21010204 - SENTIMENTAL TOPOGRAPHY

To broaden the students’ frame of reference in the field of design culture, through the in-depth investigation of the experience of important figures and works of 20th century architecture. The study is aimed at the understanding of the generative process of the work, at the identification of operative categories achievable in the present time. This approach presupposes the interpretative analysis and recognition of figures, themes and formal structures that are constant in the configuration of space, useful for orienting the students’ training, to allow them to make conscious and non-occasional choices.

Invite students to conceive study itineraries, which contribute to the construction of a personal reference system that they can draw on, through the comparison of design approaches.

To show the direct relationship between the study of these experiences and their translation within the architectural project. The theoretical and operational problems of the project are tackled through the in-depth study of certain cognitive and technical areas that define the complexity of the architectural phenomenon, with particular regard to the relationship between project and place, between old and new, between architecture and circumstance.
To promote the internationalization of didactics, through the construction of a geography of correspondences between figures of architects who are distant in space and time, linked by what Henri Focillon called “affinity of spirit in relation to forms”.
scheda docente | materiale didattico

Mutuazione: 21010204 SENTIMENTAL TOPOGRAPHY in Scienze dell'architettura L-17 TORRICELLI CARLOTTA

Programma

Sentimental Topography. Project and site in the Other Modernity.
The course proposes a series of study itineraries through heterodox experiences of modernity, in tension between the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Paths transversal to the canons crystallized by internationalism, which outline differentiated design approaches, supported by a common intention.
These are investigated not so much - or not only - in terms of their relations with local building traditions and site characteristics, but rather in terms of the compositional procedures that root the design of the new to the specificity of the site, through a hand-to-hand encounter between artefact and nature. The productive force of memory feeds the design thought, grafting the interventions on a terrain treated not as inert ground - as a pattern punctuated by isolated actions - but as a stratified system of signs, traceable and measurable, revealed by the design of the new.
Composition is the organization of the formal discourse, and of this the lectures - as well as the operative experiments that the students are required to carry out within the course - privilege the analysis of the criteria and procedures implemented to generate form and the study of the figurative variations that determine the character of architecture.
The aim is thus to bring out that inseparable link between analytical excavation and formal research, anchoring the theoretical dimension to the operative one and restoring to the project the role of a moment of synthesis of the relations between figure, form and construction. A poetic synthesis between art and technique, which denies the adoption of standardized procedures and redefines itself from time to time, in a cyclic dimension of time.
With these assumptions, the course will bring Scandinavian and from Iberian peninsula architects to the stage, passing from the Mediterranean as an obligatory reference for that search for origins that leads to another modernity, the path of which is still open today, in the topicality of its lesson.


Testi Adottati

Fernando Távora, On space organization (1962), in Estudo Prévio n. 20, Lisbon: CEACT/UAL Center for Studies of Architecture, City and Territory of the Autonomous University of Lisbon, 2022, p.29- 39.
Jörn Utzon, Platforms and Plateaus: Ideas of a Danish Architect, Zodiac 10, Milan 1962.
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, Rizzoli, New York, 1979.
Dimitris Pikionis, architect 1887-1968: A Sentimental Topography, Architectural Association, London, 1989.
Sigurd Lewerentz 1885-1975: The Dilemma of Classicism, Architectural Association, London, 1989.
José Ignacio Linazasoro, La memoria del orden. Paradojas del sentido de la arquitectura moderna, Abada Editores, Madrid, 2013.
Carlotta Torricelli, Classicismo di frontiera. Sigurd Lewerentz e la Cappella della Resurrezione/Frontier Classicism. Sigurd Lewerentz and the Chapel of the Resurrection, Il Poligrafo, Padova 2014.
Luigi Franciosini e Cristina Casadei, a cura di, Architettura e Patrimonio: progettare in un paese antico, Mancosu Editore, Roma 2015. (Edizione Italiana e Inglese).
Kenneth Frampton, The Other Modern Movement: Architecture, 1920–1970, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2021.
Álvaro Siza, Imagining the Evident, Monade, Lisbona, 2021.



Modalità Erogazione

The course will consist of a cycle of lectures supported by thematic study seminars. The students will be engaged in the interpretative analysis of the case studies, conducted through a work of decomposition and re-composition of the projects, aimed at investigating the process of formation of the works and accompanied by thematic re-elaborations. Then students will develop a design action, aiming to bring back to a personal synthesis the compositional strategies identified in the architectures studied through the itinerary carried out by the course. The course is delivered in English.

Modalità Frequenza

Attendance is mandatory for 75% of the course

Modalità Valutazione

Students will be evaluated through an oral test. They will discuss one of the theoretical topics listed in the course program, they will explain their interpretive analysis of one of the case studies proposed by the lecturer, they will present a project proposal capable of bringing the issues addressed during the course into current events.