Formative aims

The aim of the studio is to develop the awareness of architectural design as a complex synthesis while operating within the principles of architectural composition and the issues pertaining to place and construction. All those different matters are considered comprehensively in order to think over the raison d’être of architectural design and verify its goals at both urban and architectural scale. Architectural design is understood as a tool for knowledge that becomes an imperative when it comes to work within heritage sites and historical layering. Construction of Architectural Works and Representation will elucidate the relationship between formal ideas, constructive choices, and technical solutions, and between local traditions and contemporary technological design strategies through appropriate detail drawings.

As the studio is integrated with the Double Master Degree Programme in partnership with Xi’an College of Architecture and Technology (China), the tradition of design as a tool for knowledge will be also tested in fast changing Chinese cities.

A yearly spring workshop of one month in China will allow an in-depth approach and knowledge to the selected design context.

Contents

Place-identity is a dynamic process of unending construction and reinvention. Architectural design and research should express a critical approach toward the challenges and global processes affecting the identity of historical urban landscapes in both Italy and China.

Design will be determined in the mutual relationship between the building and the city, as historical urban landscapes and architectures themselves are altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. Design as a tool for knowledge challenges the responsibility of critical interpretation of cities and their past as a precondition for both conservation, regeneration, and development of their parts.

Collective complex buildings and cultural hubs, along with their public urban spaces, are selected as the main design themes as they play a crucial role within urban regeneration strategies, heritage protection/enhancement, and in reshaping the urban landscape. Considered as paradigms of the whole architectural reality, collective buildings meet the following crucial issues: composing by themes and with a civil meaning; interpreting collective behaviours through a spatial order; shaping inner space by structuring “architectural rooms”; reading places as historically, culturally, and stratified contexts; considering the construction as a coherent structural development. 

Moreover, the concepts of Life Cycle Design at different scales (territorial, urban, building and components) and the current potential of verification and analysis of the environmental impacts of buildings will be developed both theoretically and in design.

As to design spaces means to design a possibility of existence, space is the very matter of our design and it is defined by urban and inner relations, forms, excavation, texture, and light.

Representation of analytic tools and of design itself should be developed accordingly.

Studio activity

Our design projects will range different scales and issues, grafting architecture onto a wider strategy of regeneration and heritage enhancement of the corresponding urban region, thus increasing the possibility of understanding the urban palimpsest while establishing new urban relations, activities and meanings.

The teaching consists of lectures on the specific design themes and of some exercises combining theoretical and practical work.

Lectures on composition issues, on the design themes, and on the case studies will constitute a basis for the design arrangement referred to complex collective buildings. Lessons on construction will have as a focus the life cycle of the built environment at different scales (territorial, urban, building and components) and the "lightweight thinking" both in design and construction phases.

The studio is made of four intersected spheres:

• interpretative      diagrams and maps of the design context (Italian or Chinese), reading historical      layering, understanding and analysing present transformations;
• architectural benchmark      of meaningful examples related to collective, cultural, and mix use      buildings;
• design of public      buildings and spaces in an Italian or Chinese context, facing both      architectural issues and the grafting onto the urban space.
• exercises related to      the verification tools for the environmental impact, to construction      techniques and their life cycle, meant as a support for design choices.

Students are asked to understand and define the coherent urban region of their design, establishing an urban spatial strategy; to select case studies and provide an architectural benchmark of meaningful examples of buildings for cultural, collective, and public functions; to experiment and test design spatial structures through maquettes.

The studio work is organised through subsequent deliveries to check on the progress of students’ works, such as term papers, maquette studies, and mid-term workshop presentations, each targeted on specific goals concerning the design proposal.

The design proposal will challenge the different scales of design, from the reshaping of urban landscape as far as construction details and life cycle of materials. Students can choose between one Italian or Chinese context. In Xi’an case study, we will confront with a different and troublesome notion of heritage and we will focus on some composite heritage areas where pressure for transformations are greater while identity has become blurred and unreadable.  In the Italian case study, we will deal with a dismissed industrial area, characterised by listed modern heritage belonging to the 20-30s, which has now become a strategic regeneration and development area.

The Double Master Degree Programme schedules one design charrette every year to check on progress, opened to all the students of our Studio.

Examination

Attendance to ex-cathedra lectures, presentation of the group/individual work, and participation in discussions are compulsory. Students will be evaluated on the basis of their mid-term analytical works, their active participation in collective discussions and workshops, and of the quality and depth of their design proposal. 

Exercises works will be evaluated during the year and will contribute to the final evaluation.

The final examination will consist in evaluating the research and design achievements of each working group (mid-term exercises, mapping, booklets, drawings, and models), testing individually also the student’s critical awareness on related bibliographical subjects and theoretical issues covered in the Studio programme.

in Zhu Wenyi - Liu Boying (Eds), Survey, Research and Conservation of Chinese Industrial Architecture Heritage (No.5). Collected Papers of the Fifth International Academic Conference on Chinese Industrial Architecture Heritage