Luigi Filippo Rodrigues Durando

Originally from Italy, I am an interior designer and researcher with a passion for Architecture, Narrative, and the Social Environment. My fields of interest span across adaptive reuse, wellbeing, and the emotional aspect of design. 

Prior to my time at the RCA, I studied Interior Design at the European Institute of Design (IED) with a major in set design (2013-2016).

After graduating, I enriched my professional background through national and international work experiences. I moved to the Netherlands where I worked as interior designer on projects that ranged from retail design to residential, observing and understanding the nordic design and the emerging trends. In Italy I acquired experience in the high-end residential and commercial sector, working on a number of luxury private residences and commercial showrooms.

Thanks to the combination of my Italian educational heritage and my international professional experience, I developed a balance of tradition and innovation in my design.

I have continued my higher education at the RCA, specialising in Interior Futures at the School of Architecture. With a passion for architecture and narrative, my final master’s dissertation, Architecture and the Human Experience, explored the emotional connection between architecture and experience. The increasing awareness of the experience that each one of us lives in the spaces we inhabit, that we perceive with our body, must stimulate a more conscious design. Spaces have expression, behaviour; they are never static. 

School of Architecture Prizes 2021 Joint Winner of Head of Programme’s Prize - Interior Design

Today, June 2021, London’s office buildings are still empty.

This is the time to question how we work and how we live.

The pandemic not only made safety the new top priority, it expanded our idea of what a “workspace” can actually be, accelerating the natural evolution of the office away from a productivity space to something else. Driven by a change in working habits, values in the workplace are changing, which in turn means that what occupiers want from an office building is also evolving rapidly.

What is the future of office spaces? Do we really need an office? What is an office for?

Forced into new socially distanced realities, we are able to consider what is valuable and how we might create more sustainable and meaningful workplaces. Local, resilient and flexible environments must be created for a healthier and more sustainable world. Infrastructures, objects, and services, both virtual and physical, must be designed to serve the local communities they support.

A new system will emerge, a new way of organising work and life will come to the fore. The future is OFF.

OFF is an ecosystem designed to create a vibrant hybrid environment that helps to revitalise town centres and to regenerate empty office towers into colonies of conviviality, serendipity, and shared moments between workers and the local community. A program of activities and spaces that create a truly inclusive community, where people are the cultural epicenter and wellbeing is a new economic value.