DE RERUM - English

D E

R E RUM

DESI G N

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DE RERUM DESIGN XXV 1987 - 2012 QUASAR DESIGN UNIVERSITY scientific coordination general coordination preface

Benedetto Todaro Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier Luna Todaro

writings Franco

Bovo

Orazio

Carpenzano

Crisrtiana

Costanzo

Emanuela

De Leo

Federico Alfonso Luca Massimo Gianmarco Barbara

Giancotti Leonori Locci Longano Martuscello

Massimo

Mazzone

Emanuele

Tarducci

Benedetto

Todaro

Emilio archive materials texts press review graphical project

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De Matteis

Vendittelli Eva Benedetti Manuela Pattarini Luisa Fancelli Alessandro Polia

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PREFACE 5

Creativity: vital instinct.

Luna Todaro Many people say that creativity is a natural talent, even if it’s also proven that the ability in arts or science can be assimilated. The human being (but as we’ll see, also animals) have the ability to constantly learn from their experiences and in this way to modify their behavior for a precise purpose. Not a long time ago it was thought that this ability had less to do with creative expression, but instead it was an aspect of instinctive adjustment as the conditions changed.

Emilio Garroni doesn’t agree: creativity is strongly connected to evolutionary ability.

A classic example, of a case observed and reported by Lorenz (1949), can be useful at this point.

The male of the jewelfish (Hemichromis bimaculatus) – as Lorenz remembers – has the instinctive behavior to collect the little ones that are out of the nest with its mouth and to bring them inside.

It happened that once, one of these fish under observation ends up, with its mouth full of food, in front of one of the babies, laying at the bottom of the tank; he immediately grabs him and finds himself in an instinctively contradictory situation, with in its mouth both the baby, to bring in the nest, and the food to ingest. An explicative model entirely mechanical – Cartesian-like, to better understand – would predict a block, a real behavior paralysis, without an exit, or at least a suppression of one of the two impulses, the weaker one: eat everything, even the baby, or bring everything in

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the nest, even the food.

“But at this point ” Lorenz writes, who sometimes is mistaken for a severe and intransigent instinctualist, ”a really incredible thing happens: the father fish stood still, with his cheeks puffed up, but without chewing. If ever I have seen a fish think, it was then”.

So he solves the conflict in the following way: he places all of the content of its mouth, food and baby, at the bottom of the tank, eats the food calmly and, after he’s done, it takes the baby and brings him in the nest.

E. Garroni, Creativity, Quodlibet, Macerata, 2010 Therefore, after the new experiences, creativity should be read as an element of adjustment, with the purpose of protecting the species. Creativity is also bonded to the possibility of choice, of discernment among the possible solutions to the problems or to the possible ways to obtain a specific result. If even a fish can creatively think and modify its condition – going beyond the frame of mind and the instinct of the species – we ask ourselves what can we expect from a human being.

The history of Arts gave us a wide demonstration about how creativity – combined with the technique and the clear mind toward the decoding of its own time – was transmitted through many different ways,

and how they have the ability to reduce distances between ages and places.

The Istituto Quasar was born twenty-five years ago with the aim to combine personal passion for design and visual arts with an aware and wise competence, without which it wouldn’t be possible for the creative designer to express himself in a proper and satisfying way.

This happens through the School-Workshop method, according to which theory keeps up step by step with practice, through a constant experimentation about what is learned in the classroom.

Other than to be a method, this is also a creed.

Indeed we don’t think that it would be possible to divide the critical-theoretical aspect from the practicaltechnical one. We so strongly believe that creativity – at the beginning placed as a vital instinct – could concretely express itself just through a project, that is the voice through which the designer communicates his thinking, he has his ideas valued and fulfilled. This is possible through the definition of a target where to aim their planning actions and through the wise recruitment of their own abilities (natural and assimilated).

What we see, the final product, is a rational and organized result of the following components: creativity – culture – idea – target – project.

This volume documents an experience that wants to be the piece of a period of research and training directed by a small but hardened group of researchers, professionals, and young Italians bonded “in universitas” – in a medieval meaning of the term – giving back, in this way, a set of interests and results that can be of wide usage and enjoyable, even by the dynamic way which they are presented.

The text is made by a first part, where teachers, professionals, thinkers and friends of the School gave their contribute.

The contributes are colorful and heterogeneous, reflecting many interests that surround the didactic and cultural works of the School. In the central part are described the most interesting initiatives that requested our participation or that we invented and promoted ourselves during all these years. Through images and texts – in a successful union of recalls and refers – the products are portrayed and told, in different branches of these activities.

We so continue with a selection of official printings about the interest raised among many medias, who got and valued the innovation and culture that we brought during these meetings.

The volume ends with a register of everything that happened during all these years, giving, in this way, an overview of global research in the design and visual arts fields.

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ESSAYS ON DESIGN ART EDUCATION AND PRACTICE Art as a profession

Considerations, testimonies, experiences about the project’s teaching

Writings of:

Franco Bovo, Orazio Carpenzano, Cristiana Costanzo, Emanuela De Leo, Federico De Matteis, Alfonso Giancotti, Luca Leonori, Massimo Locci, Gianmarco Longano, Barbara Martusciello, Massimo Mazzone, Emanuele Tarducci, Benedetto Todaro

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Benedetto Todaro

THE PROJECT OF THINGS Benedetto Todaro topic The topic of this book is design. Or at least that part of design that for now, temporarily and just to be clear, we can define technical-expressive, considering it in its many-sided expressions and in different fields of application. These fields go from the control of our habitat to the multi-sensory communication’s one, going through the halfway levels of the interactions between real and virtual. Rational activity, not really scientific technique, but also expressive, wise and sensitive (someone could push himself to define it artistic) engaging the entire field of human faculties and potentially oriented at the configuration of the entire habitat.

Strongly connected to the project’s theme there is the one about the training of new designers, the pass on of knowledge and competences, of the training of new generations.

And since knowledge evolves fast, it comes by itself that the training, responsibly meant, can’t be separated from research.

About this last one it’s important to say that – on the contrary of common opinion, and at least regarding the type of design that interests us – we consider it very efficient and we want to continue, not much of the top research and elitist conducted within closed workshops (maybe valid as basic research) but that one (humanistic) which directly involves as many youths in training as possible in projects of real collaboration between the school and professionals operating in the territory.

resistance Stopping to think about it what we do and about the path we followed up till now in the past twenty-five years from the establishment of our school, it’s natural to allow ourselves a birds-eye view, some parenthesis and the liberty to take things from the beginning. Starting from the title: De rerum design, that is to say: the project of things, in other words a discussion about the design of things. We take on a loan the opening from the one we elect as our mentor for the occasion : that Caro Livio Lucrezio who was a scientist, philosopher and poet, in other words a humanist. We can consider him Ours as a starter of a battle – or at least preventing resistance – against that trend intended, despite him, to get stronger through centuries and millenniums, to the dividing of science and arts, of technique and aesthetics, of rational and instinct. Therefore to that kind of oversaturation that distressed and distresses the speculative inclinations of mankind, distancing them one from the other till the induction to the belief of a life where they are distinct and separate to cause – in the end – specific defenses, specialized and independent. The concrete risk, still we don’t know if avoidable, is the one of a being, of humanity, divided in their parts and all to put back together. to put back together the broken pieces Therefore, we see how the explanation and the title: Project Of Things, way beyond an illusory generality, express – unlikely – intentions and plans of a line that nowadays we could dare to call holistic.

Let’s see what it is about.

The universe of research and contemporary production procedure tends to move, more and more, after pushed specializations. The many fields of knowledge are – as men-

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THE PROJECT OF THINGS

tioned – in a fast estrangement one from another. High levels of performances seem to be attainable just from facilities and delicate and hyper-specialized methods. The signs of this are under the eyes of everybody! We got used to targets that require exactly this type of research, at the point to be induced to think that just in this way quality can come to light in every situation and for any necessity. It’s common opinion that for each thing a specialist is needed. Often it’s true, but not always. There are conditions that require a transversality of competences, ways to recreate that broken humanistic unity. If the ambition of being able to design everything makes us smile, it’s needed to think that someone should take care of putting back together the broken pieces, of bringing back the tools and the hypertrophic means that we are full of, for that purpose we tend to forget, but that it can’t be removed from the background of our actions. Our resistance can become real with an effort and the inclination towards the recreation of the lost discretions. This purpose can’t be defined differently than humanistic. And the design - as already mentioned: technical-expressive with the aim to give shape to the world’s things – will be, in our point of view, maybe the only, really special profession, that is beyond and over the necessary and various technological specializations applicable to different objects and beyond the many-sided professional aspects that it can take, it can (has to) keep transversality and uniformity of methods and culture independently from the object of application.

prologue

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today’s condition

“It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has

struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty,

that is, the use of words. it is a plague afflicting lan

guage, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and im

mediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all

expression into the most generic, anonymous, and

abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the

edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark

that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.

At this point, I don’t wish to dwell on the possible

sources of this epidemic, whether they are to be

sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic

uniformity, the monotony of mass media, or the

way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre.

What interests me are the possibilities of health. […]

I would like to add that it is not just language that

seems to have been struck by this pestilence.

Consider visual images, for example.

We live in an unending rainfall of images. the most

powerful media transform the world into images

and multiply it by means of the phantasmagoric play

of mirrors. These are images stripped of the inner

inevitability that ought to mark every image as form

and as meaning, as a claim on the attention and as

a source of possible meanings. […]

But maybe this lack of substance is not to be found

in images or in language alone, but in the world

itself. This plague strikes also at the lives of people

and the history of nations. it makes all histories

formless, random, confused, with neither beginning

nor end. My discomfort arises from the loss of

form that I notice in life, which I try to oppose with

the only weapon I can think of: an idea of literature.”

Italo Calvino

from Exactitude, in Six Memos for the next Millennium

“So Jehovah scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth and they left off building the city. Therefore was the name of it called Babel, because Jehovah did there con found the language of all the earth: and from thence did Jehovah scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”

Gen 11, 8

Benedetto Todaro

resistance project That humanity has to measure itself with confusion seems to be decided from the beginning of times, as it seems that a chaotic destiny has to afflict in the same way language and structure, writings and city. Therefore it’s not the case to complain, let’s manly acknowledge our condition and accordingly control ourselves. There is much to work on, there is to modify, for what’s possible, a course of things that many times doesn’t help us; survive to a reality obviously against us, as scientifically proven from that slice of bread and butter that falls on the ground always facing down, to end up with a thousand other daily demonstrations about the fact that as a species we came into the world not really wanted. Ours can’t be other than a resistance project against the excessive power of natural laws within the frontline that annoying second law of thermodynamics and its entropic damnation.

To tell the truth even we do our part to complicate our lives, without that the enemy would lift a finger. Think about our biggest recent conquest, which we are so proud of: the big revolution of globalization, the pervading circulation of messages and the medias insistence in which we are buried.

Never ending almost free communication, cheaper than water (that however is starting to be expensive and to lack) apparently a big conquest, anyway it doesn’t seem that the knowledge of reality, that the understanding of the events that involve us or the average happiness of people significantly increased. More human beings than in any other era are connected and communicate, they receive messages and solicitations, but it doesn’t seem that this concurs a comparable increasing of the critical awareness, or an approach to the solution of some of the problems from which we suffer since many thousands of years. Instead it seems that chaos increased at the point that maybe not even Mao would like, today, reigning confusion under the sky.

However, if for Calvino defense is committed to literature, for us resistance can be committed to design, human action par excellence, dilated, extended and inclusive, to include every action made to give shape to things. But let’s go in order trying to understand the genesis of the difficulties that we meet and the possible ways to train the resistance that we spoke about. access to information When a resource is rare and of difficult access, it becomes precious, it is managed with care looking after it to avoid wastefulness, it’s selected, it takes time to enjoy it, being careful to do it as better as possible.

In opposite, when a resource is available in quantity and at a low price, it becomes normal to take it for granted, to enjoy it distractedly, it’s no longer seen with importance, we get used to receive it passively, we expect to have it without any effort.

In past ages information, first step towards knowledge, was a privilege of few people and also hard-fought by those few.

Sometimes also jealously protected and abused, to take advantage of it above others. Education wasn’t accessible for everybody, therefore it turned into a source of inequality, and of a privilege for few people.

Nowadays the condition is totally different, but the results risk to be misleadingly the same, because communication and knowledge are not the same, and instead, the first one, if left without control, can even compromise the second one. Furthermore, today it is harder to blame the guilty ones which are hard to identify, and maybe we all are guilty.

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THE PROJECT OF THINGS

perception of reality

entertainment for everyone

It’s a fact that the availability of advanced means of information (which don’t wait to be consulted, but follow you and reach you even in the most deep and private circumstances) loads up people with an overflowing mass of varied materials of different origins, in an equal and similar way, apart from the source’s reliability, from the quality of the message or from our availability and interest in receiving them. Between not having sources of knowledge and having a chaotic library, that puts all its infinite materials on the same level, there isn’t much difference. Just few people will have the necessary critical and selective instruments to make the selection and divide the useful from the useless or from the damaging.

