• Soft Skills

The Studio concludes the training course and addresses the question of the architectural project and the intervention on the physical environment in various disciplinary areas, in line with the didactic contents of the Course of Study.

In the Studio, in which different disciplines are integrated, the students are asked to prepare a complex and innovative project through the tools of architecture and urban design, having mastered the feasibility of the project.

Students:

- acquire knowledge and understanding skills to design in complex and problematic contexts that require non-standardized and homologated solutions, but instead imply the search for innovative solutions;

- are capable of using the knowledge acquired to describe and interpret the settlement phenomena and address the complex problems of architecture, cities and territories;

- are capable of elaborating, conceiving and implementing the architectural project in various thematic areas;

- are capable of formulating and solving the problems of the different intervention scales in an innovative way.

Place-identity is a dynamic process of unending construction and reinvention. Architectural design and research should express a critical approach towards the challenges and global processes affecting the identity of historical urban landscapes. Design can be a crucial tool of knowledge, challenging the responsibility of a critical interpretation of settlements’ forms and historic formation, seen as a precondition for an integrated approach to conservation, regeneration, and development of their parts.  

The Studio’s design projects will deepen the relationship between old and new, analysing in an integrated and multiscale approach the complex issues involved in any intervention on the pre-existent urban and building reality. A case study will be selected in either Italian or Chinese context, confronting with respective conditions of local and global phenomena, facing different tradition of intervention and current dynamics of transformation of heritage and cultural rural landscapes –now at the risk of further alterations related to their touristic exploitation.

The teaching consists of lectures, analysis exercises and design combining theoretical and practical work.

 Architectural design will arise from the mutual relationship between the urban structure and the building, showing the awareness of a reading and design strategy integrating heritage reuse, design enhancement and new sustainable construction of prototypes, within a comprehensive strategy of regeneration of the whole historic landscape. Concepts and methods for reading building and places as historically, culturally, and stratified contexts will be introduced to provide interpretative and design tools to support the urban landscape strategy.

Lectures on architectural composition issues, design themes, and case studies will also constitute a basis to deepen the architectural design.

As far as heritage buidings are concerned, essential tools for a proper approach to conservation project will be integrated with specific design solutions for compatible reuses of historical buildings. Particular attention will be also given to historic buildings’ accessibility and technological adaptation, which are an important part of the project of reuse.

The activity focusing on building physics will provide students also with methodology and tools to support the design for low carbon communities in the framework of “rurban” regeneration processes. Special emphasis will be given on the rational use of energy and the use of low energy technologies and renewable energy sources in the design process.

The design work is developed from four intersecting activities:

• At landscape scale, reading of physical characteristics, interpretation of its tangible and intangible cultural values, evaluation of problems and opportunities, definition of landscape quality aims;
• At urban scale, mapping of the design context, reading typologies, morphologies, topographies and their historical layering while understanding and analysing present transformations, in order to define the rules for regeneration, revitalisation and in their constructive and maintenance techniques and analytic investigations of these transformations over time.enhancement. At building scale, the layered complexity of historic buildings, which is their major value, will be analysed both in their architectural and typomorphological formal structures and in their structural and material reality. The study of degradation processes of buildings materials in order to define appropriate techniques of conservation will be joint to the project of reuse (including important related aspects of technological adaptations) and architectural integration (infill, rewriting, re-morphologisation).
• At building physics level, development of an environmental conscious approach in the building energy design (envelope and technical systems) though concepts and advanced design tools. Case studies will be presented and discussed.

All those activities will converge in the proposal for a design enhancement of a landscape section.

Specific bibliography (books chapters, papers, articles) complementing the general course bibliography will be suggested by the teachers during the course.

 Study trip/Yearly workshop The studio is integrated with an eligible study trip in first term and a yearly spring workshop in China, substituting an elective course.

None

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

Attendance to ex-cathedra lectures, presentation of the group/individual work, and participation in discussions are compulsory. Active and constant participation in weekly reviews, collective discussions and workshops, as well as mid-term analytical works and exercises works evaluated during the semester will contribute to the final evaluation.

The final evaluation is centred on the design project, and will take into consideration the general learning skills and progress made, knowledge and understanding demonstrated through the application to the case study and design work, the capability of making judgements based on knowledge, and the communication skills in relation to the contents. Specifically, it will consist of evaluating the quality and depth of the design work, the understanding demonstrated through the analysis work and design achievements of each working group (mid-term exercises, mapping, booklets, design, drawings and models), as well as in testing individually the student’s knowledge, understanding and presentation skills (critical awareness on the contents and theoretical issues covered in the Studio programme as well as on related bibliographical subjects).