95854 - AESTHETICS FOR THE CITY AND LANDSCAPE II

Academic Year 2021/2022

  • Teaching Mode: Traditional lectures
  • Campus: Bologna
  • Corso: Second cycle degree programme (LM) in Architecture and Creative Practices for the City and Landscape (cod. 5809)

Learning outcomes

Once completed the course, the student is able to identify the critical issues and opportunities for integrating the actions to protect and enhance the heritage, outlining priority frameworks to inspire intervention strategies.

Course contents

The course continues the focus on conceptual frameworks for defining urban and landscape aesthetics from some exemplary theoretical and descriptive constructs of individual cities, metropolises or megacities and, in the same perspective, deepens a series of elements and categories for the experience and analysis of the city, its forms and cultures. During the course of the integrated course, intermediate exercises are planned, if possible in the field, and a final exercise, which will use different media, such as writing, video, photos, drawing, as appropriate. The lessons and exercises are divided into thematic blocks, which are indicated below with the relevant bibliography:

1. Introduction to the course.
How can city and landscape aesthetics be further defined?

2. Elements and categories of city aesthetics (the window, the shop window, the wall, the subway, the street, the bridge and the door) and Temporary Citizenship (tourists, migrants, students).
Field exercise.

3. Categories for the aesthetics of the city: walking. Walkscapes: Dadaist visit, Surrealist walking, Lettrist and Situationist drift. Slowing down of perception, generative grammar of legs and world as apparition.
Jirō Taniguchi, The Walking Man.
Field exercise.

4. Images of the city: the cinema of the big city, Berlin. Symphony of a big city by Walter Ruttmann; René Clair, Sleeping Paris; Dziga Vertov, The man with the camera and Alberto Cavalcanti, Nothing but time.

5. Images of the city: Rome between imagination and reality: Francesco Pecoraro, Lo stradone; Valerio Mattioli, Remoria; Cristian Raimo, Roma.
Viewing, analysis and commentary on Federico Fellini, Roma and Gianfranco Rosi, Sacro GRA.

6. Elements of the city and urban landscape: vertical dwelling and horizontal dwelling.
Images of city: James Ballard's High Rise and Ben Wheatley's High Rise.

Final exercise.

Readings/Bibliography

1. The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries, Edited By Christoph Lindne and Miriam Meissner, London, Routledge, 2019; Urban Culture: Exploring Cities and Cultures, By Alan C Turley, London, Routledge, 2004.

2. G. Simmel, Bridge and door, https://it.scribd.com/doc/217039509/Georg-Simmel-Bridge-and-Door; S. Kracauer, Farewell to the Linden Arcade, in The Mass Ornament, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1995, and The Underpass, in Streets in Berlin & Elsewhere, London, Polity Press, 2006; W. Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Princeton, Princeton U.P., 2010.

3. F. Careri, Walkscapes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8rdI20LrOk; Jirō Taniguchi, The Walking Man: And Other Perambulations, Wisbech, Fanfare, 2004.

4. A. Somaini, Cronogrammi della metropoli [Chronograms of the metropolis]. Clair, Ruttmann, Vertov, Ejzenštejn, in M. Vegetti (ed.), Filosofie della metropoli. Spazio, potere, architettura nel pensiero del Novecento [Philosophies of the metropolis. Space, power, architecture in twentieth-century thought], Roma, Carocci, 2009, pp. 153-182.

5. F. Pecoraro, Lo stradone, Milano, Ponte alle Grazie, 2019; V. Mattioli, Remoria. La città invertita, Roma, Minimum fax, 2019; C. Raimo, Roma non è eterna: Vita, morte e bellezza di una città, Roma, Chiarelettere, 2021.

6. J. Ballard, High Rise (1975), London, Triad Panther, 1985;  R. Barthes, The Eiffel Tower (1964), in The Eiffel tower and other mythologies, New York, Hill and Wang, 1990.

Teaching methods

The course is designed to provide tools for deepening the discipline. The course will be conducted as part of the integrated course through lectures, seminars, exercises and study visits.

Assessment methods

The examination is oral as part of the final examination of the integrated course. The exam will focus on the topics covered in the classroom lessons and on the texts in the programme, but it may also be based on any in-depth studies that the student has presented either orally during the lessons or in written form after the end of the course.
In detail:
- the verification of the formative objective of acquiring the main philosophical-social elaborations on the contemporary city and on the images, cultures and forms of urban life and landscape and the contribution that the different forms of expression have provided to the shaping of the experience of places and to the understanding of urban phenomena will be carried out through the presentations of individual texts or audiovisual materials agreed with the lecturer within the course;
- the verification of the formative objective of acquiring the tools to read and critically analyse the urban landscape and complex places within it will be implemented through the elaboration of field surveys using texts, films and creative products;
- both tests will be completed by the individual oral examination at the end of the integrated course, which will include questions on the texts in the bibliography and on the various final papers provided.


The final assessment will be determined on the basis of the following indicators:
1 - Knowledge of the subject matter covered in the course of the lectures (0 to 6)
2 - Knowledge of the insights provided in the bibliography (from 0 to 6)
3 - Quality of presentation (0 to 6)
4 - Personal elaboration of the contents (from 0 to 6)
5 - Intermediate tests, exhibitions or papers (0 to 6)

Teaching tools

The specific bibliographies for the different parts of the course will be analysed and acquired during the various lessons, starting from the tools available in the texts indicated in the programme. The didactic material presented in the course of the lectures will be made available to the student in paper format or electronically via the Internet, depending on the access restrictions, as will be indicated at the beginning of the course.

Office hours

See the website of Andrea Borsari