Peccioli awarded in New York, interview with the architect Segantini

THEto contemporary reinterpretation of the Tuscan farmhouse, imagined in the village of Peccioli, in the province of Pisa, won “Best Architectural Concept of the Year” at the Architizer Vision Awards 2025. Maria Alessandra Segantinithe architect who conceived the project, does not hide her enthusiasm. «If this small local idea was liked by the great professionals who were on the jury, from Daniel Libeskind and Steven Holl, it is because it is a vision: this shows that it could instead have global value».

With the micro farms of Peccioli he won the Vision Awards in New York: interview with the architect Segantini

The project by Segantini and his studio, C+S Architect, is titled LAND-CR.AF.T.ED (Community Reinvent Affordable Food Through Ecologic Design) and is the proposal of a new paradigm of rural life based on regenerative agriculture and social housing.

Certainly it is a project that offers solutions. To the depopulation of the Italian countryside, first of all. But also to what Segantini calls «the spread of bed and breakfasts». «In Italy we are witnessing an explosion of tourism: an activity that consumes, and does not produce, it is not local: it eats up the territory a bit and if it takes it somewhere else, it somehow exploits it. And the young people who work there, once the tourism season is over, have to migrate, generally to the big cities.”

The awarded project instead has the objective of «make the landscape productive again» explains the architect. «It was born from a research project I was working on in the United Kingdom and which then took shape thanks to the rather casual meeting with the mayor of Peccioli, who invited us to use our model on an area of ​​his municipality».

Tuscan farmhouses, woods and pixel farming. In circles

The administration’s need was the construction of 12 social residences, on a certain plot of land. In the LAND-CR.AF.T.ED project the lot was redesigned with thearboriculture. But, instead of the orthogonal geometric elements that derived, in the past, from the use of the plow, here the agricultural soil structure is circular. «Because here there are drones navigating, sowing and irrigating and in circulation. The agricultural areas are circular but also the residential ones. «We went to the DNA of the farmhouse, which is the traditional housing structure of these areas: the farmhouse is a large courtyard enclosed by a wall with the main accommodation and service spaces. We have translated this model into a contemporary key.”

The result is a microcosm of raw earth houses where the so-called pixel-farming is practiced«an agriculture based on biodiversity which, according to various studies, is much more productive than extensive monoculture». Houses and fields, irrigation basins and renaturalized forests: everything is organized in one master plan circular where ecology and community they coexist in balance.

And it is also beautiful to look at: «Not a detail: the area we worked on is on the slopes of the hill on which Peccioli stands. The fact that LAND-CR.AF.T.ED can also be an asset for those who simply admire it is an important value.”

From Peccioli to the world: a prototype and a vision

The project, which should be financed in the coming months by public and private funds, is, for Segantini, a prototype. «Because the Tuscan farmhouse is not very different from the Venetian or Brianza farms: they are all located in territories that we have plundered, plundered from the warehouses, and which could instead be renaturalized».

But, as Segantini specifies, if architecture also solves problems, «it is above all a look, which goes beyond the contingent solution. In this case, beyond the task of the 12 social residences. It’s a perspective on something that doesn’t exist. And the architect is the magician who tries to convince that these dreams can be worked on, that they can really be built.”

The dream of a slow and more feminine city

This applies to the countryside as well as to the city. City that Segantini imagines different: «A slow city, which allows people to feel at home in public space. Cities other than those we live in, drawn on the so-called typical male commuter: the commuter who works all day in the city center and then rushes home. And cities that are more attentive to the needs of families, which value slowness as well as speed.”

In every professional story, and it’s the same in this one, it also plays an important part personal history. «In my projects I always find what my father passed on to me, who worked from one field to another in the world and then always retired to Brisighella, in the countryside on the border between Emilia and Tuscany”, says Segantini, who today lives between London and Treviso. «He told us about countries that we didn’t even know how to recognize on the map and then he explained to us the freshness of the greenery and the flowers. Now that he has passed away, even more so, I feel the enormous debt towards him».