office

c-b a is an internationally acclaimed architectural design office that has been active for twenty years in the European context, where it has developed dozens of projects of various types for private companies and public administrations. c-b a is able to manage in a complete and autonomous way all the phases of an order: architectural, structural, environmental design, master planning, development of urban plans, works management, accounting, economic evaluation of intervention, market analysis and real estate evaluations until the final delivery to the customer

c-b a produces inventive designs so functionally specific that they offer distinct aesthetic bare experiences, namely experiences that are not engulfed by the prevailing rhetoric of the day, be them a religious green wash or deviated notions of sustainability.

Unprejudiced by conventions, preconceived aesthetic strategies or outcomes, each time it starts a project the c-b a team returns to root problems and doggedly explores them with a critical naiveté free of prejudice. Through this process, we often propose solutions that transcend initial expectations and aspire to create radically functional designs whose specificity produces profoundly unique aesthetic experiences that relate to European and Italian glorious tradition.

paolo conrad-bercah

paolo conrad-bercah is the founding director of c-b a, an architectural office that has developed a variety of projects in Europe for both private and public sectors . He is equipped with an international background gathered in Milan (Aldo Rossi and Ignazio Gardella), New York (I. M. Pei) and Berlin. Having worked in Berlin for nearly a decade, he recently returned to Milan, where, in addition to serving as a member of the city’s landscape commission, he also works as an adjunct professor at the Politecnico di Milano. Since 2026, he has held the same position at the University of Genoa as well.

He is a graduate cum laude of the Politecnico di Torino and the Harvard GSD where he has served as instructor, fellow and visiting critic. The professional practice draws on drawing and writing as complementary activities that are indispensable to the design process. Publications include

-a Berlin-based aesthetic trilogy on the relationship between architecture and the city— Berlin Fragments (2019), Berlin Transfert (2021), and Berlin Stimmung (2027); bercahaus (2020), a monograph documenting the construction process of a multi-level residential building in Berlin using a new model of prefabricated wood construction; Modernism. An American Wake (2022), and Fogli di Architettura (2022), which compile atlases of aesthetic ideas for form.

The drawings have been exhibited in various cultural capitals—Berlin, Florence, Rome, Milan, and Venice—and have received favorable critical attention from leading figures in the European cultural world: Claudio Strinati, Joseph Rykwert, George Baird, Niall Hobhouse, Valerio Paolo Mosco, Marco Biraghi, Pierre Alain-Crozet, Stefano Pujatti, and Sandro Bonvissuto.

principles

We side with neither form nor function because we aim at finding an equilibrium between the two.

We design collaborations with our clients rather than dictate solutions.

We don’t rush to  conclusions but we look for the adequate time for appropriate solutions for each specific client’s requirement.

We embrace responsibility in order to implement vision: implementation demands more creativity than conceptualization.

We challenge and advance typologies because we feel the time to do so has come.

We view constraints as opportunities because each project is a response to unique conditions.

We reach for the unexpected by exposing root problems and looking afresh.

We often discover uncharted territory; sometimes we rediscover forgotten territory that has renewed usefulness

We stand by Occam’s razor: sometimes explanations that posit fewer entities, or fewer kinds of entities, are to be preferred to explanations that posit more.