Conference Program

Architectural Affordances. Typologies of Umbau
with Andreas Lechner, Gennaro Postiglione, Francesca Serrazanetti

The book investigates 30 international Umbau projects—architectural transformations—through three temporal scales: those spanning centuries, those exceeding a hundred years, and those occurring within a single century. Central to the book is the exploration of the dynamic interplay between enduring structural elements and temporary components, illustrating architecture’s ability to adapt to shifting societal and temporal demands. Traditional buildings demonstrate their versatility through established typologies, enabling diverse and enduring uses over time. In contrast, contemporary construction—often characterized by the separation of structural frameworks and building envelopes—introduces new complexities that call for inventive, autonomous, and adaptive design strategies.

Maike Gold, Andreas Lechner, Gennaro Postiglione, Francesca Serrazanetti, eds. (2024) Architectural Affordances – Typologies of Umbau, Napoli: Thymos Books.

https://thymosbooks.com/Architectural-Affordances

Experimental Diagrams in Architecture
with Lidia Gasperoni, Guro Sollid

After its golden age in the last decades of the 20th century, diagramming is still an experimental practice today, but it focuses on the synthesis of complexity and on new disciplinary territories on the edge between humanities, art, architecture, urban planning and landscape. This manual presents experimental diagrams through sensing, analysing and transforming space. The contributions critically delineate diagrammatic behaviours in architectural history, present the design practices of offices such as AZPML and MVRDV, take the medium to its extreme consequences, and outline future trajectories.

Lidia Gasperoni, ed. (2022), Experimental Diagrams in Architecture. Construction and Design Manual, Berlin: DOM Publisher.

https://dom-publishers.com/products/experimental-diagrams-in-architecture

Welcoming
with Gennaro Postiglione, deputy director Department of Architecture and Urban Design (DAStU), and Sara Protasoni, head PhD Program in Architectural Urban Interior Design (AUID)

Social Infrastructures in Upstate Rome
Lina Malfona

The Human and the Non-Human Towards a New Form of Being Authorial
Ettore Rocca

Research by Talking

chair: Alessandro Rocca

with: Orsina Simona Pierini and Valter Scelsi

Sala Riunioni, Ground Floor, Building 29

This conversation aims to present and discuss some research of particular interest that illustrates different ways of deepening knowledge and reflection on the architectural project. The research is presented through its results but also with its premises, uncertainties, technicalities, and paths.

Particular attention is given to the role of the author, his relationship with the object of the research, and we will try to investigate how the author decides to express himself, question himself, and define himself in the research activity.

Authorship(s) vis-a-vis the research path

chair: Fabrizia Berlingieri, Jacopo Leveratto

Sala Consiglio, 1st Floor, Building 29

The workshop explores the authorship’s dimension within doctoral research processes, presenting some examples of positioning, and discussing them starting from the individual research experiences of the participants. After an initial insight on the topic, the participants will collectively discuss the authorship’s meaning and relevance in their own research process, through a personal visual contribution on an authorial model of reference adopted within the research process. The workshop will delve by grouping approaches and tools, and then will focus on assessment and in-depth tests. Participants are expected to bring with them a printed A4 with their personal contribution, to work offline and together.

ARDETH, A magazine on the power of the project
with laria Valente, Sascha Roesler, Francesca Frassoldati, Cassandra Cozza and Lidia Gasperoni

While in the recent decades, the field of architecture has primarily focused on the self-sufficiency of individual buildings, the ARDETH #13 issue wishes to bring back scholarly attention to an approach that prioritizes energy conservation and generation at the urban scale. Such an approach relies on the idea of the productive (and not only consumptive) urban environment, in which the built fabric, topography, soil, bodies of water, green spaces, as well as regional climatic conditions (determined by sun, wind, rain flows, and seasonal temperatures), serve as potential parameters for energy production.

https://www.ardeth.eu/about/

STOÀ - Tools for architectural design pedagogies
with Alberto Calderoni, Carlo Gandolfi, Jacopo Leveratto

Teaching how to think architecture is one of the most challenging tasks in the profession of those who design the pedagogy of the project. Throughout the history of architectural education, numerous examples can be found of schools where thought has often transcended immediate horizons, fostering a community of individuals who have questioned the meaning of the teaching endeavor. At its core, teaching is a continuous inquiry, enriched by a dialectic shaped through the coexistence and expression of heterogeneous perspectives. Theories and worldviews capable of marking pivotal moments or shifts away from the status quo, which have profoundly influenced schools, educators, and students, are at the center of the new issue of Stoà Journal about Schools and Theories, which tries to show how these have shaped society and the ways of constructing realities, spaces, and cultural projects.

https://stoajournal.com/

Via Angelo Mosso, 3, 20127 Milano MI

Trajectories for a shared agenda on design driven research

chair Sara Protasoni

with ARENA (Ana Betancour, Johan De Walsche, Urs Hirschberg, Tadeja Zupančič), and EAAE (Roberto Cavallo, Claus Peder Pedersen, Jörg Schröder)

The joint discussion on the values of design-driven research in international doctoral research is at the heart of this meeting. The conference’s topic raises the question of recognizing a contextualized position of the researcher and of the construction of tailored and non-generalizable research paths in methodologies often assumed as the foundation of shared scientific research. Authorship is, in fact, the basis of design-driven research, of an often divining and iterative approach based on both intuitive aspects and comparison with contemporary themes and urgencies. What is changing at an international level? Is it possible to push for overcoming methodological barriers – quantitative/qualitative – that can put the value of an authorial “path” back at the center? Starting from the EAAE Charter on Architectural Research (09.02.2022), the roundtable discusses possible synergies at an institutional level to promote design-driven research within the international panorama as a recognizable method for architectural and artistic research.