The Studio is focused on challenging the fragile territories of contemporary cities and on developing a critical reading of common and existing urban aspects individuating circumstances, constitutive elements and voids, relations among parts, scale and distances. This initial investigation and then the further stages of the design process will open a critical relationship between architecture and the city in order to examine and rearrange how the space is organized.

The project should strive to re-assemble existing urban materials and to re-elaborate elements, fluxes and connections with the scope to produce confrontation and coexistence. The matter is not how to define the shape of a stratum by an ordinate and controlled urban process or design idea, but rather how to continue processes of accumulation and stratification. Architecture can be used as a method of investigation to conceive questions and to make hypothesis for future transformations of the city.

This course aims to deal with the remains of modern transformations of the territory of Volos at the fringe towards North where the Panthessaliko Stadium, built for the 2004 Olympic Games, lies. The area is characterized by a large variety of disjointed buildings, some of them abandoned or underused, along with major infrastructures set in an incomplete and undefined urban fabric.

The given assignment requests to design new collective housing that will include the re-use of an abandoned hotel together with the addition of new adjacent buildings. Moreover the proposals should envision new linkages with the existing buildings on the surrounding as well as the re-programming of surfaces for the formation of new public spaces.

The proposals will explore the impact of middle-scale interventions and their consequences at the urban level, creating a transition between the small scale of existing residential unit plots and the 'bigness' of public facilities. 

Students will work in groups. The final assessment is based on exercises in class, interim and final reviews. 

J. Corner (ed.), Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

M. Gausa (ed.), Housing + single-family housing. Boston, Mass.: Birkhauser-Publishers for Architecture, c2002.

D. Leatherbarrow, Architecture Oriented Otherwise. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009.

D. Leatherbarrow, Uncommon Ground, Architecture, Technology and Topography. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.

F. Lorraine, Drawing for Urban Analysis. London: Laurence King, 2011.

F. Maki, Investigations in Collective Form. St. Louis: Washington University, 1964.

P. Matvejevic, Mediterranean: A cultural Landscape. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1999.

A. Rossi, The Architecture of the City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007.