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.
Students will work in groups. The final assessment is based on exercises in class, interim and final reviews.
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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.
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A. Rossi, The Architecture of the City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007.