The course focuses on identifying and investigating the tension between the landscape—both archaeological and that shaped by the more recent historical past—and the contemporary urban fabric. This tension is central to the understanding and design of public space, as the city remains at the heart of our culture. The course also examines the distinction between the scales of architecture and urban planning, exploring the relationship between architectural interventions and the larger urban context.
Research and design approaches to public space have the potential to reveal fundamental cultural principles. Syntactic and formal methodologies constitute essential tools of urban design, contributing to the improvement of public life in cities through an interdisciplinary approach.
Understanding the relationship between natural, archaeological, and urban landscapes brings to light their historical, mythological, anthropological, and cultural dimensions. Landscape, understood as the convergence of natural and built environments, becomes a field in which multiple relationships intersect: between nature and the city, the collective memory of the city, its history, and its geography, ultimately finding expression in designed space. The study of the built environment thus provides a means of recognising and interpreting the concepts and forms that define the contemporary urban condition.
The theoretical and design investigation centres on how places of historical memory—including the remains of the more recent past, such as industrial buildings and their potential for adaptive reuse—can be interpreted, reconstructed, and reinvented through a critical engagement with the existing urban fabric.
The aim is not simply to restore the relationship between historical sites and their surroundings, but to explore their capacity to reconnect a fragmented social fabric by bringing their significance to the fore. The past is not replaced but expanded and reinterpreted, removed from its original context and incorporated into a dynamic process through which the future of the city is imagined and shaped.
Architectural investigation unfolds through the relationship between geographical topography and human intervention, from which the spaces of everyday life emerge. At the same time, it raises questions concerning the rapid technological advances in communications and networks.
The course proposes that the city is not merely a place of habitation but a symbolic and cultural construct, in which every architectural element—arcades, dwellings, public buildings, workplaces, squares, and networks—refers to broader political, social, or ideological meanings.