And anyway there is time and energy to spend.

The result of all of this is that the distance, between what we define as reality or individual perception of it, hasn’t decreased for the majority of people, instead the appearance of an effective participation of everybody of the global village life, it’s – in fact – a soothing and anesthetic illusion, and in the end more far from reality.

If there is something important in the world, surely in the end I’ll know it, sooner or later it will reach me, we just got to wait: this is the common feeling! The uncritical passiveness is the attitude that comes from it. Most of the people were deprived of the incentive to research. It gets always harder to imagine an energy used for research of knowledge, an active militancy to get critical awareness.

To the demanding and severe critique about the given contents: ideas, concepts, theories (McLuhan would have called the message) it’s replaced a generalized and growing demand of performances from the devices (for McLuhan it would have been the medium). (the latest smart-phone, the latest i-Pod, The latest HD screen, 3D etc.)

The direct consequence of the passive habit is the progressive moving of interest and of approval, from the things with more innate value, to the ones able to give delight, pleasure, curiosity, therefore to the primary neural stimulus: meaning things that are able to come to visit and entertain us, without a bit of personal effort, in a condition of passive saving of the intellectual energies, strangely enough exactly those which get renovated just when they are used.

In the nineteenth issue of Alfabeta2 it was considered the problem: Who does culture belong to? Reporting the servile compliance of management of the Cultural Heritage to the way things are generally going, of what we are talking about, with the consequence that even the havens of what it should be the recognized quality: museums and archeological areas, are used (and managed) for recreation and entertainment, instead of using them for serious things that we should understand with all the necessary initiation steps.

In this kind of generalized Disneyland culture, by now resigned to the lightening that is requested from each side, sold out to entertainment, does everything to not be considered antiquated, boring, outdated, and puts itself to the pursuit of those who do everything possible to escape from it. new subjects come to light If the profession of producing and spreading culture is not improvised, even the one of entertaining is not invented.

Facilities and organizations exist, dedicated and equipped, that became really big and economically powerful, exactly because people like to entertain themselves, and entertainment is paid.

What would you prefer – for example – to know how things

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Benedetto Todaro

went in Pompei in the 79 a.C.? A multimedia reconstruction with animations, more or less reliable, to better understand like Piero Angela or History Channel, or to go to search the reports of Pliny the Elder maybe in original Latin? But even to know something about the origin of the solar system, with the vivid recreated images re-proposed in an obsessive repetition, good for morons, but also to not get the key point of an asteroid shower, if maybe we got up for a second to go to get peanuts!

It’s a fact that in Rome – to make an example close to us – exist the newborn MAXXI, the MACRO its peer, the GNAM older, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and other renowned institutes designated to culture (even they, dear me, tempted to follow the trend). But an exhibition where people go to as a football match are those, most really sloppy, organized with a big media distribution and with a show of advanced technologies, by financial institutions, institutions set up for the occasion and by many other subjects that don’t have a tradition in culture.

to culture and the resistance to the progress of the merchandized subculture.

It’s too easy to object that schools are, mostly, restricted facilities and unfit for evolution; that the word school itself sounds old (and boring). It may be also real, but anyway the problem exists and it’s about the ontology itself of training, teaching, supporting the transition of the student from the original condition to another, of a major critical maturity, operating in an intrusive and often gross context.

schools in crisis

This process of transition brings, in the one who’s training, important changes in the structure of his thoughts, in the management of his personal skills, in his attitude and behavior. And it’s so big that it can’t be brought to completion without effort, without intention, without the sacrifice of something else. But the old school spirit as pain and coercion, as grim violence conforming the individual differences (by now a bit more than a comic character of De Amicis) provoked, in public and private education of every order and level, a guilt complex from which every institution rushes to take distances from, in an arguable competition on who is more generically pleasant, light, easy. Wasting in this way the last betrayal of its mission in a improper emulation of entertainment. Already many decades ago Umberto Eco reported this condition suggesting that a good teacher should be, in certain measure, even an actor. The standard is by now established from habit to edutainment.

This illusory democratic availability of events, not selected information and culture, coming from the most varied sources, creates new problems to the institutions officially responsible for training on every level: from primary school up to university. We could strictly define them unfair competition if it was just about this, but the problem is more serious and it’s not about the defense of school, but the protection of the right

The same efficacy can be expressed, in guiding educational paths, on the condition of selecting the messages aimed to the students. The school should be able to expose with evidence, to their students, the best that it has and even to support the incipient ability of critique and selection, that can be autonomously developed from who is trained.

Some institutions answer this need making a more or less

But these new subjects, important on the economical field, make money with undisturbed raids in territories not theirs, confirming themselves as new makers of culture for the use of crowds (paying) and following trading purposes dressed up as cultural promotions.

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THE PROJECT OF THINGS

clear preventive selection, almost a censorship, about information, studying materials and subjects of reflection. They try – actually – to isolate themselves from the background noise of their surroundings. It’s the traditional method of the old school, of the academy, based on the presumption of an absolute efficiency of their cultural line, of a peaceful assurance of their truth. More open institutions have to anyway find a line – maybe less strict – but as much efficient as the others, to defend their students from generality and from the surrounding confusion, that weaken and disorient the educational process. the project We wouldn’t take care of these phenomena if they weren’t having a direct effect on a thing that we care about.

It’s about the project, to which we dedicated this writing, the book that contains it and the work of these twenty-five years. And this time we include, in the project’s idea, even the program of future life that is (should be) at the basis of choice of each student: the project of life.

The design skill is the type of reaction that each person can express to fight chance, the blind sequence of events. The project requires the ability of ideas (of options), the maturity of judgment, and the courage of choosing. Gifts hard to practice, at times stressful. Because of this, taking care of design, actually dedicating our lives to this preventing actions, guiding generations of youths in this path, we want to use the necessary energies to fight against the anesthetic and pacifying ideal that enervate the design abilities.

Designing is a human ability par excellence, moves all of our faculties, this is surely satisfying, but it’s not effort-free. Build, Live, Think: what’s this if not a project. The same author, somewhere else, recalls the attention on Holderlin’s distich:

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“Pieno di merito, ma poeticamente, abita l’uomo su questa terra.” (“Full of quality, but poetically, men lives on this Earth”) to explain how to live on Earth, to adapt to its surroundings, to set it up, to give to it a logical shape for a better life, it can only be obtained through merit, therefore with labor, deserving it. the technical-expressive project Since the beginning we defined the field in which we move, to explain the basic components. These, even if applied to different objects: from the ways of living and design, to the company’s coordinated image or the virtual scenic design and to the interactive communication on the web, they all participate to an analog composition of technical competences (specialized in different cases) and expressive values to bring the meanings beyond the mere functional fact. It’s the field of the project with an aesthetic value, when it’s not really artistic, which it distinguishes itself from the many other types of projects, for the condition – to him really characteristic – to keep together two domains of knowledge traditionally different one from the other: science and technique from one side, aesthetics and humanistic science from the other.

The noble origin of the educational program of the project, maybe is not yet completely explicit, we can find it already in the Renaissance workshop or in the Florentine Giardino dei Medici, in an age when art and science still were getting along. Then at the beginning of the last century, in most of Europe, schools and initiatives spread out, which, following the path of the past English trend of Arts and Crafts, started a process if technical-artistic production ideally aimed to the integral design of each object, after Gesamtkunstwerk’s goethian idea or total artwork, applied to the universe of the

Benedetto Todaro

incipient industrial production. The Deutscher Werkbund in Germany, the Wiener Werkstatte in Austria, the Vtchutemas in Russia, then the Bauhaus, always in Germany, with its inheritance contained in the second postwar by the School of Ulm. As a consciously up to date schools, these, with different types of integralism, searched types of discontinuity with the past, they tried their own ways of innovation, intentionally reshaping the role of historical knowledge, in a sort of damnatio memoriae of the culture of origins.

Their look is aiming only straight ahead, it is the aspect that, in the current atmosphere, we can consider more critically; an aspect of big interest for us, instead, it is the highlight set on the artistic value, but in the end intellectual and cultural, held in the objects. It profiles the idea that the culture of a civilization isn’t held just in the art and literature treasures (in the intangible testimonies) but even in material testimonies, from monuments to objects of use, to graphics, to the advertising etc. From then the appreciation of that, which will go under the name of material culture will sign the line, and probably the destiny of the institutions aimed to the study of design. the integral designer As soon as they achieved the dignity that they deserved, the schools of design had to solve an internal problem about their own nature of institutions between two cultures, the scientific-technical one and the artistic-humanistic one: not an easy problem that afflicted and still afflicts every aspect of our culture (and to which in 1959 C.P. Snow dedicated his famous book).

Gustavo Giovannoni, promoter of the Scuola di Architettura of Rome, already in 1916, talked about the integral architect

as a figure, to teach, in which they had to harmoniously merge scientific competences (coming from engineering studies) and the critical and expressive abilities (changed by the humanistic and artistic studies). The following history of all the schools in the field, in Italy as in other countries, had to measure itself with this original dualism, so characteristic and basic, but also so difficult to be solved, because of its antithetical character of the original statutes of the two educational worlds.

In closer times the harmonization of the educational components of schools of design (that from the second postwar were changing and joining the unit of Architecture, Art Academies and Schools of Design) saw different vicissitudes and experimentations, all more or less aiming to support the efficient merging of the various knowledge at the moment of design summary. The aim was – as it’s still nowadays – to ensure that all the knowledge (the so called knowledge) and abilities, achieved in specific moments, merged without loss, at the moment of “poiesis”, of the project’s result, which had to be the specific purpose of the study. in the background, far: profession But to correctly direct the single subject of study to the design summary, it’s needed to outline the figure of the designer that we want to train. In Italy, till the first years of the second postwar, the practice of this profession characterized most teachers of the architecture schools, and so even in others. The transmission of experience between professional and educational activity got in this way a spontaneous and natural character. They were inclined to reproduce, in the figure of training the student, the known features that direct experience showed as appropriate.

In the following decades, especially between the 60’s and 90’s of the 20th Century we see a process of progressive

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THE PROJECT OF THINGS

separation (that still continues) sometimes even a declared ideological release, of the work and of academic purposes, from every external reference. It’s started a process of separation between academic and real project with serious consequences both for the first, directed to ineffectiveness, and for the second which, no longer supported by proper research and always more guided by merely economical reasons, will end up producing the landscapes that the recent city made us be used to. disciplines deviation It’s not just the abstraction from reality to damage the efficiency of education, but also some reasons internal to the subjects of learning that, always more demanding to acquire an own scientific accuracy, tend to isolate themselves, to cultivate their own specific, scornfully refusing to build for themselves the instruments of knowledge useful for the integral designer’s education. So it happens – taking for example the ability of the architecture – that history, the historical subject (denying and contradicting Bruno Zevi’s farsighted idea about founding an operational Critique of Architecture) other than to treat reluctantly and occasionally the last two-hundred years, considering them not strong enough , doesn’t want to guarantee critical contributions for the project stage and prefers to dedicate itself to the education of historians, so to summarize, to the reproduction of itself. A similar discussion could be done for the subject Science of representation that, instead of teaching students the arts – indeed – of representation, follows a pseudo compositional deviation that aspires to a sort of autonomy, with the result that the ability of design disappeared from school.

But the phenomenon is general and doesn’t spare not even the so called design subjects that, the only ones to make the design summary’s final act, and called to produce ideally complete results aimed to the operating reality , similarly to

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the others, they want to acquire the statute of discipline.

But we can talk about discipline just if and when the used methods are scientific. The act of designing, in virtue of its composite character and ineffably mixed of theory, practice, objective duties, and instinctive subjectivity, in equilibrium between many incentives and duties, sees just some moments attributable to the scientific method and many others inescapably practical. So often it happens that, to increase the scientific accuracy of its methods, design dresses the noble part of the composition and, escaping from reality, prefers to concentrate itself on its disciplinary, accurate and strictly self-referential dynamics. To put a gravestone on the hopes of a possible new concreteness in the studies of design in the academic field, the ministerial authority intervenes “ex lege”, which, in fact, sets the academic ranks and careers, with modalities that discourage the teachers professional practice, and demands that these stay more immune as possible from any contamination of extra-academic realities. recomposition project Leonardo Sinisgalli, in his short “Architecture Degree” (in: “Promenades architecturales”) tells the story of a student who, arrived close to his degree, but not satisfied of how much he could learn in the university classrooms, starts a personalized self-teaching apprenticeship on researching the secret of the art of building. He tries – therefore – to penetrate into the secret soul of places: villages, towns and cities, with the hope to deduce from it the art that passionately follows. He starts, thanks also to the help of contributors and collaborators, an insatiable collection of clues, samples and testimonies of material culture, between the most various and mixed ones, even apparently incongruous to the theme of its subject.

