A Shelton Reed film · IPS Congress 2026, Dubai
Marco Piva, Co-Founder of Studio Marco Piva, sits down with Alexander Morari, MRICS, CEO of Shelton Reed, at IPS Congress 2026 in Dubai: why he reads Dubai as a set of islands still waiting to be pieced into one city, what a Milan office of more than seventeen nationalities sees that a single-market practice does not, and why he calls Italy the worst place in the world to develop.
22 minutes · Marco Piva, Studio Marco Piva & Alexander Morari, MRICS, Shelton Reed
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Marco Piva, Co-Founder of Studio Marco Piva (opens in a new tab), sits down with Alexander Morari (opens in a new tab), MRICS, CEO of Shelton Reed, at IPS Congress 2026 (opens in a new tab) in Dubai.
Studio Marco Piva is a Milan practice that describes itself as an academy of sciences rather than an architectural and design firm. Piva was trained at the Politecnico di Milano to work across every scale of design, from master plan down to a single product, and he says he has spent his career testing how those scales connect to one another.
His Milan office brings together, in his words, more than seventeen different nationalities, many of whom joined after working with the studio on projects in China, the Gulf and beyond. He treats that as method rather than decoration: a practice that reads a place through the people who come from it.
On Dubai he is precise rather than promotional. The city, he argues, is not yet one city so much as a set of islands, each one finished on its own terms, still waiting to be put together like pieces of a puzzle. On home he is blunter, calling Italy the worst place in the world to develop, and he sets the beauty of a mixed-use street against the sterility of single-use zoning, with China and its ghost cities as the cautionary case.
He closes on embodied carbon, and on a recycling project in Iceland.