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Urban design and landscape architecture

Educational objectives

The goal of the laboratory is to sensibilize students putting them in the condition to consciously operate on the scale of urban design. Particular attention is given to public open spaces following a cognitive itinerary which focuses on principle questions such as the development and transformation of the city and the contemporary metropolis, and on the direct confrontation with its physical environment.

Course contents

The city is an object of inquiry of noteworthy complexity, the result of an intricate system of relationships between the physical environment and human behaviour, that does not permit any type of reductive interpretation. Numerous are the viewings and competencies necessary for a comprehension of site phenomena and such comprehension is a prerequisite for an intervention on the city that searches for adequate responses to urban decline.

Consequently a formative approach will be practised dealing with both analytical and design considerations, with the intent to provoke profound interrogations and to acquaint the student with a few fundamental issues.

1 the relationship with historical periods, by direct scrutiny of traditional theories in urban planning and the area under study.(in particular Milan and its metropolitan area)

2 the use of the instruments of urban analysis (morphological, typological, demographical, site settlement), and the modality with which they can proficiently be utilised in requalification projects,

3 the relationship with the physical aspect of the site; with the intent to activate the student with his peculiar sensibility and individual capacity to feel to "feel the spirit of the place" interpretating the problems and potentials through design stategy.

Today’s main orientations toward the interpretation of the city and territory will be mapped. Within this framework point of view that assumes site planning as a privileged instrument able to continue the urban narration will be purposed. The social instances and the materiality of the three-dimensional space will be confronted maintaining at the same time a close dialogue between the scale of the urban intervention and the architecture.

Structure of the course

The laboratory is organised in lessons ex cathedra and project exercises. Some seminar activities are foreseen: Literature Seminars will present and analyse thoughts and realisations of some 19^th and 20^th century protagonist in urban planning; with the Contemporary Voices Seminar there will be an in depth study of crucial questions regarding the modern city : security, competition between urban systems, phenomenona of activity concentration (zoning), resistance or decline of the notion “community” in today’s metropolis, preservation and invention of landscapes, relationship between site density and dispersion; and personal professional experiences will be presented.

Urban planning (B.E. Campbell)

Educational objectives

Considering the peculiar challenges that contemporary times have asked of town planning, the lessons are organized to investigate the metropolitan phenomena as the result of a complex and dense relational system, from the territorial scale to the most minute network of spaces within a neighborhood.

A sustainable design process, which includes even the architectural choices, requires the decyphration of this dynamical context and the capacity to govern it by an adequate intervention strategy.

Therefore to set and verify the adequacy of the instruments to analyse territorial and urban contexts, the course will comprehend a study case-the lombardy territory- and some practical exercises.

Particular attention will be given to landscape with regards to both the theoretical sequence of questions laid out and also some experiences of landscape architecture.

Urban planning (S. Sbattella)

The course is intended to offer further theoretical contributions considered necessary to critically start the design experience. Furthermore the culture maturation will be strongly encouraged. Students are asked to recognize and put to use the different problems given by the various contexts, in a contemporary fashion, without forgetting tradition and history. The course will progressively explore some architypes, crucial for the interpretation of site planning such as thresholds, enclosures, clearings, etc.