Benedetto Todaro

“[…] the measures of a building had to be combined with information about the vegetation of the place, the conditions of the sky, the wind star, the humidity index, the sun maps, the shape of the clouds; I used to ask for samples of the ground, plaster and the dust swept out from walls, and also the precise positioning of the building relative to the cardinal points, the site and the isolating conditions.

I used to make the measuring vessels and other forms fossilized by customs and traditions be studied, wineskins, barrels, pipes, spinning tops, looms, capstans, boats, keys, chairs, sandals, hoes, horseshoes. Furthermore all the building materials used in an area. […]”

I imagine that not just architects but also students of other technical-expressive disciplines (designers, graphic designers, artists, performers) could desire, in their education, a preliminary concrete and direct experience in things, a sensorial immersion, almost carnal, a real cohabitation with reality and its rituals, from which then maybe freely abstract from, following intuition and geniality, to recover more keen and rarefied meanings and senses.

So it’s good to remember that the most natural kind of learning and maturation, in every field of knowledge, is not different from the one that every unaware baby of Homo Sapiens Sapiens follows, in a fast and efficient maturation in his preschool years: the process that experts call bottom-up and meaning from the bottom, from the material dimension, sensorial and tangible one, to proceed then to the following levels of refinement and conceptual abstraction. After all from the Middle-Ages to at least all of the 17th century, even a designer (that was together master craftsman, architect, sculptor, painter, artist and artisan) was arriving to his role after years of apprenticeship starting from the humble job of

the stone carver, or stoneworker, or whatever you want to call it. So at first they touched things with their hands and they made practice with techniques, then being capable, they could climb up the line of competences till they reached to tell to others what and how to do in the role - indeed - of who designs in technical-expressive fields. The same Heidegger already mentioned – who obviously can’t be defined as a mundane materialist – always in the “build, live, think” title, lists the three acts, putting them in an order that we can define from the heaviest to the subtle one, almost observing a sort of logical alternation between substance and spirit.

The prevailing systems of education, a bit everywhere, but mostly in Italy – where idealism left more valid traces - follow the opposite path, that is deductive, from which some general systems of knowledge then come practical-operative consequences. the birth of a school Going back in time it’s possible to recognize, in personal life experience, at the beginning of the Quasar, actions similar to the ones that pushed the student, whom Sinisgalli talks about. Not different, in the end, from the ones of professor Keating who, in the “Dead Poets Society”, invites young people of the Dead Poets Society – quoting Thoreau – to suck all the marrow out of life.

We don’t have to resign to the preventive abstraction, we have to live reality, experiment it, bite it, interpret it, set ways of analysis and then, for following levels of distillation, with the practice of the critical ability, trans-form it considering architecture, from which a bit everybody was coming from, just a part of the possible fields of expression of the project, to be unified in a unique reality. Expressing, therefore, a sort of unified theory of design that had to be applied to the tran-

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THE PROJECT OF THINGS

sformation of reality – starting from the big variety of technologies and substances of each field – critical principles and methods unified, result of a holistic idea and of humanistic predisposition applied, potentially, to each aspect of the material culture. With no fear of the substance’s weight, not accepting the antinomian dualism substance versus spirit (remains of the Cartesian distinction between res extensa and res cogitans) and not even presumed hierarchy between the two.

So it was born, spontaneously, almost naturally, the idea of building a place, an institution, a meeting and confrontation point (in a Rome that was seeing the habit of students and of architecture graduates to meet on studies that were less professional, but had much research, discussion and confrontation). But in this case with a double inclination: from one side to deduce, from the professional practice, that completion of operative experience absent in the field of university studies, and on the other hand to involve young students in an intellectual and professional adventure.

This second intention amounts already to the idea of a school-workshop available to embrace apprentices and collaborators in an ideal generational passage of baton.

The representative points clear from the beginning were: - the interest for an equilibrated relation between the project’s theory and practice - the transversality of the subjects: from the transformation of the physical space to the various types of visual and multimedia communication - the attention of social utility programs - the common work of academics, experts and youths in training - the participation of the public on themes such as

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environmental quality and artistic expression - the supervision of the competence reached by students The Studio Quasar in via di Porta Pinciana n° 10 The first team of colleagues found a meeting point in via di Porta Pinciana n°10 between 1971 and 1973. It had chosen the name Quasar (or better, in the primitive denomination Quas/ar) as a refer to the remote and strongly emissive astronomical objects, and to the architecture (ar), and also for a certain phonetic fashion in pronouncing it. There, over some years, in a bohemian condition, we started to work on some first private commissions mostly about internals, design and graphics, and at the same time to host students for unofficial lessons, thesis reviews and, more generally, for meetings between cultists who were sharing the same interests.

Therefore, some of us used to conduct activities inside the university and they became a natural referee for the students. In the meanwhile, on the two-floored building (earlier used as workshop), the solid structures that were going to host the office were progressively built up, as to give a shape to the original genius loci, almost in a roman Merzbau way.

Just as much complex, maybe, but a bit more organized than Shwitters original one. The building slowly made progresses, during the years, setting up a continuous building site, an open work, where research and design activity were constantly put side by side with the construction, mostly directly created by the designers. The work could be considered done just near the end of the 70’s, when other architects and designers joined the original group, and they now still share the fate of the new Quasar.

The structures of the office, visible from the road through the glass door, were catching the attention and curiosity of pedestrians and foreigners, mostly architects, who, didn’t miss to notice the kinds of similarities with the Centre Pompidou

of Paris at that time under construction(but of which the idea of our little work was anyway preceding it, even if by a little).

The 1977-1987 decade saw, therefore, the continuing of the office’s activity with frequent new entries and leaks of colleagues, following a mostly frequent dynamic of the roman offices of those times. In the meanwhile it was growing a diligence in research and experimentation in architecture and design and, a mostly unusual fact during that age in Italy, on the landscape theme.

Projects in contest and pilot studies for public customers characterize the decade, together with an increasing role of the “Studio di Porta Pinciana”, as it was also called, a cultural circle and design workshop constantly invaded by groups of students, young collaborators and apprentices.

1987 In October of 1987 it was decided to give an official and more organized shape to the educational activity, that in such a spontaneous and natural way it was going to get associated to the profession, alternating it in an exchange positive for both.

A group of students were hosted, for the didactic year, with a program agreed in advance to guarantee them, in two years, with daily meetings, the development of design abilities in the architectural specialized fields.

To better understand, the ones neglected by the university education (at least until, in closer times, they will be introduced, for the first time, in the university programs by the Zecchino reform of 1999) and so meaning those for interior designer, for industrial designer and for parks and gardens designer.

a business intention with money purposes, as an economical investment with a view to an awaited profit. Completely different is the beginning of the Quasar. The students interest was – obviously – to learn a profession in the project fields in a cultured and informed way. The interest of the professionals-teachers was to experiment, with the resources that came from the boarding costs, didactic methods, to verify design theories, to incite – therefore – a continuous cognitive process transferable in their doing and in the education.

We particularly care about that genetic diversity with the business oriented initiations and we are proud of it because it makes the birth of Quasar more similar – maybe – to the beginning of the middle-ages university, when the community of teachers and students – universitates, indeed – was meeting, by agreements that regulated their mutual relationships, to give rise to free centers of study and production of knowledge. This premise explains mostly also the mission of the school and the direction followed through the years till now.

All the ones that took part at the beginning, both as teachers and organizers, and ex-students now differently working in the four corners of the world, remember with pleasure that uncomfortable, disheveled, intense and educational experience in the magic space- workshop in which they all together and informally were arguing about the themes of the project.

We don’t know about schools with the same beginning, in closer times. Generally the private teaching was born from

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conclusion We surely aren’t the ones who could judge, today, the result of this experiment, we just occasionally took a look that is at the same time retrospective and soliciting the future.

We called some friends and colleagues of different educations, messengers of different values, more or less involved in our activities, to express themselves about the themes of the project and of the artistic expression. We found it interesting to listen to the voice of those who shared the work of these years, together with the ones who came from other experiences.

not rarely, sparks of geniality – that helped even to our growth.

Many, cyclically, cross their orbits with the Quasar, proving that they fly with strong and sure wings, so as we wish to those who are still with us, at the moment in takeoff run.

We consider pluralism a value, the meeting and the exchange a necessity. It seems to us even useful to give importance, even of partially, to the variety of themes that the Institute examines and teaches. There can be seen similarities and differences, it can be detected the challenge of putting back together the broken pieces, as we were saying at the beginning, and finding a “koinè” that should pass through the various themes defining the “ethos” of our research.

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In conclusion, it seems appropriate for me to thank, even on behalf of Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier, with who I shared this adventure during all the time frame of this quarter of century and - obviously – other than from all those who collaborated to the writing of this book, all the friends who during the time succeeded each other at our side, both those who are still with us and those who followed other paths leaving anyway important traces of their transit and that would be too long to list.

1.

The first team was made by the architects: Benedetto Todaro, Giuseppe De Luca, Carlo e Paolo Pacini, Norbert Kamenicky.

2.

In the order: Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier, Alfredo Benedetti, Franco Bovo, Luca Leonori.

We want to particularly thank and give a special wish to the many students who lived, and live with us, years that are not pretentious to define exalting. Even they left and leave really deep traces of the creative energy, of enthusiasm –

3.

For those who are still working in the school: S. Benedetti, B. Todaro, A. Benedetti, F. Bovo L. Leonori, Luna Todaro (present and busy with her first childhood drawings).

Notes:

Orazio Carpenzano

THE DIDACTIC OF CONNECTIONS

Orazio Carpenzano It could seem trivial, but first of all it’s important to say that education is a process that follows the person through all his life, before, during and after school, but in school learning is not improvised, but organized, wanted and followed. The complexity of assignments given to teachers is so obvious already from general educational purposes, that is to guarantee to everyone the best of learning, in the respect of the personal characteristics of helping to increase all its potentialities. Since a big variety of people, it’s always hard to define educational paths good for everybody, because in schools permanent features don’t exist, but just variables often really hard to have under control (behaviors, relationships, resources, intelligences, criticalities, abilities) because they are all elements of a process that is always changing.

te the secret of those examples in arts that need attention, because capable of transmitting ideas. He’s a person that doesn’t see drawing as an independent technical ability, but as personal, artistic and thought expression. Obviously he has to be even really able to make you understand how he reached some results.

A good design teacher since the first lesson aims the attention of his students towards the generative process of the project and also, through easy exercises of formalization, allows to deal with free imitations that teach since beginning to outdraw the how before the what. To plan an educational intervention means so to think strategically, organize activities, connect them, calculate them, choose which materials to produce, evaluate their impact and results.

In this frame a teacher can’t do other than fulfill many roles: the one who organizes, rules, judges, intervenes, listens, through many actions aimed to the mastery of the basic abilities (knowledge, behaves, attitudes) and to the complex competences (processes, methods, paths).

Comprehension through the project

To teach design A good design teacher makes you become fond of the project, he makes you love his stories, he makes you build your own line of action, opens your mind, setting you free from all common places, with your feet on the ground. He’s a person that transmits to you his big passion and that knows how to modify his lesson depending on the personality of his classroom, even not filling the basic concepts that he has to transmit. A good design teacher knows how to explain to you why it’s important to study, design, write, see (possibly with their own eyes) the works. He tries to penetra-

The discipline of the project so as it was transmitted through Bauhas didactic, was passing through the manual labor, considered the essential basis for education and necessary to demonstrate the different technical characteristics of the used material, the vulnerability and the potentialities of the shape, the suggestion of its function, the projecting intentions of the creative process. Through the concrete and manual action, new relations of weight, equilibrium, of strength, the necessity of the geometrical handling, the following of some interesting contradictions were experimented. The didactic of the project was needed to start over from new relations of measure, to work on the dimensions of the surface and of space, to try to illustrate the world, to play with the scrap, to probe the technical, artistic, expressive ability and the one of shaping. The manual labor became such a rigorous, pure and clear program, capable to create not a

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THE DIDACTIC OF CONNECTIONS

style, but a creative integration without disciplinary barriers that was going to deeply restore educational modalities and the physical scene and the habitat’s bodies. the student was learning, maybe for the first time in history, through an objective method irreversibly aimed to change man’s world.

To enter in a Dessau’s classroom was meaning to participate to a show of knowledge, because it reproduced the presence of different languages all at the same time, that with more power were helping to discover the relations of connection between design and life.

Understanding by design It would be wonderful today to see the eye and the mind of the student that selects, recreates, through the driving force of his perception and of the following cognitive process and elaboration of the collected information, his own performance field, his own theatre of knowledge in which to perform the existence filled with new technologies. The pervasiveness of technologies of information and of communication reached the project schools fast, extending educational opportunities and underlining characteristics of the cognitive processes that surely improved the quality of learning. The more we go one, the more technology will be everywhere. It will not be always visible, but it will work at full speed in the surrounding environment. The discoveries in the science of materials will create further possibilities. But men have to find time to stop and evaluate its influence on future life and have so under careful observation the frenetic gait of new technologies, often this reflection is missing and this surely is not good. The understanding through design is today a research method used in an increasing way in different scientific fields, and it’s based on the idea that some phenomena could

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be better understood through the making of artifacts that incorporate a selected combination of the analyzed properties and phenomena . The making process of these artifacts and their following exposition to the results of the experiment end up then in a tangible form of verifiable conceptualization and theory. There are many examples in the physical world (the climate, the birth of a star), in biological organisms, and in the society (the brain, the genetic rules, the moving of a body, the behavior of a crowd, the spreading of diseases), so as in the technical and socio-technical systems created by man as architecture, city, communication systems, etc. and of the complex interaction methods between them.

