Three years of lectures, workshops, and advanced education with YACademy, exploring the value of natural stone in contemporary architecture.

Over the past three years, Franchi Academy has developed a programme of education and exchange that has brought Carrara marble to the centre of the dialogue with some of the most influential voices in contemporary architecture. An educational approach conceived as an open laboratory, where material, design, landscape, sustainability, and technical culture come together to explore new possibilities for the use of natural stone.

In this journey, the collaboration with YACademy represented a decisive step. Franchi Academy identified YACademy as a strategic educational partner, bringing together young architects, big international studios, and top-level companies. This synergy arises from the encounter between two complementary skills: on one side, in-depth knowledge of Carrara marble, its quarries, craftsmanship, certifications, and supply chain; on the other, a postgraduate education model that brings together an international community of designers and lecturers from some of the world’s leading studios.

This collaboration has given Franchi Academy a new dimension: a platform for applied research, where marble is studied, investigated, and reinterpreted as a material for contemporary design, in synergy with the company’s expertise. Through the courses and workshops developed with YACademy, students engage with the material not as an abstract concept, but in the places where it originates: the quarries, production facilities, showrooms, slabs, finished surfaces, and the transformation techniques. In this direct experience, marble ceases to be a simple product and becomes landscape, history, expertise, responsibility, and design potential.

A particularly significant step in this collaboration is represented by the launch of the Master in Spiritual Architecture, promoted in 2025. The Master marks an important evolution: Carrara marble is placed at the heart of an international reflection on the relationship between architecture, materiality, and spirituality. The theme of sacred, meditative, and symbolic architecture offers a new perspective on natural stone in its deepest dimension: a material capable of creating silence, duration, contemplation, and a connection with human experience. 

The presence of architects from studios such as Snøhetta, BIG, AMDL Circle, Zaha Hadid Architects, Herzog & de Meuron, and EMBT Miralles Tagliabue, together with figures such as Giuseppe Zampieri and Claudio Silvestrin, has given Franchi Academy a value that goes beyond the scope of an educational experience. Each collaboration has brought a different perspective on design to Carrara: from landscape to sacred space, from design to retail, from formal experimentation to the quiet depth of materials. In this comparison, marble is not presented as a finished product, but as a material to be understood in its origins, its technical characteristics, its natural identity and its expressive potential.

The Carrara Community Quarry workshop, led by Patrick Lüth of Snøhetta, opened a particularly significant reflection on the relationship between quarry, landscape and community in the setting of the Ponti di Vara, one of the most iconic places in the Carrara quarries. The Norwegian studio is known for its architecture capable of transforming buildings into public spaces and places of connection; a notable example is the Oslo Opera House, where  Carrara white marble covers the large walkable roof, transforming it into a sloping plaza overlooking the fjord. Bringing this sensitivity into the Carrara marble quarry landscape means questioning the future of marble sites, their accessibility, and the possibility of creating new forms of storytelling and engagement.

With Giuseppe Zampieri, partner of David Chipperfield Architects Milan the theme of marble has taken on a more intimate and spiritual dimension. The workshop From quarries to temples invited students to imagine, in the heart of the Ravalunga quarries, a place of interreligious meditation. Zampieri, director of the Master, brings with him a design culture founded on proportion, context, permanence, and construction quality; an approach that dialogues naturally with stone, a material of durability and memory. The reference to his work on projects such as the Torlonia collection – one of the most significant collections of ancient sculpture in the world- strengthens this relationship between architecture, sculpture and the enhancement of the material.

The presence of Giulio Rigoni from BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group introduced a further perspective: that of an architecture capable of connecting storytelling, urban scale, experimentation, and the collective imagination. With the “Bucce” project, marble was interpreted not only in its monumentality, but as an active material, capable of generating new forms, new languages ​​and new relationships between object, space and narrative.

With Nicholas Bewick of AMDL Circle, Franchi Academy explored the relationship between marble, design and spirituality through the module Transcendence and design, dedicated to cult objects and their role within spiritual spaces. From this perspective, marble becomes a threshold material: between gesture and ritual, function and symbol, physical presence and intangible value. AMDL Circle’s design culture, founded on attention to the individual, the quality of living spaces, and the humanistic dimension of the project, offered students a key to understanding the symbolic power of natural stone.

The visit of Claudio Silvestrin brought to the Academy one of the most distinctive voices of international minimalism. In his work, natural stone is never merely a cladding material, but an essential element capable of creating silence, proportion, light, and depth. His presence reinforced one of the central themes of the Franchi Academy journey: marble as a material that requires knowledge, respect and restraint, and which can express its maximum intensity precisely through subtraction.

With Bogdan Zaha of Zaha Hadid Architects, the discussion focused on the relationship between architecture, fashion, and retail. ZHA’s fluid and dynamic language has often explored the boundaries between architecture, design, and sculpture; from this perspective, marble can also become a material for experimentation, capable of translating complex forms and continuous surfaces into immersive spatial experiences.

Finally, the presence of Olga Bolshanina of Herzog & de Meuron opened a dialogue with a studio that has made the physicality of materials, surfaces, and textures one of its most distinctive tools. The references to fashion retail and projects such as Prada Aoyama and Miu Miu Aoyama offer a way to interpret natural stone within contemporary contexts where materiality, brand identity, the city, and the perception of space intertwine.

This journey is now enriched by the upcoming session with Benedetta Tagliabue, head of EMBT Miralles Tagliabue, who will lead a new chapter of Franchi Academy, structured around a quarry visit and lecture. Her presence introduces a perspective strongly connected to the relationship between architecture, landscape, the memory of places, and the sensory quality of materials. The work of EMBT, internationally recognized for its ability to create open, organic spaces deeply connected to their context, finds a particularly significant reference in the project of the Chiesa di San Giacomo Apostolo (Church of Saint James the Apostle), where architecture, community, and the spiritual dimension come together in a welcoming and contemporary form. In this sense, the appointment with Benedetta Tagliabue strengthens the dialogue already initiated by Franchi Academy between Carrara marble, design culture, and new interpretations of natural stone.

Through these collaborations, Franchi Academy has consolidated a method: bringing architects into the material, even before facing the product. Quarries, slabs, veining, processing techniques, certifications, sustainability, and the knowledge embedded in the supply chain become design tools. The collaboration with YACademy strengthens this method, transforming the Franchi experience into an international educational program, connecting Carrara with new generations of architects and the most advanced languages ​​of contemporary design.

It is here that Carrara marble confirms and redefines itself not only as a prestigious material, but as a material of thought, culture, and future.