Valentina Pantalena is a Swiss-Italian interior architect currently working as a product designer at a small artisan company in Zurich.
She received her Bachelor’s degree in Interior Design from the Institute of European Design (IED) in Venice in 2021, where her project won an award and was presented at the Venice Art Biennale in 2022. During her studies at the IED, she collaborated with institutions such as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and various textile workshops, immersing herself in their craftsmanship and meticulous attention to detail characteristic of the rich cultural heritage of Venice.
Valentina continued her education by obtaining a Master’s degree in Interior Architecture through the MAIA program at HEAD – Genève. This academic pursuit revealed to her the potential for designers to actively engage with contemporary issues. During the Master’s program, she participated in the 2024 Salone del Mobile with the project Diorama of the Future, a performance/installation on climate change. In the coming years, Valentina intends to explore legacy from the scale of objects to larger architectural interventions, reflecting on her keen interest in social and cultural issues.
Diploma Project
Il Teatrino della Vita
Il Teatrino della Vita is a set of urban interventions taking place in a quaint southern Italian village overlooking the sea, where simplicity defines life. Amidst the rhythm of daily rituals, the village embodies a self-contained ecosystem whose inhabitants seamlessly wander between public and private spaces.
The project employs a series of small architectural interventions in public spaces to demonstrate a practice of care for the village, particularly for its elderly residents. The project engages in the careful revival, renovation, and addition of public objects and infrastructures, thereby reigniting forgotten and disappearing communal practices.
Inspired by five characters living in the old town, five architectural interventions create a path to rebuild the community as it was before, thereby helping the people living there. By fostering a sense of domesticity in the streets, the project seeks to rekindle the communal spirit by transforming everyday life into a spectacle—the theater of life.
