This master Design studio will teach the way and provide the tools to design a piece of town in coherent relation with the built environment. It wants to train the student in understanding the preexistences, detaching existing values, and using this knowledge as basement for a proposal of urban growth. To do so the studio has chosen a site suggested by the municipality of Milano within the program Ri-formare Milano.
THE COMPLEXITY OF THE CITY
The workshop will introduce to the complexity of the structure of the city.
Working in successive approaches, from city scale to architectural scale, forth and back, will allow understanding the urban form and its determining aspects: the previous ones before urbanizing, related to the shape of the territory; the ones due to infrastructure, both urban and territorial; and of course the social aspects, related to human activity and its translation to space.
Several patterns -different in geometry, size, shape and contents- collision at the mentioned areas. An opportunity to saw these contrasted realities arises; we will check in what amount the intervention on the site is capable to respond to this challenge.
While the overall goal is to regenerate-reconnect-reactivate this relevant urban area, the closer approach wants to requalify the area from a physical, social and cultural point of view (requalification of the built, of the open spaces and of the relationship with the global urban landscape), according to different strategic decisions.
The themes to explore along the design process should be tightly connected with a ‘projective vision’ of the quality of the place, in relation to new uses, social environment and sustainable development. We want to insist that careful reading and understanding of the place identity will be crucial to lead the design process to an integrated building proposal.
We will pay special attention to integration by focussing on the borders of our intervention. A priority goal is to work out the physical connections to the environment: we will study how to establish relations with the surrounding blocks, occupied by different types of buildings and public spaces.
A MULTISCALE APPROACH
We have seen that working on Caserma Montello provides the opportunity to interrelate the existing neighbourhoods.
But focusing the site itself also gives the chance to discuss about public and open space in town. Understanding that public space is what makes a town be a town- by providing the space for socialisation- is crucial. Public space will have a direct relation with the proposed buildings, acting also as an extension to them.
So public space becomes the meeting point between the reflection on the city and the idea on the buildings. Going in both direction, from city scale to architectural scale, and simultaneously from the room to the masterplan, is the only way to achieve an integrated result.
LIFE IS HYBRID
Regarding the program a mixed use is proposed: working, housing, commercial, services, leisure. A well-done interrelation of human activities means improving living quality. Therefore offering the place and space for cultural, economic, social, etc. actions becomes a major. Hybridisation is the key to make towns alive.
In order to deepen the knowledge on certain requirements of the program, prof. Sandro Rolla will develop the specific issue ‘Architecture of Exhibition Spaces’.
ARCHITECTS DEAL WITH COMPLEXITY
By working both multiscale and multiuse we pursue the integration of diverse components of our discipline: landscape, technology, structure, art.
To make humans’ life comfortable -that is the overall aim of our discipline- we have a wide range of instruments: from the most conceptual to the most specific ones. Our decisions have to take in account all kind of factors that can be external or internal to our proposal; factors that belong to different categories. We have to deal with the physical aspect of the site, with the functional requirements, with the economic conditions, the technical possibilities, with weather and solar orientation, and so on.
Within these demands and acting as transversal requirement the concept of sustainability will inform any decision taken. Non sustainable architecture/urbanism is senseless; infrastructure and buildings should achieve solvency and comfort by passive means as much as possible.
OUTCOMES
As already said, the general aim is to get the skills and knowledge to be capable to propose a piece of town.
Of course an extremely simplified piece, but able to support the discussion about the relation with other parts of the town, and able to allow the reflection on diverse building typologies and their physical and formal relations.
To achieve this aim special emphasis will be given to the understanding of space in its three dimensions. Sections, perspective drawing and models shall be used from the very beginning, understood as tools more then as result representations. The learning process, participative and experimental, will be taken very much in consideration. At the same time strategies concerning the best way to explain aims and results will be trained.
According to this prof. Andrea Cammarata will introduce the reflection on ‘Virtual space and Visual communication’.
A DOUBLE OPPORTUNITY
Ri-formare Milano is an educational project that aims to involve students and teachers in realizing design proposals for areas and buildings in state of decay and neglect, selected from the cast provided by the Municipality of Milano.
The second edition, starting with the beginning of A.A. 2014-2015, works upon the urban areas located in the western sector of the city, where the Universal Exhibition EXPO2015 "Feeding the planet, energy for life" will be held in the second half of 2015. The functional and economic dynamics this important event will set up are understood as an opportunity to foresee and propose changes in an area that during recent years has suffered a strong transformation process.
Analyzing in deepness this area constitutes one of the foundations of the project; another will be careful observation of examples and case studies, both in Milano and in Barcelona, as these towns host the universities of the course teachers.
Barcelona since the Olympic Games in 1992 has gone through an important renewal of its cityscape, becoming a reference for the urban development of consolidated towns. The different proposals, mainly at the 22@ area, and the way they have been carried out, as well as the places that still have to be arranged, offer a large range of opportunities to think upon town, space and civic life in the 21st century.
A visit to BCN guided by prof. Karin Hofert will provide direct experience on these issues.