The Studio Subject
The topic of the Studio is housing design in an urban context since the dwelling is still a key factor in the contemporary city, and fine housing projects contribute to enhancing the quality of the urban space. The program of the Studio is grounded on a full immersion in design topics, starting from simple exercises as the project of a room and getting on to more complex issues as the relationship between shape and expression.
The first stage concerns how to arrange an apartment layout. The students have to acquire the skills to organize the habitable space, set the relationship among furniture, space and people movement, and pursue a building access arrangement to merge the typological rules with the increasing need for social space. This part of the Studio is addressed to study the relationships between space and body, turning them into the floor layout, setting distances, transparencies, paths, and dynamic or stasis points according to criteria from Euclidean geometry and Gestalt.
The second stage of the Studio aims to deepen the student’s awareness about the relationship between the type, the façade and the expression of the loadbearing structure. Consequently, the concept of tectonic is addressed to explain how to handle the relationship between formal and constructive aspects, providing the students with the tools to begin to set their own language. Another fundamental subject of the Studio is developing a sensitiveness towards the context. Indeed, the housing design can be considered a weaving of relationships among architecture, urban environments, history and human life.
