Designing Responsibly: Insights from Nicola Scaranaro from Foster + Partners

Designing Responsibly: Insights from Nicola Scaranaro from Foster + Partners by Camila Grimaldi

How can architects design for a future in which cultures, climates, and technologies evolve faster than ever? It is a question that resonates strongly today, especially when considering how architecture can connect places, communities, and long-term environmental responsibility. It becomes even more relevant when exploring how global innovation, local identity, and ecological intelligence can coexist within contemporary design practice.

A conversation with Nicola Scaranaro, Partner at Foster + Partners, offered a clear perspective on this balance. His reflections highlighted three essential dimensions: the value of cultural research, the irreplaceable role of human insight, and the responsibility architects hold in the ecological transition.

Innovation Through Cultural Understanding

For Scaranaro, every project begins long before any line is drawn. The preliminary phase, including research, attentive listening, and cultural interpretation, is crucial to ensure that global innovation does not overshadow local identity. Foster + Partners approaches this balance through multidisciplinary teams in which architects, environmental specialists, and even anthropologists work together to deeply understand places and the people who inhabit them.

Vernacular knowledge, he notes, is an irreplaceable point of departure. In climatically demanding contexts, understanding how oases work, how shade is formed, or how wind circulates, becomes essential for developing contemporary strategies that do not imitate tradition, but reinterpret it. By merging cultural analysis with advanced environmental modelling, the firm aims to craft spaces that are not only more comfortable and high-performing, but also deeply responsive to their context.

Technology as a Tool 

When asked what technology should never replace, Scaranaro was clear: architecture remains “humans designing for humans.” While tools like prefabrication, modular systems, environmental simulations, and AI accelerate iteration and optimize resources, they cannot substitute the designer’s critical, ethical, and empathetic perspective.

For him, technology is most valuable when it supports better building practices, reducing waste, improving control, and enhancing performance. But even in an increasingly digitized workflow, human sensitivity remains central: understanding how a space is lived, the kind of experience it generates, and how it becomes part of someone’s memory, something that technology can never replicate.

Architecture’s Ecological Responsibility

Scaranaro frames the ecological transition around a foundational question: What does each project contribute to the city, the community, and the world? Addressing this question requires architects to consider, from the earliest stages, the embodied carbon of materials and construction systems, the possibility of reusing or adapting existing structures before contemplating demolition, and the need for programmatic flexibility so that buildings can evolve over time. 

It also demands a commitment to circularity by designing structures that can be dismantled, reused, or reconfigured, and to continuous environmental measurement supported by digital and AI tools. Designing with a long-term life-cycle perspective, whether 50 or 100 years, is for Scaranaro not only good practice but an ethical obligation, one that defines the architect’s role in shaping a more responsible built environment.

Looking Ahead

Nicola Scaranaro’s insights offer a clear reading of where architecture is heading. The discipline’s future will be shaped not only by technological capacity, but by its ability to remain conscious, adaptable, and rooted in cultural and environmental responsibility. Innovation and sensitivity, far from being opposites, are mutually reinforcing forces that can help build more humane and resilient cities.

For today’s emerging architects, his message stands as a valuable reminder: design with intelligence and humility; work with digital tools in ways that preserve the human dimension of design; and maintain a global outlook balanced by a deep respect for the local.