Architectural Design Studio for Complex Constructions 1

Studio1 and 2, with a progressive approach, will focus students’ attention on the role of architecture in the transformation processes of the 21st century city: an “urban device” acting in both physical and cultural setting of the city and capable of shaping new urban environments and civic spaces.
The design of a complex building provides to the Studio the educational focus, whereby students are required to synthesize theoretical positions, expressive intensions, formal and constructive conception with an integrated disciplinary approach since the early-stage design.
The sites and themes selected for the design exercise encourage the debate between the work of the Studio and local, national and international institutions, and promote a mutual exchange between academic research and society.

Students will tackle the project of a complex building as a coherent technical, functional and aesthetic process. They are expected to achieve a high level of design resolution, including the project of the building structure, material assembly, environmental systems and all the technological aspects of construction, as well as an understanding of the constructive processes whence a building emerges.
The studio allows the students to sharpen their skills and develop their own original approaches and offers them the tools to grasp a rigorous and coherent design methodology to determine the appropriate relationships between formal conception and the technical constructional requirements.
An essentially maieutic procedure is complemented by a systematic practice of supporting disciplinary knowledge of students, based on specific analytic exercises dedicated to the various design themes.
The mix of educational forms (lectures, project work, debates, seminars, visits, study trip) is specifically designed to enable students to “experience architecture” and capture that special bond between space and everyday life. As Ernesto Nathan Rogers taught us, that special bond is what gives roots, sense and recognisability to architecture, whether we work on a project for a city or a small architectural design, making sense of the things we do.