Through the making of artifacts after an approach that goes from the components to the composed aggregates, to the complete systems, synthetic sciences can study the properties of a developed system and understand that these properties depend on the interactions and on the behaviors of the different parts in play.

Experimental tricks The world of design has recently enforced an empirical position based on observation, on experimentation, on attempts and on mistakes. This means that to understand how the changes of a space system influence its usage, a designer has to invent experimental tricks and scenarios in which the project can be observed in its evolutionary process. For example, he can analyze how shape made by a group of objects, or of rooms, could define a type of living behavior, a certain security or prevention to risks, a type of answer to the environmental conditions. When they design systems in the context of the synthetic methodology of the project, a student needs to make a simulation, even if it’s surely really

Orazio Carpenzano

hard to reproduce a real behavior. The undefined wealth of the real world is the main driving force of every design action for the differences of the morphologies and of the behaviors that we observe, instead a simulation has just those properties that were planned, so any experiment based on simulation is thwarted by the absence of what it was not inserted and that could be important for the description of a phenomenon. Having said this, simulations remain a necessary and essential instrument for the didactic, and creative experiments can be made normally just through a simulation.

It’s important the interaction of methods that come from arts and sciences that have always been used in the study of the systems existing in nature not just for how they actually are, but also for how they could be. In consequence, the understanding through the project method allows the students to acquire a deeper discernment of the habitat’s main aspects, combining multi-textually the efforts of sciences and arts in a challenge that aims to clear the meaning of life in many possible spaces and bodies, verging in this way on the fields of cognitive sciences.

Collateral projects By now the ten-year research that I made with Altroèquipe for a series of architecture for dancing, was based on the interactions between choreography, space, biomechanical engineering, light design, sound, motion graphics, motion capture, and was planned to create an experimental environment that had to observe from up close body communication. The dancers were put in a condition to feel the body and the movements in architecture, inside a stereoplastic space revealed by a double perception (real and virtual). The level of reactivity and autonomy of the dancing bodies was

interacting with all the other components of the environment.

The dancers were transiting, through synchronization, correlation and independence periods, inside a space created to incite them to enter in a mobile dialogue with their virtual copies, with the purpose to con-fuse the visible and invisible elements and the complex ways of interaction between them. In this way, the performances brought to life an experimental space that allowed each spectator to observe the features of a not-verbal language, based on knowledge of the body, to feel in this way a real Mobiligence. I observed, for reasons related to this architectural research, the project of a robot hand used to study the relationships between morphology, the body’s intrinsic dynamics and the creation of the structures of information through sense-motion and learning activities. Partially created with elastic, flexible and deformable materials, it was surprising to see how his start up was based on a system made of muscles and tendons inspired by the human hand’s anatomy , including some of the sensorial possibilities of the biological real one (each finger was equipped with sensors to measure flexion, rotation and pressure, instead on the palm and the back were placed some additional pressure sensors). There were implemented learning mechanisms inspired by biology that allowed the robotic hand to explore its moving possibilities. Connecting the inputs of the hand’s sensors to the related output engines, it was visible how it could learn to handle and grab objects, even if to grab was necessary to introduce a structure of training that had to imply the necessity of complex sensorial reactions. So, these methods could be really appropriate in an educational context, they will help to inspire and keep high the motivation level in the students and they will transmit concept of high abstraction in an understandable and concrete way, they will help the research of new creative

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THE DIDACTIC OF CONNECTIONS

strategies and they will be useful sources of inspiration for anyone who is involved in the resolution of problems and in decision processes inside dynamic and complex environments, just partially predictable, as the creative ones.

I always warn my classroom that it’s decisive not just what is learned, but also and mostly how what’s learned is kept. The construction of the shape of our archive is really important if we want to use the memory not just as space of keeping but also as a place for the imagination. To well save means to be able to quickly find, but it’s important to know everyone has his own order and when this becomes a shared order it will be needed to move some things, sometimes simply changing the position, other times the name and the character.

Complex functions, as the ones of the memory organization and of the arrangement of the information stay essential for the organization of the knowledge generally and particularly in the design field.

School, therefore, is that place that has to give not just shape, but substance to those classification strategies which the project’s culture refers to. Sometimes it’s appropriate to remember that the drawing, the history book and the one of theory, cities, territories, architectures, are just technologies (at least following the meaning of the technology as the totality of the ways that men express to interact with the world) meaning the extensions of our uses towards the exterior, which help us in tasks that nor the hand or the mind can carry out alone in a complete way. The technology is the research of solutions for the living-not living relationship.

Each important lesson that I received when I was a student I lived it as a big cognitive technology that knew how to do of communication the main principle of the cultural transmis-

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sion, always associated to a good participation project.

Between communication and culture it has to be dissolved that dichotomy that too often tends to prefer the image from the ways of socio-cultural inter-relation that make to work the game of spreading. To use the word “game” is, in the end, anything but secondary. It’s here that lives the ideal tension to bring to life that impulse that makes us search for knowledge and that teaches us to know how to search without stopping. It’s not the case that personally I always aimed to inaugural speeches, at the Quasar as at University, each time I was starting a class, to give strength to the speech that was introducing to the big game of knowledge.

At the Istituto Quasar, having a bigger feedback and a series of more commensurate quantitative and qualitative elements, to plan an educational intervention meant always to think on strategies suitable to organize activities, connect them, calculate them, choose which materials to produce, evaluate their impact and results.

The words of the teaching profession The language of the teacher presents two sides, one is connected to the discipline that teaches, and that qualifies him as team leader of that subject, the other is specific of his profession and that qualifies him as teacher. It not to be ignored in this frame of elements, the relation between the teachers of a school that often have a different cultural and educational background or a poor spirit of belonging to the group, a lack of education to the education, therefore their collegial speeches often show big operational doubts. Each professional environment protects his vocabulary, a specialized language, understood just by authorized personnel,

Orazio Carpenzano

that often is transferred in daily communication. The words of the trade don’t have, therefore, specialized motivations but also rational. From one side they help and make more efficient and more faster the communication inside a community and, on the other side they protect its identity. In the teacher’s case we can distinguish two types of languages, one disciplinary and the other didactic. Each disciplinary area develops and uses an own terminology that comes from its specific theoretical and experimental research. When he talks about his subject the teacher identifies himself as the discipline’s expert and it’s obvious that experts of more disciplines use different languages. It’s less obvious, instead, that a teacher doesn’t succeed in making his colleagues participate when he talks about a common aim, to make them to understand what he’s doing and why.

The power of the teacher is in the disciplinary language, but that language can also transform itself in a linguistic lair that isolates him and gives him a cultural strictness and communicative closure.

A literature teacher who wants to speak to his colleagues of other disciplines about the lexicon lacks of students shouldn’t do it through an erudite exposition about Noam Chomsky’s syntactic structures and about Bernstein’s theory of the tongue-twisting codes; better, and most of all more communicative, simpler, to present an illustrative frame about the students linguistic poorness, and identify possible disciplinary fields linguistically lesser lacking (because more motivating) and then trace a common intervention project, trans-disciplinary. If the disciplinary competences are specific, the methodological competences are common and transversal. If the disciplinary language divides and differs, the didactical one has to join and associate the professio-

nalism of teachers. Yet it’s exactly on this field that we find bigger incomprehension between superficiality, dogmatism and experimentations.

Education, instruction, formation Wanted or not, we teach in an explicit and implicit way, and seeing that educational fact presents complex features tied to the person’s values and to social purposes, to the word education other two words are associated, instruction and formation. To “instruct” is an ancient word that comes from “in-struere” (to put inside), instead to form, means to “give shape”, “to model”. So instruction and formation are to a complementary processes: the quality and quantity of the contents at one side and reaching a profile of competences on the other. The what and the how.

The didactic in the field of creative techniques in which are put into play both the critical-cultural and the technicalexpressive abilities, in a situation, as the current one, that sees the supremacy of the technological innovation and the media pervading, it requires a complex organization and a good dose of educational planning, meaning to teach how to learn in particular conditions, immersing the student in situations, environments and contexts thought especially for him. If we want to teach a student about the correct use of the architectural syntax, even if the procedure is other than banal, it’s enough to give him a together of syntactic rules; but if we want to train him for a certain linguistic property, to composition, we have to make him live simulated and different situations, starting from the most suitable one to his style, to the further improving, and we have to do this going beyond the useless and damaging dichotomy if it’s more motivating for the student, to learn from situations or the

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THE DIDACTIC OF CONNECTIONS

study of theoretical concepts. Both things are important and necessary and they have to co-evolve together. To learn from the project can require time, but it’s essential that the two things are connected. To educate, teach, and train represent therefore the three primary paths of a process that aims to the (trans) formation of the student, and what makes the three concepts to join is that the (trans) formation is intentional, planned and absolutely necessary for the reaching of those required competences abilities.

and the needs that that thing has to satisfy; the adaptation of the realization’s methodologies to operational models, the estimation of the level of bond between the result and the idea, and if the result is not suitable, the setting of alternative operational strategies to readapt the product to the chosen operative model, and this last one to the ideal model. In this sense the project’s didactic is an organized group of actions inserted in a system of complex, variable and multiple processes.

A particular way of training

In the end, to learn designing, from a methodological point of view, is a process just partially bounded by its object. To design is a way of thinking of reality, a “forma mentis” used on a certain phenomenon to analyze it, understand it better, reproducing in vitro the components to insert in formal answers.

To design is a modality founded on patient research aimed to a really careful location of problems, to the expression of hypothesis and of solving models, to the practical control of the feedback action’s results between all the components of a program.

The production of knowledge, in a scientific and didactic meaning, has to be always built in the project because it illuminates its shape, meaning and purpose. (O.C.)

It is the group of techniques and instruments that the teacher uses to make more useful teaching and more effective learning. Therefore, it’s about the way of teaching, the methodological, technical and instrumental paths that the teacher plans and puts into practice in the classroom or in the workshop. The creative didactic, it’s not just about what the teacher does in the classroom, but regards all the organization of interventional strategies with the purpose to reach an educational profile almost additional to the professional profile.

In this particular kind of education, the teacher and the student go through independent and completing processes.

Nobody goes into the classroom without to at least have thought about what he will do. To each intention corresponds a realization project, that is a way to prefigure the actions to execute in the different phases, between the one to identify the general external features (space, cultural, of the context) and the internal ones (types, qualitative and quantitative facts) where everything to produce takes place; then the defining of the accessible resources, the ambitions

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The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

Winston Churchill

Massimo Locci

DESIGN FOR A NEW HUMANISM

Massimo Locci What’s the task of an educational Institute that since always supports itself to the University’s official network, putting itself also as an affective alternative to it and compensating for its lacks? First of all – I think – explore always new paths, concrete and/or utopian, anticipating themes and strategies in the field of design. To confirm itself in its dynamic operational condition at the Istituto Quasar, maybe, it’s enough to continue being more efficient in communication and less bogged down in the methodological approach. But if the purpose is also to reinforce its function of integration and substitution of the official education, it’s needed to always be more aimed at experimentation. To identify new orientations and prospects. The name chosen by the Istituto’s foundation maybe it is not casual, it refers to a clear point source, almost a star, and that can change light faster than the time that light needs to pass through it: “if the cosmological interpretation is right, the huge luminosity and the rough flames of a quasar are totally unimaginable for the human mind: a medium quasar can burn down the entire planet Earth from many light years of distance and to radiate so much energy in a second as the Sun radiates in a hundred years”.

So we expect an experimental approach, able to interest students and to transmit energy, flexible procedures, a less restricted planning.

Seeing the actual didactical offer of the Istituto Quasar, island of happiness compared to the big chaos of the educational field, the relation with innovation is a consolidated practice and for the future we expect that it will be able to anticipate always the rising scenarios of architecture, in the enlarged system of visual arts, of design, of graphics, and aiming at that direction its interdisciplinary action.

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DESIGN FOR A NEW HUMANISM

For what we said it’s inevitable a contrast with the “academic” education, to understand the actual relations/ differences, and to understand how to prefigure the future.

The educational and cultural address, that since forever characterizes the Architecture faculty, sets the architect in equilibrium between theory and project: we got used to imagine him as an intellectual curious but strongly oriented to the particularity of his own technical-creative know-how.

and tied to the Euclidean geometry, evolved in the digital field, in the material fluidity and of the spatial liquidity, reinforcing the metaphorical structure and the one of process.

