ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN STUDIO

A city is an organism made of "fabrics". Social, economic, cultural and environmental fabrics, energy and information networks: the very functioning of an urban structure depends on their interaction. The more such fabrics are interrelated and efficient, the more the organism will be dynamic, versatile and capable of meeting the demands and aspirations of its citizens. While it is unnecessary and perhaps impossible to try and understand the form of such fabrics, it is possible and necessary to understand the logic of their relations. The modes of interaction between fabrics in fact express how citizens inhabit their city, express how citizens transform the city through their daily actions. Understanding such logic or, better still, understanding the logical basis of such relations and discerning their role in the definition of urban fabrics is one of the main objectives of urban morphology. Urban morphology is therefore the platform where all networks that make up global society naturally find their place: information, energy, environmental, functional networks, which find in urban fabrics their necessary economic, social and cultural plug-ins. Fabrics that morphology can ‘read’ and plan in order to respond effectively to the needs of contemporary cities. But fabrics tend to "polarize" in specific locations of urban areas, and "become active" through routes, generating hierarchical systems which are unstable in as much as they are dynamic and constantly changing. Therefore, polarities, routes and fabrics are key concepts on which the city has been founded and transformed for thousands of years: morphology relies on them to read urban phenomena. But above all, it is on such concepts that a design methodology can be established for the construction of the smart, sustainable, livable city of the XXI century.
The project of the city, as the foundation of a new and sustainable global society, in which all scales of contemporary living are enclosed, is the theme of the Studio. The urban morphology, as an operational tool able to "read" the environment and "translate" into a conscious design synthesis is the common thread of the learning experience.
The Studio consists of two learning modules: "Architectural and Urban Design" and "Landscape Architecture". The project of the city and that of the landscape are, in fact, two sides of the same coin, two inseparable fields if you want to effectively address the design of the sustainable city of the XXI century. To paraphrase J. B. Jackson exists, shall we say, just a single landscape: the anthropic landscape.
The work in the Studio is divided in two phases so interrelated: a theoretical-critical one, during which the student will learn the essential tools for a morphological ("structural") reading of the city and its environmental features; a purely operative one, during which the student will apply the knowledge acquired to the project of the city. An analytic and design Workshop will hinge between the two phases.