Founded by Mario Cucinella in 2015 as a practice based academy for young professionals and recent graduates, SOS School of Sustainability is now a Foundation that includes Mario Cucinella Architects and Iris Ceramica Group.This collaboration is based on a common vision and goal of providing future decision-makers with the necessary tools to address environmental issues with an open, holistic, and research-driven approach.
As a Future Factory, a hub for the exchange of knowledge and visions on the future of sustainable architecture and design, SOS offers a first-level professional master’s degree.
The program integrates design activities, research, and practice, utilizing the most advanced sustainable tools to operate from urban to product scale, from developing communities to more advanced ones.
SOS combines the know-how and experience acquired by Mario Cucinella Architects over more than thirty years of professional practice in the global context with the skills of the SOS faculty, and its partners, serving as a bridge between the education world and the job market.
Education and professional practice can no longer be considered separate from each other, therefore, SOS provides a highly practical educational experience.
To prepare students for future challenges, it is necessary to equip them with new skills, approaches, and working methods based on responsible and sustainable design processes and practices.
Transforming human environments into ecosystems requires a more cultural than technological change. In this sense, the school has developed and proposes a holistic, innovative, and visionary approach.
By attending the SOS Master’s Program in Sustainable Architecture and Design, students learn and apply what their acquired knowledge by doing research on real projects. This aligns with the educational method promoted by founder Mario Cucinella, which combines theoretical teaching with practical application through workshops, case study analysis, simulations, and site visits.
The master is delivered in an innovative blended format, made possible by collaboration with Uninettuno University. The program structure combines e-learning with in presence project work carried out within the SOS campus and the Milanese headquarters of the MCA Mario Cucinella Architects.
This provides students the opportunity to work closely with SOS and MCA partners and the professionals from the studio.
The master lasts 12 months and is divided into two phases:
Foundation CoursesProject Tracks
During their journey in SOS, students become active members of a professional community working to bring about a better future through coming together and sharing.
Mario Cucinella was born in Palermo in 1960 and graduated in Architecture at the University of Genoa in 1986.
In 1992, in Paris, he founded MCA – Mario Cucinella Architects, an architecture and design firm that has now headquarters in Bologna and Milan, and of which he is also the creative director.
In 2015 he founded SOS – School of Sustainability, a school for young professionals and recent graduates that focuses on the application of sustainable architecture and design to give future decisions makers the tools necessary to tackle the environmental issues that are emerging globally with an open-minded, holistic, research-driven, and human-centered approach.
The importance of his work and continued commitment as an architect and educator on environmental and social issues have been recognized with the International Fellowship of the Royal Institute of British Architects (2016) and with the Honorary Fellowship of the American Institute of Architects (2017).
In 2018 he was curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale with the exhibition “Arcipelago Italia”.
Mario Cucinella has taught at the universities of Ferrara, Naples, Munich, and Nottingham.
He is the author of many publications including:
Building Green Futures (2020, published by Forma), a volume that investigates, through a collection of the latest projects and most representative architecture of Mario Cucinella Architects, possible answers that architecture can provide to the global challenges of the future.
Architecture of Education (2021, published by Maggioli), an analysis of how the most important places in civil society will be able to evolve thanks to architecture and the dynamics it is able to generate, through a multi-voiced narrative alternating with design solutions developed by Mario Cucinella Architects.
The future is a journey to the past. Ten stories about architecture (2021, published by Quodlibet) In this book Mario Cucinella – together with Valentina Torrente and Laura Zevi – describes ten trips to cities and places that gave him valuable insights into environmental issues and the rational use of available energy.