In short, a modern modeler of the architectural shape has to put himself in equilibrium between virtual fascination and concreteness of the materialistic culture, obviously without losing sight of the operational dimension and aimed to the solution of the technical problems.

On the contrary, to educate an operator that knows about the actual complexity of the discipline, it’s needed to create an integral figure, still able to rule theory and practice, but also to join the traditional knowledge with a more articulate know-how. Therefore, an educational project tied not just to its specific, but also able to make interact the different knowledge, for example able to combine new technologies with new expressive and communicative values; fields in which architects have to fully transform their operational scenario and to interiorize in his cultural horizons the parallelisms between architecture and the other related disciplines, examining the respective languages and fields of interposition.

Even more complex knowledge is required to manage the landscape and vegetation design, for the recovery of suburbs; a requalification that goes through “in-between” practices, working on the building and infrastructural interstices, on the urban vegetable gardens, on the densification, on new suburban centrality.

Already Baudelaire, poet of modernity, exalted the city and architecture as an expression of innovation and center of vitality in all its aspects and contradictions; therefore, our discipline, as structure in constant transformation, is an eminent place of communication, it reflects culture and evolution of society.

To collect the challenges of contemporaneity a modern designer has to acquire also the sensibility of a sociologist and the curiosity of an anthropologist, the ability of synthesis of a commercial artist and the poietic one of the artistic operator.

The contemporary expressive research, from merely abstract

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These and other different viewpoints, that emerge in the social structure, anticipate a more articulated education that, in my opinion, at this moment the University gives just in part: a discussion within itself often ends on the necessity of reducing/increasing degree courses or on the unification of the departments. A deep reflection about the cultural addresses in tune with the new orientations and design themes of the so said connective creativity are missing. Furthermore many teachers seem to hang on to their own traditional certainties, sometimes anachronistic, often less attractive or self-referential.

On the contrary, the young graduates, seeing that their own operational scenario with much probability will be in a foreign country, have to deal with multi-disciplinary methods, a mostly international approach. So they need a cultural long raged openness, a strong technical and technological preparation (especially about energetic control and bio-architectu-

Massimo Locci

re), an ability of presentation/illustration of the projects with evolved informatics instruments. Today we think in terms of expanded virtuality and of increased reality, both tied to the digital revolution and to the linguistic experimentation.

Repetitions, variations, continuity, discontinuity, mutations and differences are the logical – theoretical prerequisites from which measure and expressive values come from: the process method transforms axioms in meanings. Theory in this way ties with tectonics, physics – geometrical data with conceptual maps.

But we don’t have to forget that space is the main character of the architectural identity and that history is always a method of doing.

The university masters substitute, in part, to the mentioned lacks, extending the educational frame and the disciplinary interests, but it’s clear that in the approach we can do better.

Even in this case it seems more realistic that it’s a dynamic institute as the Quasar to orient the courses according to the operational and professional changed needs.

Similarly the theme of low environmental impact architecture, a field in full development and with a big occupational opportunity, has to be faced with an holistic approach and with wide cultural refers, entering in an eco-systemic philosophy in which the main human needs are put in relation. It’s needed to rebuild a virtuous relationship between architecture and territory, learning to design eco-buildings children of an alternative vision, built on the planet’s vital equilibriums.

Innovative buildings in the spatial quality, bringers of a new aesthetic, with enclosures thought to attract on an urban scale, efficient for the reduced consumption and for the ability of energetic auto-production.

Thinking on a modern educational path in-depth analysis are required in technologies and materials, but mostly a more articulated and complex vision than how it happens today.

The same Productive Footprint to answer to the living basic needs, to protect the natural areas and the landscape has to reduce the use of not-renewable resources, use recycled and recyclable materials, avoid the production of waste, minimize the ground consumption and make more dense building fabrics with suitable typologies. Therefore not just answers of plant design but a systemic approach, for new buildings, and for the requalification of the existing building assets. In the future, in fact, to designers it will be mostly asked interventions of urban recovery. Reformulating the traditional relationship between artifact and nature, between city and environment. between historical centers and urban expansions, it will be needed to overturn for a reconciliation of the values now opposed. Earth, as we know, it is not endless.

Contemporary architecture, after that it left some abstractions, precast rules and demonstrative approaches of the Modern Movement, sets its new frontiers on the ethical and participated side: to who designs are asked spaces able to stimulate feelings, useful with different modalities and thought for new social relationships (meeting places). Architecture now can be again a useful vehicle for the happiness of man, showing a way that could allow to praise most of the free expressivity of the contemporary starchitect. The ethical approach, that some define as “frugal”, pushes us to think again about the role of our discipline, with proposals declined on a simplified level and with a community value.

A frugality that represents an alternative way of intending the creative processes and the linguistic experimentation,

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a practice able to translate the utopia of consciousness in a concrete and alternative way of living the collective space.

A practicality directed to answer in an efficient way to the problems of the global economy. If on one side are always asked more performing and smart buildings, linguistically expressive structures and urban landmarks, on other sides it’s necessary to give answers in line with the new social organizations and the contemporary ways of living. Since a few years in the metropolitan areas are experimented alternative ways of living (co-housing solutions) and of “parasitic” architecture, tied to the pre-existing with a plant design and functional cordon, underground and/or removable objects that occupy the ground just temporarily. In the touristic field these solutions represent opportunities to re-naturalize the agricultural territory and the coasts, in the urban area for the building recycling and scrapping. All the operations are inserted in a contest of increasing knowledge of the environmental matter.

Some of the expressive trends of contemporary architecture, in particular in the interior design, define processes of decomposition and recomposition of space in unit of form always readable; there are characteristics such as syntactic differentiation and contraposition of elements of composition, and it joins to it the semantic reduction, the minimalistic esteem of the geometrical matrix, the essentiality of the material ones. All aspects interconnected and permeated by the adhesion to a logical-conceptual rigorous statute and tending to a formal-functional absoluteness with strong principles of order. In other trends, on the contrary, it’s clear the wish of a rewriting of internal space creating distributive systems varied and flexibly variable during time, through light bodies and transparent diaphragms, that allow to realize

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always more fluid settings. In all of them the value of experimentation is marked. Anyway for some designers internals are often considered a secondary aspect of the project; some represent space drawing maps and sections without furniture, excluding, in an abstract way, the actions that there will happen. On the contrary, all the MM’s big architects, from Wright to Loos, from Le Corbusier to Kahn, conceive interior architecture as the space of life, seeing that its “main character – remembers us Bruno Zevi – is in its behavior with a tridimensional vocabulary that includes man […] architecture is a big sculpture in which the human life takes place […] takes possession of space, know how to “see” it makes the entrance key to the understanding of buildings”.

Between the new planning lines of interior design it stands out an innovative orientation connected to the industrial production and to the light prefabrication of parts and components or of entire residential cells. An experimentation applied in a field that will have a big technological development, interesting both as evolution of the Furniture System of which is kept the components logic, of variation and of assembly differentiation, and as an ability to create new low cost residential types, based on the auto-construction possibility, on the personalizing of the product and on the flexibility of use.

The light prefabricated cells have already now a wide field of application, but often the production is of low architectural quality. In consideration of the many purposes, instead, they should be designed more carefully. The scenarios go from the emergency conditions after natural catastrophes, to exceptional situations or temporary conditions, to big religious and sport events, till touristic or special residences

Massimo Locci

(for example of rotation type for the urban restorations or as home/studios for students), till the excellent function of research workshops in the environmental and archeological field. Generally they are recommended for all those situations in which is asked a less impacting product realizable with few tools and assembled in less time, easily transportable and movable. In the densification logic they can be combined with the already existing products, creating new hybrid buildings with enclosures that could improve its functionality, image and bio-climatic efficiency (re-fitting and re-cladding operations). In the end these interventional strategies can technologically improve the construction industry that is industrially dated.

The recourse to assembled and dry stratification technologies opens new horizons even for the grabbing of alternative sources and of energy saving, thanks to the thermal hyperisolation, to the introduction of solar/photovoltaic panels, to the small wind turbines, to the thermal offset/attenuation materials, thermo-reflectance or using the refined Phase Change Materials, able to give settable thermal inertia.

Thanks to the multi-stratified enclosures, with different high performance isolating mats (thermal, acoustical, fireproof), there can be inserted also external expansion modulus, bio-climatic greenhouses, Trombe walls, small wind turbines webs, with the aim to give concrete strategies and solutions for more efficient buildings.

The orientation is of extreme interest seeing that it allows to enlarge disciplinary contrast on all the themes of living, it brings them back to the heart of the civil and cultural discussion. All of this is also because of the entrance in the residential field of the big industry, for example IKEA and VELUX light prefabricated and of low energy saving cells, and of other various leading companies that have already realized

prototypes or engineered parts and components.

This new business strategy appeals to an evolved idea of building typology, reinterpreted as open cell and tied to the actual social dynamics, so there were hypnotized customable and functionally variable structures even if not always aesthetically well solved. The originality doesn’t stay much in their constructive technology or in their appearance, but in how they are thought in terms of industrial costumer goods; therefore, they answer to a logic of uniformed and serial production, flexible solutions reversible during time, potentially in development in every phase of the user’s life. To architects goes the task to improve their appearance, their technological, functional and collective structure.

Between architecture, design, energy saving and living wellness it’s set the ATIKA prototype, developed by the VELUX company, that in an architectural logic allows interesting morphological compositions and typological variants. The residential cell shows a low environmental impact enclosure, for the wide usage of natural light and ventilation, and because the materials used for its building are totally recyclable. The structure shows high levels of flexibility in its use and possibilities of alternative usage in the future, low energy consumption with a passive use of renewable energies (windows with low value of thermal transmittance, enclosures with a high air seal, strong air circulation and natural ventilation).

All this demonstrates that it’s in the micro-environment’s design that is better shown a new phase of the architecture’s project. It’s not by chance that in Helsinki soon will be finished a district with wide green areas, entirely at zero carbon emissions, that uses light wood elements; the project

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was realized by Sauerbruch Hutton, Ove Arup, Experientia and Gallery Eco capital, that won the international “Low2No” contest.

This address in design applied to buildings, that prefers the logic of wide compatibility of low cost elements, allows also to deal with the social housing theme, with an holistic approach that sees the experimental moment strongly connected to the operational process and to advanced and recyclable solutions.

The aggregation of morphological small units, in the end, allows the defining of compact units and the decomposition in more blocks of volumes, to perfectly get adapted to the grounds geometry and, at the same time, keep free passages and empty spaces to guarantee permeability to the naturalized system. The endless aggregative hypothesis organize multifunctional urban spaces, in a correct relation between people-oriented and landscape scale, to be inserted in the small Italian historical centers. The requalification of the construction industry goes, inevitably, through a new dialog between critical reflections about processes of transformation of cities and industrial research, technological innovation and economical reasons.

In Italy, the light prefabrication theme was already questioned in the postwar, when, to go beyond the dated construction industry, young designers started to deal with the international reality and to set a new interventional philosophy that answered the new social conduct. They realize fascinating drawings that anticipate a future with shocking mega-structures and linear cities, multifunctional spaces for nomadic users, created with new materials, technologies and ways of

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use. The Italian research deals with the theme in a theoretical and operational level, giving concreteness to a trend that was risking to set itself in the sphere of the linguistic utopia.

The Design Conferences/Contests experience about themes of strong experimental charge, promoted by the Istituto Nazionale di Architettura and of important companies (IN/ ARCH-DOMOSIC, IN/ARCH-FINSIDER, IN/ARCH-SIR), it is emblematic, because they give us an efficient example of our research in the second half of the 20th Century, all to be recovered, and because some building typologies started to be produced. Between the most interesting ones of the 70’s are the prefabricated cells of Luigi Pellegrin and of Cappai and Mainardis for Olivetti in Ivrea.

Going back to didactics, it’s needed to observe that the living space is not just the professional field in which young designers are mostly busy, but it’s the place in which we find out many multidisciplinary reflections, genetic base of the entire new architecture.

Architecture has always been, mostly in the thousand-year old Italian history, a meeting and summary place between economical processes and cultural strategies: our discipline, in this transition phase, needs a new effective relationship with the industrial field, particularly it would be appropriate a new role of customers and of advanced production fields.

Shortly, a bringing up to date of the one that took place in the postwar by Adriano Olivetti with his synergic idea between economy design and graphics. In the 50’s Olivetti enlarged the horizons from the single industrial product to the production place, in particular Ivrea or Pozzuoli, where the factories were flanked with residences and services able to offer to workers the best life conditions. A virtuous

Federico De Matteis

RESEARCH – FORMATION – PROJECT: A NOT LINEAR RELATINSHIP 1

Federico De Matteis city-factory, Ivrea is considered the most advanced level of development of the territory of the 20th Century, for the naturalized complexity, and because it was created by some of the best Italian architects, so that the entire city was nominated to the Unesco World Heritage Site.

The philosophical work is properly – as often in architecture – rather a work on ourselves. About the own way of thinking.

About how we see things. (And about what we expect from them).

