SOS is
- a professional school aimed at recent graduates to build experience in a setting that integrates education, research and practice.
- a comprehensive program, combining principles with a practice-based approach to the design and application of the most advanced methods, processes and tools.
- a training opportunity distinguished by its main focus on the application of sustainable architecture, from urban to product scale, from developing to advanced communities.
Our Vision: to Design the Future
- to advance a humanistic approach in architecture and urban design while addressing our present and future challenges
- to advance architecture’s cultural, social, economic and environmental impact, relevance and value
- to define processes of transformation for a sustainable world and lead systemic change through collaboration
To Define the Future
- of professional education through a revolutionary model of integrated education / research / practice
- of practice by transforming the professional development path and changing to an open and shared culture
- of the profession by repositioning architects through innovative and intelligent driven strategies
To Imagine a future where
- the intelligent investment of design positions us as global experts, leaders and stewards of the environment
- design delivers outstanding quality that is responsive and sustainable
- all stakeholders are involved from the initiation of the project
- decisions are performance-based and value-driven
- all communications throughout the design and building process are clear, concise, open, transparent and trusting
- outcomes are innovative and visionary
Founder Statement
The SOS Master’s in Sustainable Design is a post-graduate program that we crafted by bringing together the knowledge, competencies and skills that MCA has acquired over more than twenty-five years of professional practice in the global context, with the expertise of our partners in the fields of education, industry and research. This is not a conventional postgraduate program, but rather an “Academy of Practical Work”, where we teach how to work through research.
In recent years we have tackled emerging issues related to climate change in many countries, from China to the United Arab Emirates, India, Senegal, Zambia, - and finally, Italy where the school is based - aware of a strategic challenge related to training the next generation of designers: education can no longer operate as something separate from professional practice. To prepare recent graduates to really face environmental issues that are emerging globally, it is necessary to equip them with new competencies and skills.
The 2030 and 2050 roadmaps are the framework within which the next generation will operate. Designers, architects and urban planners are called on to take urgent action. In order to turn human environments into ecosystems, we need to re-define our approach and re-shape our work methods; what is required is more of a cultural than a technological shift. The terms ‘circular economy’, as well as ‘sustainability’, are so abused in global discourse that they have nearly lost all meaning.
How can we reinvent the terms, measure their success, and use the design tools at our disposal to transition to a circular economy? Every year we accompany a selected group of young designers along a shared path that unfolds in the awareness that it is necessary to rethink the ways we address people’s needs and we operate in the natural context; we do it by offering new cognitive and technical tools that will allow them to design products, spaces, buildings and systems capable of generating new forms of creative empathy.
Within SOS students share the facilities with the MCA team and have access to all the opportunities for knowledge exchange between consultants and office partners. We don’t address sustainability only from the designer’s perspective: we invite climatologists, journalists, sociologists, anthropologists, digital manufacturers, economists and experts from the industry to share their experience in public events that we host within our spaces.
At SOS, participants establish a strong professional network that will serve as a nexus for accessing quality job opportunities, that the school encourages and facilitates. Join the SOS community and become a design leader of the Post Carbon Era!
