Bosco Colto's Thinking with Animals summer campus in Santo Pietro, Sicily

In the oak woods of Santo Pietro, near Caltagirone in south-eastern Sicily, Bosco Colto has been working since 2022 on new ways to live in and look after the land. The name plays on the Italian for forest and for cultivated, and each summer the project, run by Makramè APS, holds a campus of workshops across the village. This year's edition, Thinking with Animals, ran from 30 July to 9 August 2026 and asked how architecture changes when humans stop being its only measure.

The standout was Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow-Wow, whose Sicilian Satoyama workshop borrowed the Japanese idea of a mosaic farming landscape. Participants built two permanent pieces together, the Zucca Gazebo and the Mulberry Canopy. Elsewhere there were sessions on the old bond between forest and town, sound and food experiments, and a hybrid wood-fired train kiln for ceramics, set in a nineteenth-century rural settlement.

Co-director Marco Navarra says designing alongside other species starts with admitting human limits. The longer plan, Casa Bosco Colto, would turn four public buildings into a research centre with labs and guest rooms, and is under way. The campus itself is over, but the installations and kiln remain: worth keeping an eye on if slow, rural architecture is your thing.

Our summary of a story from designboom, published 25 October 2026. Read the original