93725 - ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN II

Learning outcomes

Once completed the course, the student is able to formulate the actions of protection and enhancement of the tangible and intangible heritage in terms of transformation strategies and to communicate them in an effective and reasoned way, preparing coherent documents and drawings.

Course contents

Starting from the current condition of the contemporary city and the life of its inhabitants, the course aims to provide students with some useful tools to intervene in the processes of urban transformation and regeneration. These tools concern both a) the drafting of new programs and b) the techniques of architectural and urban composition.

The global crisis of our development model directly involves architecture and its ability to represent a horizon of common consciousness in which the citizen can recognize himself. The overspecification of the relationship between form and function have made the modern urban environment a fragile place, which decays much more rapidly than the urban fabric inherited from the past. The challenge we face concerns the construction of an "open city" (Sennet), made up of dense and diversified places, in which the form is not functionally overdetermined and finds its reasons in the recognizability of which the symbolic and archetypal dimension invests architecture. In other words, the goal is to help build a city in which the interaction between physical environment and social behavior generates what Quaroni calls the "city effect".
From this point of view, the regeneration strategies and the new programs primarily concern the anthropological and figurative dimension of architecture and the "open system" mentioned can only be understood as a "narrative system". Students will therefore be called, in a first phase, to invent the plot of the story they intend to tell, according to the theories of prose and literature.

The tool for prefiguring the narrative strategy is drawing.
The re-drawing of the city allows us to construct an intentional image of its narrative-figurative structure, proceeding "gradually" by adding unity of meaning: the generatrixes of the plan, the type-morphological texture, the monumental emergencies, which differentiate the continuity of the urban space by establishing the texture of topological interrelations. The same intentional image allows us to identify, on the other hand, the empty areas without meaning to which architecture can restore a role within the urban organism.

The drawing is also the means that allows to intervene at that intermediate level between the idea and its completed formal expression which is represented by the architectural type intended as a formal structure. The re-drawing of the city according to the categories of the Italian tradition of urban studies and the architectural typology are only preparatory to the invention of a scenic space in which the real challenge that the student will have to face will be that of characterizing, much more than describing or classifying.

Readings/Bibliography

Amistadi et Al. 2021. Mapping Urban Spaces. Designing the European City. London: Routeledge.

Amistadi, L. 2019. Una casa come loro. Curzio Malaparte e John Hejduk. In Archiletture. Forme e narrazione tra architettura e letteratura, ed. A. Borsari, M. Cassani Simonetti, G. Iacoli. Milano-Udine: Mimesis (English translation provided by the course).

Amistadi, L., Clemente I. et al. 2015. John Hejduk. Soundings 0/I. Firenze: Aión.

Sklovskij, V. 19936. Theory of Prose (1925). Dallas: Dalkey Archive Press.

Teaching methods

The course is organized through workshop activities with design / application exercises of the concepts acquired, the students will work on the architectural design project divided into thematic groups.

Assessment methods

The final exam will be taken jointly and the evaluation will take into account the results achieved in the various activities ('Architectural Design II', 'History of Contemporary City and Landscape', 'Aesthetics for the City and Landscape I'). The final exam will combine the evaluation of the design exercises developed within the individual teaching modules and an oral discussion on the contents of the activities carried out during the course.

The judgment of the exam will depend on the quality of the exercises and the discussion of presentation of the same, with references to the bibliography of the course. In addition to the appropriateness of the project outcome and its coherence, both with respect to the initial premises and the guidelines of the course, particular importance will be attributed to the design and representation techniques.

The exam will be preceded by a seminar, to which all those enrolled in the course are obliged to attend. At the end of the seminar, the student who has completed the required papers will be able to take the exam (details of the papers will be provided at the beginning of the course). The exam will take place with the exhibition and presentation of the project documents.

The examination commission will assign the student an evaluation following an evaluation grid that will consider the quality of the exposure, the knowledge acquired, the theoretical in-depth study, the correctness of the design project and the quality of the tables.

Further specifications will be provided as the course progresses.

Teaching tools

Each student will have to equip himself with tools for the development of the design project, both for hand drawing and for digital drawing. All tables and papers will be developed on the basis of a layout that will be provided at the beginning of the course. The development of architectural models is foreseen.

Office hours

See the website of Lamberto Amistadi