturing the reality in which it designs as a play of mirrors in continuous and mutual interaction, with reactions and counterreactions, OBR’s investigation proposes a holistic vision not merely centered on man, but on man’s relationship with the environment, adapting man to the environment, and not the reverse. OBR’s is therefore an architecture based on relationships, rather than on objects, an open system operating on time, even more than on space, welcoming even the unpredictable.
It is by working on the existing heritage—Palazzo dell’Arte at Triennale Milano, Galleria Sabauda in Turin and the Mitoraj Museum in Pietrasanta—that OBR rethinks the relationship between building and what is built: the project is not conceived as the sum of its parts but as a whole, leaving no space for “style” and seeking a correspondence between constructive and expressive logic. Combining technological innovation and cultural tradition, OBR does not indulge in ostentatious iconic solutions and proposes an architecture that is “already there, since forever,” belonging to its own time but also perceived as having always been there, overlapping the present with the past and the future.
After nearly two decades, the original group has seen the addition of a new partner, Andrea Casetto, and consolidated into a team of forty architects based in Milan, dedicated to experimental research and committed to projects with a strong social meaning. As a team they have developed an approach to architectural planning as a diachronic process.
Open to different multidisciplinary contributions, Paolo Brescia and Tommaso Principi have been invited to various universities, such as the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, the Aalto University in Helsinki, the Academy of Architecture in Mumbai, the Mimar Sinan Fine Art University in Istanbul, and the Florida International University in Miami.
OBR’s projects have been displayed at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, at the Royal Institute of British Architects of London, at Triennale Milano, at the Bienal de Arquitetura of Brasilia, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum of New York. Since 2018 its works have been part of the permanent collections of MAXXI, in Rome.
OBR has been awarded the AR Emerging Architecture RIBA honorable mention in London, the Plusform under 40, the Urbanpromo at the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale, the Europe 40 under 40 award in Madrid, the LEAF Award in London, the WAN Residential Award, the Building Better Healthcare Award, the national young designer In/Arch Award, the MIPIM Award of Cannes and the American Architecture Prize in New York.
