Coursebooks

Studio MA2 (Vigano)

AR-402(a)

Lecturer(s) :

Viganò Paola

Language:

English

Remarque

Inscription faite par la section

Summary

The Atelier explores the possibility of designing the city, the urban and territorial space, as a renewable resource; its scope is to plunge the last year master students into an intense confrontation among themes, scales, theoretical and design positions.

Content

The form of the contemporary city has changed and finds also in Switzerland its particular configuration: "a Großstadt in formation", writes André Corboz in Vers la Ville Territoire in 1990. Today this City-Territory works as spatial capital and agent of transformation, as support and place of potentiality. It is a layered territorial construction in which economic, agricultural and non-agricultural activities produce an original mix.

Beyond the center/periphery opposition, the City-Territory concept allows to read the dispersed contemporary condition as a potential for the construction of a sustainable and innovative urban dimension, where the notion of territorial recycling/reinvestment reverses the idea that urbanization is just a process of waste and considers it, instead, as a "stock" and a reservoir of energy.

The Atelier will work on the "Alpine-Leman City-Territory", a vast inhabited landscape stretching along the shores of the Leman lake, from the plain of Chablais to the Arve Valley, and will focus on the Geneva basin. This large transboundary metropolis is experiencing today a strong demographic growth, exerting an unprecedented pressure on its soils, especially considering the role they will play in the future for the ecosystem and for the construction of a new form of city.

Here, particular topographic and hydrographic systems, equipment and infrastructural meshes, agricultural landscapes in transformation, open spaces and heterogeneous residential tissues have drawn over time specific territorial structures, in some cases weak or discrete, that need today to be deeply reinterpreted and re-imagined.

To react to the challenges posed by the evolution of a ¿natural¿ and productive landscape, inhabited by a growing and increasingly diverse population and to question the idea and form of the contemporary western metropolis, the Atelier proposes - through the project - to conceive new spaces for the everyday life, based on the reinvention of traveling and living practices, on strategies aimed at opening new life cycles and at densifying and adapting the inhabited landscape to climate change.

Keywords

City-Territory, Resource, Life Cycle, Growth

Learning Prerequisites

Recommended courses

AR-402 UE Y Description. Operations (Barcelloni)

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, the student must be able to:

• Elaborate a reading of the territory
• Assess / Evaluate critically the contemporary urban condition
• Develop scenarios
• Develop inter-scalar strategies
• Elaborate prototypes and territorial urban projects

Teaching methods

The work is organized through a series of ¿design operations¿:

- fieldwork
- mapping
- prototypes designed as "concrete descriptions of future situations"

Expected student activities

Projective construction of urban scenarios and prototypes through the use of maps, architectural drawings and models. Understanding and interpretation of the proposed bibliography through short presentations.

Assessment methods

The materials produced by the student will be the basis of a presentation evaluated taking into account:

- the student's contribution to teamwork and individual
- the quality of the different representations and of the project
- the capacity to place the work in a broader context
- the deepening of the proposed literature

Supervision

Assistants

Yes

Resources

Bibliography

Provided at the beginning of the semester