Ludwing Wittgenstein

Today more than ever it’s visible that without a synergy between the subject directly evolved in the process of the habitat production designers, customers, business fields, finances fields, cultural institutions, administrations responsible for the territorial policies – can’t be realized that essential passage from the building’s indiscriminate spreading, that we have to definitely leave behind us, to the territory’s requalification, that is the only way to the future.

Γνώθι σεαυτόν Socrates Recently reading Methods in Mind, a small book of Michael S. Gazzaniga, a famous American neuroscientist, I found, between the various interesting considerations, his interpretation of the evolutionist theory of knowledge. To learn a new ability, says Gazzaniga, it’s nothing else than bringing into light an ability of our brain that is already inside it since birth but that requires, to be activated, a particular training.

In other words, our learning ability is strongly influenced by the structure of our brain and, for how much someone can apply himself, some knowledge and abilities will always stay precluded. Who is not able to understand quantum physics will never be able to do it; at the same time, the human brain’s potentiality is huge and it doesn’t take much to allow it to express itself.

This kind of knowledge as “becoming conscious of”, made me to think, going back in time of some tens of centuries, to the Theaetetus, the dialog in which Plato explains his idea of Maieutic, that is a teaching method that consists of leading the student to the acquisition of a knowledge already existing inside of us. As a teacher this idea attracts me, because it gives to education a role that goes beyond the simple “give concepts” or worse, after the cold language of academic bureaucracy, of the skill building.

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RESEARCH – FORMATION – PROJECT: A NOT LINEAR RELATINSHIP 1

It’s a prospect that gives meaning to the teaching, seeing that defines its profile as research activity: but it’s a research not meant just as meaning of “scientific method”, but more as a “research of our surroundings”, as was also explained

by Wittgenstein in the famous phase that we put here in epigraph. It’s surely not by chance that Wittgenstein, the most architect between philosophers, wanted to compare the philosophic work with the architecture one, the project one. The project, therefore, as a form of knowledge: even in this case, first of all knowledge of ourselves.

So it seems clear to me that to research, teach and design are activities different and with a well defined theoretical foundations, but also inextricably tied to each other by the “heart” represented by people: the student, the teacher and the customer, whose roles end up, often, getting intertwined and merging with each other. For who learns to design, the path is not really different compared to the one of who starts an analytical therapy: to allow this project to bring to results, it’s necessary to “open ourselves up” and to put ourselves into play, even risking to get lost, with the clear purpose to know ourselves better and, as consequence, the “space” that lives inside each of us. Metaphorical space, obviously, that I, however, think is the same foundation of the architectural space that is anticipated by the project.

Designing, inevitably we project on the external world a kind of reflex of our inner being: for how much cold it could seem, the process that brings from the action to realization, for how dominant can be the used instruments and techniques, stays the fact that each decision, each space, each recalled shape shows a small piece of our inner being. Even when

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we imagine to build places where our customers will live, we are really giving a home to the image of them that we made inside of us.

The teacher’s role, in this process of knowledge and research that the student makes in his surroundings, consists in helping, leading, in the identification of the necessary equilibrium between requests that come from this inner being condition and, on the contrary, those that come from the objective and measurable situations, from “ critical distance” that the designer has to know how to keep up with the object of his work, to ensure that the result isn’t a mere and self-referential artistic production. So it’s about, to paraphrase Coomaraswamy, to identify the equilibrium point between knowledge and wisdom: if this equilibrium is missed we would end up “falling in the well”, as happened to Thales who, busy watching stars, forgot to watch where he was walking.

The idea that the good project can come just from the equilibrium between two different moments and kinds of knowledge, an interior and an exterior one, makes us think on another matter, founding for my point of view, about didactics, mostly compared to the project’s teaching: the transfer of the ethical bases of design. One of the writings that I think every design student should read is Adolf Loos Story of a poor rich: the sad story of an unfortunate and simple person that falls prey to a mean architect. it’s good that this warning echoes always in the students ears: we never design for ourselves, but always for somebody else, the project doesn’t come always from inside but from outside. To know how to back up, recognize when the designer’s task is done, when the work starts to make an own, independent existence,

Federico De Matteis

allowing who lives it to adapt themselves to it. this ability of “letting go” distinguishes the designer from the artist, whose work stays always tied almost as there was between the two an umbilical cord.

With these considerations I’m trying to connect between them some features of design that seem to appear to me particularly important: the personal commitment and the professional ethic, the relationship with the other one through personal knowledge, the relationship between knowledge and intuition. Actually only rarely this various multitude succeeds to set itself on only one level: more often, instead, it’s the case in which it’s the conflict to prevail, a constant tension between opposite requests, sometimes not compatible between them if not through compromise. The nature of these compromises defines, in fact, the not linear character of the relationship between research, project, teaching: exactly as different and conflicting wishes can live inside of a person, so even the project can be the result of a conflict.

The architectural space is a sophisticated representation of human desires: each era, each culture used it to tell it to themselves. But man’s history, as we know, is full of conflicts, contrapositions and contradictions that, when they become space, sometimes stay emblematically unsolved.

In his beautiful novel Billiards at Half-past Nine, Böll tells us about the allegorical story of the Fahmel family: Heinrich, an architect, at the beginning of the 20th Century realized his masterpiece, a big neo-romantic style convent; his son Robert, military sapper during the Second World War, makes the building shine to free a line of fire in a battlefield; when the war was over Joseph, Heinrich’s grandchild, contributes to the reconstruction of the building as it was, where it was.

A family story that sums up not just Germany’s generational

conflict during the war, but also the destiny of an architecture that incarnates in an emblematic way the dialectics and the contrast potentially innate in the project.

The most difficult part of teaching is, in my opinion, exactly in helping who learns to deal with the project’s conflict: to learn how to embrace it without escaping, without to be afraid that their ideas could be diminished by the impact of the real world. The project is not an architecture, but just its (partial) anticipation: what architecture will become once completed we will know it just after that this will be “freed” in the real space world. Big architectures are often those which in this transitions enrich themselves, change, are employed for uses that nobody, not even who designed them, was able to predict all the way. To ensure that the student knows how to embrace this inevitable labor destiny, he will have to make a big effort, working on the reduction of himself to give space to others, exactly how it happens when you learn, when as children, to interact with the people around him.

Since less than ten years I am working as a researcher and as a teacher, always trying to transfer the results of my researches in didactics. It’s not always easy, because sometimes it’s about to work with imprecise, immature and nor verified instruments: anyway the use for what students learn is big.

I believe that more than I succeeded to give them, I had the occasion to get: not just for the fortune to deal with many talented students, that bring new and interesting ideas, but because it’s the same interaction with them that continuously feeds the ideas.

The didactic activity offers also a huge potential for the research in virtue of its multiplicity. Especially in his “atelier” dimension, where more students work on the same project, to the teacher is offered the possibility to experiment, with

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RESEARCH – FORMATION – PROJECT: A NOT LINEAR RELATINSHIP 1

them, a wide variety of different design solutions that in the professional activity are, for obvious reasons, precluded. To be able to use this opportunity is, for who teaches, a rare privilege, because it allows him to have “in hand” an outand-out workshop where to verify the efficiency of different approaches, putting to work young minds who, conveniently led, can significantly help on the project’s research.

Obviously the teacher has to know how to lead students through difficulties represented by the many conflicts of the project’s activity, teaching them how to solve this complex labyrinth.

To who learns the design practice, the atelier offers also the occasion to compete inside a “social” dynamic: here comes to light the research aspect about ourselves that we have, at the beginning of this writing, put at the heart of the project’s work. Obviously the student doesn’t learn just from the teacher, but also from the work of his neighbor, from the direct or indirect confrontation of ideas, problems and solutions.

To learn to design, therefore, is also implicitly a team work, anticipation not just of the professional activity, where is always more required the agreement of many specialists, but also synthesis of research work, where the biggest and most difficult challenge is to put knowledge in real sharing.

The circle of this reflection closes here: to interact in a positive way with others, if they are colleagues, teachers or students, it’s needed to have knowledge of ourselves; to deal with the project with awareness, we need to be aware of our inner being. Just in this way it’s possible to rule the contrasts that populate the design activity, as also the life with others. They are aspects indissolubly tied to each other, that, if they don’t succeed to find the necessary equilibrium, they transform every kind of knowledge in useless concepts

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and every practical activity in empty repetitiveness. About this Bernard of Clairvaux was aware, who almost a thousand years ago wrote: “Whatever is the wideness of your knowledge, you will always miss it, to reach the full wisdom, the knowledge of yourself. Is it really important such a gap? Fundamental, at my opinion. Could you know the secrets of the universe?

And the most remote districts of Earth, and the firmament’s heights, and the sea abysses if, at the same time, you ignore yourself? You would make me think about a constructor who wants to build without foundation: he wouldn’t obtain a building, but a ruin. Whatever you could collect out of yourself, will not be more resistant than a little heap of dust exposed to the four winds. It doesn’t deserve the name of a wise man who is not wise about himself. A real wise man has to first of all know who he is, and he will be the first one to drink his well’s water.”

Federico De Matteis

Thales, busy watching stars, falls in a well

Designers at work at Ford Motor Bomber Factory in Michigan, 1942.

The project as teamwork

Architecture as representation and memory of a battle.

The St. Albana Colonia’s church in the reproduction of Rudolf Schwarz

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RESEARCH – FORMATION – PROJECT: A NOT LINEAR RELATINSHIP 2

RESEARCH – FORMATION – PROJECT: A NOT LINEAR RELATIONSHIP 2

Alfonso Giancotti The word “composition”, broadly speaking, embraces the entire field of the environmental contribution, created by men, visible from the most simple object of daily use till the complex plan of an entire city. If we will manage to establish a common basis to understand the composition and to find a common denominator through objective researches instead of basing ourselves on personal intentions, if we will succeed to do so, this could be applied to every kind of composition; since the composition procedures of a building or of a simple chair differ only from the degree, not in the substance.

Walter Gropius Design Topics in Magazine of Arts, 1947 The reflection theme suggested for this essay immediately brought to my mind the first years when I officially began my career as a teacher and, at the same time, to deal with matters related to my research activity in the architecture field.

I clearly remember how it felt to start thinking about how I could build inside the school my own identity as a teacher that had to be as measured and coherent as it was in my activity as designer.

It seemed appropriate to me to give this introduction, seeing

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that, still now, in the confrontation with students as in the circumstances in which I found myself presenting my job as a designer, I feel the complexity and the fascinating ambiguity of this theme.

It’s also necessary, in this occasion, to re-propose a position that I acquired not much time ago when I had wrote about the meaning of my job. In this recent occasion, I felt necessary to clarify how, in the execution of my profession as an architect, I always was brought to consider research, didactic and project fields as a possible variation of a same verbal form, aiming therefore my work to the inevitable research of an impossible cohesion inside of these three fields.

Confirming what I just said, I so feel to be able to say, on the basis of my personal experience, how it’s possible to assimilate the research, formation and project fields to some groups that, as reason of their same meaning, are destined to be superimposed, integrated, intersected, and most of all to contaminate each other.

Taking this statement as a starting fact of this essay’s reflections, it’s possible to understand and to analyze the nature of this dialectic relationship between the parts, of which the direct experience proved its absolute lack of a linear development. About the relationships system, between research, formation and project fields, it’s right to tell how a possible interpretation is in the features of the architecture discipline: it’s the one that stays on a thin and undefined borderline between the scientific disciplines and the humanistic ones.

This peculiar condition of discipline allows to select two factors, widely researched in the reading: the mind and the invention one.

The first factor, the analytic one, can be directly connected

Alfonso Giancotti

to the scientific field of the architecture discipline; the second one, that we can define of expressive nature, can rightly be connected to the humanistic component.

The analytic component and the expressive one, which directly refer to the objective and subjective dimension of the design idea, can be read as two elements, through which the relationship between research, formation and project outlines and declares its fascinating and synergic ambiguity.

Let’s try to build scenarios that demonstrate this hypothesis based on the effect of the two elements inside these three fields. Inside a path of basic research, for example, the analytic – objective dimension gets such a big importance to exclude from the start every subjective contribute. Anyway it’s this kind of research, in the just mentioned modalities and forms, that allows the researcher to increase his sensibility as a designer and after, the ability to control the expressive instruments. The same research, furthermore, being able to act through the definition and the classification of architecture’s phenomena with the purpose to understand them, it allows to acquire the ability to work through frequent and gradual simplifications with the purpose to ease the reading and analysis of complex problems.

Let’s try to enter more directly into the sphere of the architecture’s project: in this case a correct variation of the reason and invention factors is the necessary condition to reach an efficient equilibrium inside of a process that allows the idea to become material. Anyway it’s impossible to not recognize the analytic research value as a basic act of design elaboration.

Therefore, the study of the context and of the type, of the where and what to design, the awareness of how analysis,

just if made and expressed in a scientific way, can set itself as a necessary condition for the correct identification of the themes that a project each time is called to deal with and to solve.

