D1 - Knowledge and understanding skills
Advanced interdisciplinary knowledge for reading and analyzing complex urban contexts and multifunctional architectural programs to draw up architectural and urban projects to respond to these contexts

D2 - Ability to apply knowledge and understanding
Ability to apply the analytical knowledge acquired in a multi-level design processing (graphical representation, written report, dimensional program development, constructive evaluation)

D3-Autonomy of Judgment
Ability to develop independent judgments on intervention strategies in a complex urban context

D4 - Communication skills
Ability to communicate acquired knowledge and design assumptions, both graphic and textual.

D5 learning skills
Ability to reprocess and transfer the acquired knowledge also to other contexts, related to existing urban sites

Architectural Design Laboratory III

The project that will be assigned to the architectural composition module will have as its object an existing urban settlement with the request of its transformation and reconversion to new uses with newly built parts, reuse parts of existing structures and redefinition of all open spaces.
Nowadays architecture is positioned on a thin line between a disciplinary tradition inherited from the past and the complexity of contemporary culture. The categories of space, technology, functionality and architectural form no longer seem able to understand the fragmentation and multidirectionality of today's experience. Opening up to multiplicity is a fascinating challenge but it also involves risks. The influence of the means of communication makes everything accessible but often reduces complex realities to mere signs and objects of consumption. Often architects are deceived by the iconicity of many representations and do not realize that these are only a superficial level of a reality that also includes a cultural, social and material dimension.
Designers and students must take responsibility for developing a critical consciousness and being able to translate the different facets of reality through the expressive means of architecture. Whatever the problem to be faced, we must not forget that designers work with space and materials, with uses and users, with an inherited tradition and placing artifacts in existing settlements. The real challenge is to incorporate cultural and social complexity into true three-dimensional habitable structures. Every architectural element should be able to talk about many things and, in parallel, to maintain its own specificity.
There is, however, not a certain and univocal way to achieve this: there is a continuous dialectic between culture and materiality, between expression and operation, between specificity and abstraction. Some of the most interesting contemporary interventions have a narrative value; they are able to recount a reality by creating a multi-level interface that critically dialogues with the context in which they arise. In this way they resist the reduction to pure image and assume a "stratified" presence that raises questions about the settlement, social and cultural reality: these issues evolve over time, responding to changes in the environment. Architecture thus becomes a relational device that opens up to new readings. It also dialogues with existing structures, transforming their relationships and meanings into a semantic modification activity.
Putting it into practice becomes a continuous challenge: architecture is operational and elusive at the same time; when it defines something, it opens up new problems; works with physical elements but needs to continually rethink the way they are arranged. If design teaching is able to suggest this continuous need to question, it will give an uninterrupted cultural curiosity. Each project will become an opportunity to review certainties and discuss new ideas.
During the semester the students will face a project composed of multiple realities: they will be asked to relate them with a work of analysis of the context and of the program, with a research of significant precedents, with a design elaboration that will be developed at a constructive level.

On the relationship between architecture and city:
Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Architetture e Città, Mazzotta, Milan, 1973
M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, MIT Press, Cambridge 1996

On reuse and dialogue with the existing:
Ignasi del Solà Morales, "From Contrast to Analogy. Transformations in the Conception of Architectural Intervention ", in Lotus International, 46, 1985, pp.37-45
Bruno Reichlin, “Riflessioni sulla Conservazione del Patrimonio Architettonico” in Riuso del Patrimonio Architettonico, monographic issue of the Quaderni dell'Accademia di Architettura, Mendrisio, edited by Bruno Pedretti and Bruno Reichlin, pp.11-30, 2011

On constructive thinking:
Kenneth Frampton: Tettonica e Architettura, Poetica della Forma Architettonica nel XIX e XX Secolo, Skira, Milan 1999.
Various Authors (edited by Pietro Valle), "Il Cantiere", n.2 of the magazine Viceversa, June 2015

The IV Architectural Design Laboratory is divided into three didactic modules: architectural composition, architectural restoration, structural problems of historical buildings.
The three modules are closely coordinated with each other and take the study area as a pretext for verifying the theoretical assumptions of the different disciplinary approaches.
In addition to design-type seminars, each module will consist of theoretical lessons aimed at critical illustration of the different intervention methodologies and the development of disciplinary tools, which will find scope for application in the area subject to design experimentation.
The design theme, introduced by a series of introductory lectures and texts to be read, will be articulated by three exercises that will organize the semester in successive phases.

Other information, as well as the teaching materials of the Laboratory and the individual modules that compose it, will be made available by the teachers on the Moodle platform.

Each exercise, presented publicly during joint reviews that will take place at the end of each phase, will be evaluated by the teacher and will receive a partial vote that will contribute to the final vote. Each exercise will consist of graphical tables, a three-dimensional model and a written report: such material will be delivered to the teacher in a digital graphic format (graphic tables, texts and photos of the model).
Class attendance during laboratory hours is mandatory. The teacher wants to talk with each student or group as often as possible in order to gradually structure the design process.