Living and dwellings: culture of living and the design of urban architecture

Research focus

The Peer review has evaluated this group as Average

The research team has focused on the processes of transformation of the city, through the elaboration of projects aimed at directing, with architectural techniques, the configuration of the new cityscapes, orienting the peripheries, suburbs, border areas and the large new infrastructures in order to give them the urbanity characters proper of a big city. The structural frame of the design researches, applied to different sites and contextual conditions (from monumental areas to old towns, to historical peripheries, to suburbs and border areas) is a study of existing constructions, as fundamental reference for the identification of the reason for the transformations and the typological heritage, i.e. the replies, provided by the discipline in the course of history, to the different design themes. The typological research associates, from a critical point of view, the definition of the new architectures with the experience, with memory, with the heritage of knowledge represented by architecture from the past. The design decisions are thus developed along logical itineraries, symmetrically with respect to the processes of critical knowledge, giving imagination free reins in the presence of reason, and in other words with the greatest possible control and rigor, to guarantee the dignity and decorum of the construction. In particular, in the last few years an initial sphere of activity has been consolidated on the themes of building in the built tissue and building among monuments. The research team has provided a clearer definition of the concepts and techniques by means of which buildings, new or existing, may be arranged together to form the urban space, a site that will last in time, where the persistent presences feature a stratification of the culture of the inhabitants, bearing witness to the collective memory. With the intention of contributing to contain the conformism of the more and more diffused practice of self-referential architecture, the research tackles the theme of transformation by means of a cognitive process aimed at understanding and respecting the sense of the history of the city and its buildings, striving to improve the conditions of use, involving various levels, scales and modalities of intervention within the context of a dialogue between the motives of the past and those of the present. The relationship with the persistent facts of the city and the territory is linked to the second sphere of work, that centers on the theme of the relationship with landscapes inherited from the past. Also in this case the concept of identity is central; it is something singular and typical, but also a choice, in the sense that it 91 reflects our intentions. The identity of a place is, in fact, what survives the continuous changes of the spatial and functional arrangements of the territory, and gives an indelible character to the sceneries where the existence of human beings, and that of forms, merge. The research team purports to assure that the history of the landscape is represented as an element of the logical process of architectural design and construction of the forms of contemporary living. In fact, it aims to orient the planning and the act of building, between renunciation as reasonable, responsible and therefore logic refraining from gestures that are out of time and out of place, and the inevitable necessity of assuring that also our age may responsibly translate its own culture of living into built structures. The third sphere of activity, finally, centers on the culture of living, that represents a return to a theme, that of the “home for everyone”, that has been explored by the research team for a long time, since the early Seventies, in line with the prolific lesson of Franco Albini and Biagio Garzena. The new housing emergency is aggravated by the multiplication of the family nuclei, the new migratory flows and the mobility of the labor market, but also by the diffusion of a certain “economic vulnerability” on the part of families, that gives rise to a widespread and multifaceted anxiety. In this context one must also consider the presentation, by the media, of the public heritage of municipal lowincome housing as symbol of a lifestyle marked by hardship and squalor, allegedly a direct result of the architectural solutions, rather than of the deplorable management combined with the low income level of the inhabitants. The team works on solutions that may help prevent the negative interaction between low building density, that produces a formal and functional vagueness of the open space, and excessive housing density, and strives to build medium to high density tissues, that may make it possible to interpret and enhance different configurations, fractures and interruptions. With the objective of highlighting specific urban and territorial individualities, where both the settlement model characterized by a apparent “closing” of the space, and the one characterized by ample perspectives may represent spatial arrangements worthy of tackling, in order to enhance the specific character of the location.

Departments

Dipartimento di Progettazione dell’Architettura

Professors

Full Professors
Raffaele Pugliese
Associate Professors
Lorenzo Spagnoli
Assistant Professors
Marco Lucchini