The identification of the project’s elements, the selection of themes on which to use sensible choices, seem the research activity’s typical factors, able to recover, in the design profession, a real ethic dimension. Speaking of this, it’s important to give to the school – and in this the formative feature takes part – the task to communicate how the traceability of the same analytic path can also set itself as critical step to define the idea’s distinctiveness that every proposal bases itself on, since it’s the only possible result that comes from the methods with which the analysis was lead.

The task of who’s called to teach is, therefore, to communicate how the building of a scientific basis in every design proposal allows to increase the value of the expressive choices that belong to the sphere most sensible to the subjective dimension of thinking.

For a teacher, the ability to help a student in the distinct reading of the objective and subjective dimension that are in the project represents also the necessary condition to allow the student to build a totally independent sensibility in design and lexicon, especially related to the one who teaches. It’s possible, on the contrary, to build an educational path that sets the didactic experience as a travel through the fields of the teacher’s language. But this is not my position.

Speaking of this, along the years, I learned to use an “a posteriori” analysis, since it is an efficient method, lead through instruments proper of the basic research, of the choices

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RESEARCH – FORMATION – PROJECT: A NOT LINEAR RELATINSHIP 2

made in my design activity. A method that doesn’t allow just to verify the meaning of his own design choices, but also to improve the teaching quality, helping the student in the realization of an ending result that, beyond the potential evaluation, it could be considered as the result of its most pure personal research and of a dialectic process that contains, in the technical and formal approach to the project, the distance between the architect’s idea and its becoming material.

Let’s try then to outline an ending frame about the relationships system between analytic and expressive dimension in architecture: in the proper research field the first one is called to be divided from the second one , nullifying it, anyway, the second one at the end of the research activity turns out to be sensibly enriched by the first one.

The same two dimensions are called to join in the design experience, since it’s really important to build a method that allows, the most as possible, to make them traceable and recognizable in reading and, furthermore, to be divided in the educational experience, to allow the building of an independent sensibility of who teaches. It’s a frame that declares the clear relationship between the parts, underlining their not linear being through the clear consideration of how the possibilities of contamination can’t do other than to endlessly increase.

Anyway I feel the need to underline a matter where anyway the complexity of this relation and relationships should lead to and in every field that we are working: that architecture is everything but immediacy.

It’s a consideration that could correspond with a wish

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that I expressed also in other circumstances: the one of seeing bloom, in school and in society, architectures whose choices, in the aesthetic field, are anyway offspring of an ethic code and that, on the contrary, will not prevail an ethic entirely submitted to the aesthetic choices.

It’s good then to end with the formal matter, a variation key of the relationship between research, formation and project in which, personally, I work with a lot of energy to help – in myself and in those whom I have the big responsibility to educate – the building of an idea that should independently and freely develop after the pure lows of its operation.

I like to write it and repeat it more times but I’m really aware of how, in architecture, to question ourselves about the theme that we are daily called to give an answer to, it sets a satisfying strategy aimed to nullify from the start, in the development of every project, the birth of every form, so that the same form could give itself away more easily.

Luca Leonori

FOR AN INTERACTIVE DIDACTIC

Luca Leonori

I personally spent at the Istituto Quasar around twenty-two of its twenty-five years in a significant and various experience that went from teaching (a communication to students about my experiences in the industrial design field) till the recent participation in these last years dedicated at first on the coordination and after on the didactic direction.

The method that during these years was experimented and gave indisputable results was based on the interdisciplinary confrontation between the experts of different fields, with an idea that could be summarized in a strongly ambitious and apparently unreachable claim: “design the world” meaning not completely all, but of everything!

Browsing through this publication, many experiences that I lived and the memory of many students trained in our School, students who are now successfully following their own professional paths, come to my mind.

Another key factor that always represented a clear identification mark of what we can call “Quasar method” was the operational relationship between the School and the companies that, asking for collaboration, alternated contributions of a creative, technological and design innovation.

It’s not easy to summarize how much we did, during this period of time, to develop the interaction between the different project’s fields. The first goal that the Istituto Quasar has always set as target.

It’s an interaction that takes place on different levels and that can be meant as a relationship between physical and virtual reality, relationships between internal and external environments. The creation of an atmosphere made of different particles, typical, that join in the ending project. Therefore the project can’t be faced following vertical chains, that don’t consider what was faced in other disciplines, apparently untied and incoherent between each other, who, instead, work together to enrich and complete the creative process.

This was and will always be more and more along the years the first purpose of the Quasar. Even the contents of the subjects, that can include and examine also paths of fields that differ from the ones expected at the beginning, modified themselves along the educational path started by the students.

The real customers, better than the simulated ones, it’s what we always tried to refer to, to define projects, to have tasks and to bring our students in the design activity, with the purpose to allow them, since the first formation years, to deal with the “real” technology, with the production costs problems, till the creation of plates, inspecting the most recent technologies and getting close to the most sophisticated machines.

Between the many works made by students of all the classes we can mention the ones commissioned by Barilla, Slamp, Ferrarelle, Peroni, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea do Roma, the ones for the Rotay Club of Anzio, Greenpeace, Accademia Filarmonica di Roma;the gardens realized in the Chaumont sur Loire park, the installation for the S. Cecilia’s academy, the many competitions won and all the experiences lived with the same enthusiasm and supported by the excellences of the achievements. Along the time the main attitude to collaborate for the satisfaction of the project’s innovation requests

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FOR AN INTERACTIVE DIDACTIC

was stabilized, making students and teachers meet realities that work in the various specific fields of the subjects that interest us.

To achieve results that are illustrated also in this issue it’s good to analyze the relationships that, in our didactic experimentation, are set between the design analysis and the realization of the project.

The used method is the one of the school-workshop that sets itself in the legacy left by Bauhaus and by the Ulm school. It’s a school where, in our opinion, students learn doing things, joining theoretical-critical concepts with technical-practical experimentation. Since the beginning students are put in the condition to design, experiment and then produce their projects.

My personal opinion, after many years of close collaboration as a teacher and more recently as didactic director, is that a determinate coherence between what is declared and what was concretely realized was reached.

I feel the need to underline the attention set on the different communication and executive techniques, for the projects developed in all the disciplines: from graphics to web, interiors, from design, green areas, till virtual architecture and hyper-graphics.

The formation provides the practice of manual design, as immediate and spontaneous expression of the project, till the use and knowledge of software through which the computer becomes an efficient representation means of the project.

I clearly remember how, during these years, we lived the almost historic passage in all its meanings, from the precision and fashion of the manual graphic elaboration of the

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design, till the first bi and tridimensional designs developed with a computer, declaring in a constant growth all its potentialities and efficacy to enter inside the projects in an always more refined way.

Browsing many works and experiences made and reported in this issue, comes out an indisputable quality of representation techniques and of contents, but I don’t like to end my reflections looking just on the past, becoming nostalgic and self-celebrative. I also would like to analyze the present and to think a lot about the future.

Exactly in these days we add to our prize list the victory achieved in a contest made by Chevrolet, to which our students of the second year of the Visual Graphics and Communication class participated: first and third place on a really high number of participants coming from many different Italian schools and universities.

The second year Web & Interaction students were the creators of a really sophisticated scenic design, created with a computer and projected in these days on the screen of the Ambra Jovinelli’s prestigious stage, for a show directed by the youths of the CIES’s MaTeMù center, an ONLUS busy in the re-integration of foreigner youths in the society.

Two different realities, one decisively aimed to the industrial and production field, the other aimed to society. Two different fields that are treated in the same way and with the same didactic rigor.

Franco Bovo, Emilio Vendittelli

AROUND THE IDEA OF INTERIOR

Franco Bovo, Emilio Vendittelli Disciplines that belong to the field known as “Interior Furniture and Architecture” are different and really organized between them: Interior Architecture, Decoration, Furniture, Project of the Furniture’s Product, Installation, Museography, Scenic design, History of Furniture and Design. This last one, Design, even if belongs to the Technology disciplinary field, and particularly to the Industrial Design, it’s never completely excluded from Interior Furniture and Architecture classes instead, often it acquires a really important role, as we will try to explain next.

In the last years design means more things together, more fields that refer to the design activity. Sometimes the same architecture is defined as Design object, and therefore no longer in the context and referable to a certain place.

Therefore, maybe, it’s needed to start from the theoretical reconsideration and utterance of the origin, of the dimension that belongs to Design and of all the rest. In this occasion we will deal just with the re-definition of the Interior Architecture and Furniture dimension, and with Design, postponing to other occasions the statement of distinctive and founding factors of other disciplinary fields.

Interiors, furniture and design could be joined in one big dimension, meaning the one that Walter Benjamin preferred to define as “intérieur”: a kind of “private space” more complex than the physical one, full of symbolic aura of the living, a leaving that means “leave prints”.

And how M. Heidegger was affirming that “living comes before building”. Maybe in this sense Bruno Zevi explained better this aspect when he affirmed that “architecture’s main feature, for which it distinguish itself from other artistic activities, it’s in its understanding with a three-dimensional vocabulary that includes man (…) architecture is a big sculpture in which the human life takes place”.

Therefore, this architecture has its own physicality that includes an air-shaped dimension: the interior space. Men enter with the density of their body in this reality and architecture plays between and on different densities of the enclosure and of the body that “occupies” the space. Space has always an enclosure, a fence that identifies and denotes it. Space, or “Raum”, is at the beginning of a freed space, as something freed. But in certain limits and therefore the limit it’s not a point where something ends, but where something starts his life (this is Heidegger’s theory to explain the beginning of space and interiors).

In the beginning it was the shelter, man’s primordial necessity to defend himself from bad weather: a shed, a branch, a cave.

And the shelter becomes haven. To be protected from nature, from animals, but also from other men and so the haven gets organized, it’s built also for other purposes, making so the primordial work of artifact opposed to nature. This is the original dimension of interiors. The first community organizations introduce evolutionary elements not just to refer to the organization of the haven’s interiors, but to refer to the embryonic relationships that get created with the other neighboring havens.

When these relationships start to get organized in a social, cultural, religious and political meaning, starts a now dialectic relationship between inside and outside, between private and public, in a physical, symbolic and semantic meaning. This dialectic will be more and more rich and strategic, and will more generally characterize architecture for millenniums.

We can start talking about “intérieur”, in Benjamin’s meaning, when the physical interior becomes a place, a context, a relationship space. it’s a significant system of combined physical entities, adapted for life, for men, for existence, and able to hold the time marks. In this point of view, the physical entities

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AROUND THE IDEA OF INTERIOR

that start to get in relation to allow the interior to become a place, context, are: space, enclosure/limit, furniture, objects, light, substance, color; and these factors have worth just in their interaction with men.

And so also the interpretation of the interior space for authors such as Carlo de Carli acquires an even deeper meaning. Architecture is born when the gesture is defined in space, for de Carli it was born with gesture. The internal space should be born form gestures, from the motion created by men. The architecture’s quality has to be verified, on the “primary space” quality, based on the first tensions that generated it, meaning from the projective motions. The geometrical shapes, always for de Carli, are not born as forms from beginning that create, or better compose the space, but are suggested by projections first reactions. De Carli talks about the internal space as something living and so doesn’t use adjectives that describe and qualify it, but he uses verbs to denote its life. Cause of this space colors, opens, shapes and articulates itself.

Going back on the relationship system, to the place, furniture is one of the entities that mostly characterizes and gives substance to a place, to an interior. To furnish, generally, means to provide the space of equipments, ornaments, necessary instruments to carry out the human activities and to satisfy needs (following the Spanish vocabulary “arrear” means decorate, adorn, trim). They are needs that naturally are not just the primary ones, tied to the use and to the functional answer of places, but that also include the psychological and representative necessities, and of identification with the build environment.

In this point of view, the most convincing definition is given

by Mario Praz when he defines the furnishing as the “taking

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care”, taking care of something, identify ourselves with it and adopt it, imagining the living, the house as a kind of “soul museum”, able to express the real identity of the living through its things, its objects, its furniture, its fabrics, its clothes and everything that animates its “furnished” surroundings.

Therefore, at least in the most shared original definition, furniture is indicated and characterized by some essential and founding parameters. First of all for its “topicity” character.

The relationship system of the elements that form a particular furniture of a certain interior, are created for that place, are made to be inserted in that particular place and context.

Before the Industrial revolution and so before the birth of design, other parameters were representing in a clear and distinctive way what was defined as furniture. These, for example, were the human factor necessary for the creation of a certain object, without other brokerage interventions.

The human factor, the only possible one in an absolutely artisan perspective, made that object unique. Mastery and knowledge of who created it gave to the object that aura that belongs just to the artwork.

