Sustainable Architecture Construction Studio

The Studio aims to build a set of robust abilities related to the design process:
– the ability to take technical and constructional design choices that are sustainable and appropriate to the building contexts;
– the ability to design buildings that are easy to construct, easy to maintain, durable and adequately performant at thermal, lighting and acoustic level;
– the ability to govern the structural conception of building structures so as to make them safe, stable, robust and adequate to their functional requisites;
– the ability to obtain a solid knowledge of the building sites, and the opportunities and constraints regarding them, on the basis of their geometrical and material features.

The activities of the workshop will be structured around an architectural design project in a specific context and will be integrated with a schedule of lectures.
The structural design competences will be centered around the following topics: types of general concepts on structures; typological classification of structures, structural materials, structural organization (vertical and lateral loads), structural models, and structural safety; forces; stresses and deformations; yield criteria; trusses and beams, with concepts about stability of equilibrium; structural analysis (determinate and indeterminate structures); simplified models; load analysis and preliminary structural design.

The technological design competences will be structured around the following topics: technological appropriateness; conditions for constructability; design and construction strategies for reducing the thermal loads of buildings for heating and cooling; design and construction strategies aimed to daylighting and acoustic comfort; construction strategies for opaque and transparent building envelopes (roofs and facades).

The competences regarding site surveying, staking out and monitoring will aim to build an understanding of the building sites and their relations with the candidate building forms. For doing that, they will provide some basic tools for the analysis of the urban or rural context where the new buildings have to be inserted. This will involve the use of digital maps and other types of geographic information. In this framework, the technologies for surveying the portion of land hosting the project will be presented, as well as some basic surveying and photogrammetric methods, including the application of Structure-from-Motion Photogrammetry and Terrestrial Laser Scanning. When possible, these tasks will be applied to a practical case. Once the project will be defined, a plan for tracing it out on the construction ground will be drawn. Finally, the design of the building will entail some procedures for monitoring the structural safety of the building to be applied along with the building serviceability. This task will be accomplished in cooperation with the analysis of the structural design of the building.