From the relationship of these objects, maybe coordinated and coherent with the more general formal system of the belonging context, already from the Gothic period, we gradually go to a relationship system between objects and integrated and integral enclosure (interior). We find it and it explicitly shows itself starting from the Art Nouveau, to reach then to that complete “artwork” that recalls to that so said “Gesamtkunstwerk”, originally associated to Richard Wagner’s opera, that were putting together music and theatre. After, the word specified the furniture fully integrated with architecture and its interiors. Every element involved in the artistic project is carefully designed mostly by the same creator. An

Franco Bovo, Emilio Vendittelli

only big director to create the total and complete symphony for a unique intèrieur. All the Art Nouveau was filled by this ambition, in all its national and territorial variations, from the Italian Liberty, to the Spanish Modernism, from the Nancy’s school to the English New Art, from the Viennese Secession to Mackintosh’s Glasgow School.

Ambitions, and sometimes trespassing, that brought Adolf Loos to a kind of radical rebellion. His writings, collected in Ins Leere gesprochen - Trotzdem, were undermining at the root of this approach. The satirical figure of the poor rich, plagiarized and molested by the architect to its deepest part, as for the slippers that are inappropriate for the doorway even if they were designed by the same architect, it’s a parody about the untenable presumption to want to participate in all private and existence spheres and to all levels.

Loos sacrilegious opinions and critiques definitely open to the Modern season. The figure of the total creator of the work is drastically reconsidered. “The walls of the house belong to the architect. Here he can do what he wants. And as the walls also the furniture that can’t be moved belong to him”.

And furthermore “in my latest article I advanced some really heretical presumptions. Neither the archeologist, nor the decorator, the architect, the painter or the sculptor have to furnish our apartment. And then who would do it? Well, it’s really simple: everybody has to be the furnisher of himself”.

One of its inventions was revolutionary for its period and for all the further architecture: the “Raumplan”, or plan of volumes. It consists in the organization of the volume around relocations in the respective levels of the main floors, elisions that are needed not just to liven up spaces, but also to diversify a living room to the adjoining one. A kind of manipulation

of volume available in a prism, as if it was rough material, from which to create a composition of the dynamic section.

This manipulation was read also on the outside and on the functions that took place in the inside. The main basics of the new architecture were by now written.

And it’s at the same moment, or a bit earlier, that starts the real design season. Design, as we know, is the son of mechanization, of the industrial revolution, and refers to the single object, or of micro-systems of assembling objects. The industrial product, differently from the furniture product as an artisan product, doesn’t have relationship problems with other objects or with a place. It’s basically “atopic”. Generally design necessarily refers to the industrial product and so to a process that includes: a project, defined in detail in all its parts to be transferred to the machine; the realization of the project and so the product’s production, that once defined and fully developed can be reproduced undefined times; selling, absolutely necessary to keep the production and most of all the consumption, that allows to restart the cycle. The industrial object, clearly can’t be left outside of the mechanical factor, and for this, at least until a few decades ago, also from the limits of the serial and standard production, that doesn’t accept approximations, irregularities, imperfections (in the new contemporary scenario would seem by now that even these peculiarities were passed, almost as wanting to see a new hyper-technological artisan as industrial purpose).

They are products aimed to consumption. Furniture, that as seen conveys of the human factor, was thought and realized to last. But we can say that the industrial product (or of design) is self-referential, it answers to itself and only at itself.

It’s clear that the Design Universe is something more complex and articulated, in this occasion we tried to point out

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AROUND THE IDEA OF INTERIOR

just some of the aspects that are at the basis of the same phenomenon and that are operational to the subject and to the more general thesis that we affirm in this issue.

But going back to the theme of this thesis, if we consider the general frame of architecture, of the new production of objects to the new relationship with nature and most of all with the new dimension of arts, referable to the twisting made by the industrial revolution, we understand that the “Intérieur”, from where we started for this definition, goes through a drastic and radical review and redefinition in its deepest meanings. To say it as G. Ponti, when, thanks to new technologies made by the industrial revolution in steel and glass better than in reinforced concrete, the wall disappears as all the relationship systems that for millenniums set up the basic features of the Intérieur’s definition. For millenniums the wall’s “nobility”, its weight, mass, gauge signed the interiors. It was the limit par excellence, that other than to give shelter, haven, it was set to be equipped, lived in its gauge, digging it, illustrating it, decorating it. The “inside life” got meaning exactly from the wall’s nature. Outside it answered to the symbolic, rhetorical and communicative solicitations coming from the community. Inside the private life and so of rituality, dreams, representations. In the relationship system of things, of objects in a kinetic point of view, it could be defined as centrifugal. There was nothing at the center and everything was set near the borders, near the wall that had to support and complete the equipment of functional furnishings necessary for the activities that could take place in the inside.

The new building technologies and especially the point sources ones in steel and reinforced concrete make the wall to be an accessory, a completion of the building. Its weight,

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mass, gauge are no longer necessary and therefore it’s no longer allowed to “live”. The kinetic system becomes a centripetal system. We clearly think on examples pushed to the extreme, as the Barcelona’s pavilion of Mies, or always of Mies the living-room of Tugendhat home at Brno, but that regard a big part of the modern and contemporary architecture, if not other than an approach that will the edge, the lining as a thin skin that opens the inside toward the outside without a solution of continuity.

But it’s clear, the battle for survival by now evolved in a battle for knowledge; by now nature doesn’t show itself no more as a group of unexplainable and dangerous phenomena and a new sensibility and identity are developing in the relationship between man and world; science expresses trust and liberation power; a laic, anticlerical and ironic mentality of the old dogmas that widely spreads out in the western society. By now nature can enter inside the house.

It’s no longer needed to defend ourselves from it. It’s by now known as domesticated. Between “Inner und Aussen” is set a dialectic relationship of mutual respect, of constant confrontation, that doesn’t exclude a dimension more than another. All the representative and figurative equipment, sometimes symbolic and metaphorical designated to the limit, to the edge, that set itself as a narrative level, it doesn’t have no more reason to exist. The world is directly brought back into our home or observed in the safety and comfort of our living-room.

The processes of abstraction in arts, the exemplification of formal and decorative superstructures in the industry, of still-life contemplation of natural elements, of nullification of the physical limit of the interior, that bring a radical twist in the relationship system between objects (by now of Design!)

Franco Bovo, Emilio Vendittelli

and so of furniture, as coordination of things, fixed and mobile objects in a certain context. It’s no longer and not much a system that refers to the “topos”, to space and time of a certain place, but more as a system of relationships between abstract and atopic elements, always differing from each other. Connections and disconnections more or less declared relationships between points and lines of space, dynamic relationships between linguistic, formal and cultural relationships of different and sometimes antithetical extraction and origin. An endless resource of solutions inside an open artwork. Open meaning that not only it can always be modified, but, compared with the total/complete artwork, in the different levels of the project, it doesn’t necessarily belong to the same creator. And it’s this the big element of absolute originality that comes out from the Modern Movement and on, and mostly thanks to Loos.

This doesn’t mean that the work’s unity, as a complete artwork, will not be pursued by the researches that will follow.

For big masters as Wright, Aalto, Scarpa, Albini and Riva it will stay the main purpose and they will follow a tradition that ironically exactly nowadays seems to be again convincing.

The fact is that these expressive research lines of methodological approach will be flanked with other possibilities that will work mostly on the coordination, on the wise direction of design objects, to define the project of interiors.

Anyway the 20th Century will be characterized by the “Design supremacy”. In many cases, often exactly in the residential construction industry, the residential units were thought as an industrial product. Standardized and serially produced, nullifying their private and cultural content, they were homologated and often homologating. Empty boxes all the same, furnished with projects of industrial produc-

tion, anonymous and alike for every place and person, they characterized most of, if not all the postwar residential construction industry. But anyway, if we consider a residential unit made of a hundred houses and we dissect it to show the inside of every house, we would see that to each single house corresponds a solution and adaptation different from the others: a litmus test of how it was and still is prevalent the necessity of men to declare their own cultural, religious, political, of customs, of origins identity through its furniture, and, if they could, also through its “Intérieur”. Even if drawing from the same linguistic and technological samples, made available by the production, in the end a person chooses by himself and for himself as to “take care” of his own living environment.

The satisfaction of this almost primordial inevitable and insuppressible instinct that belongs to each man is the new frontier for civilization of the Third industrial revolution. The first design was aimed to a kind of “collective identity” and after to a “mold of stable identity” even if they were different and dynamic. Today it has to answer to the requests that come from “individual identities” and in constant transformation. The multi-ethnicity, the many and even multiple identities belonging to our modernity, and our modernity is characterized by dynamic processes that are outside of the devices created by the “classic modernity”, busy searching for definitive and permanent solutions, for perfectly defined problems and functions. As Andrea Branzi affirms: “In the current society, busy in a continuous contrast with its out of control spin-off, therefore the new, the different, the continuous innovation, the project has to find solutions reversible, incomplete and temporary that will guarantee the possibility to not create strict decisions, that could create fragility in

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AROUND THE IDEA OF INTERIOR

front of directional and functional changes”. The sociologist Z. Bauman talks about the arrival of a new liquid modernity, meaning a modernity without a formal code, but ready to acquire the many shapes of their containers.

Therefore we have to relate with these new liquid and formless flows that get a shape time by time, to then change it again. The important systems of physical entities integrated between each other, shaped in relation with man life, they have by now blurred and changeable boundaries.

The interior, the furniture, the design, so as we tried to express, to specify their origin in a one summary moment, as it was the one of the “interior”, they find new definitions and declarations depending on the “container”. If we consider then that the transformations generated by the third industrial revolution are mostly of a continuous reconversion and functional reconversion of the contemporary city to adapt it to itself, this process is made mostly through the design of its interior spaces, as Branzi says, “as an independent infrastructure, that in respect to the architectural systems, modifies their social and productive destinations, and renews its image, creating those “memorial tunnels”, which in the 60’s Kevin Lynch talked about, made of urban signs and furniture often temporary, that make the city recognizable compared to the architectural micro-signs, more and more blurred by the object and human filter, and far from the daily experience. Therefore, the design of interior spaces is going beyond its traditional limits of the furniture’s discipline to become the “main activity of the project for the general operation of cities in the Third Industrial Revolution period”. It’s a main function that works through the resource of technologies and product sectors that belong mostly to the competences of what we define as “design”, as designing activity of sub-systems

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and micro-systems, created in big series, in small series, or unique objects, using advanced or manual technologies, but always able to easily follow the changing of social and expressive requests, inside modern, ancient and really ancient architectural contexts”.

The future generations will clearly be the ones who will have to answer to these new requests of modernity. Therefore it becomes crucial to also review our knowledge’s modalities of transfer, and most of all those directly tied to teaching.

The didactic, the teaching of interior design has the necessity to re-think on itself going beyond the limit built by the simple transfer to the student of preconditioned and strict methods. The purpose and the new frontier for the didactic is to recognize the student, our spokesman, as an active part of the knowledge’s transfer process. Starting from this beginning he needs to give a series of really specialized historical, technological and ergonomic knowledge, but absolutely trying to develop the creative ability and the individual predispositions and imagine innovative environmental scenarios.

Cristiana Costanzo

LANDSCAPE. Reality follows the image. Image follows reality

Cristiana Costanzo With time some REALITIES acquire a mythical dimension, their physical materiality transcend and they show themselves in the mind of man as IMAGE and the only scientific explanation seems destined to disappoint us.

If we imagine an expert tightrope walker who keeps his equilibrium swinging on his rope, we know that he “naturally” knows how to do it because of his long training and study of himself. Without knowledge he couldn’t keep this equilibrium.

All visible things take place between extremes and opposite powers, swinging slowly or fast, now on one side and then on the other: so the affirmation follows the denial and the denial follows the affirmation, desire follows disgust and disgust follows desire, abundance follows lack and lack follows abundance, sureness follows doubt and doubt follows sureness.

Since forever the history of opposites fascinates scholars, thinkers and scientists, who try to unfreeze things from a prearranged drawing to bring them back to their natural swinging between its limits. What is created by its contrapo-

sitions is one, when this one is divided its extremes appear.

In the most recent historical phases the popular awareness of the emerging of new environmental paradigms progressively increased in the culture of plan and project, so as in the more widespread social sensibility, strongly influencing the technical disciplines of architecture, and extending its research field to that part of the habitat designed with less attention to the context’s conditions and to the availability of the local resources.

The first paradigm is represented by the modification of the relationship nature/artifact, with the entrance of technological potentialities that were unknown until a few years ago, anyway this requires the finalizing of complex control equipments between a condition of absolute naturalness and artificiality, not reducible to reductive and simple synthesis. The second paradigm is characterized by the narrowness and the relative renewability of natural resources, this dictates the acquirement of parameters and methods for a correct analysis of the development’s sustainability, after compatibility logics extended to spatial and temporal limits that are also extremely dilated – the already known “future generations”. At last, but not for this lesser important, the paradigm of the ecological quality, that shows the necessity to bring back the residential systems to proper levels of psycho – physical quality and rationality.

For these reasons the culture of plan and project can no longer “limit itself” to an application separated from the technical, natural, social and economical components of the site in which it works, but it has to try to become promoter of an holistic approach in the definition of architectures complete and recognizable in a strong local identity. Therefore, in the

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LANDSCAPE. Reality follows the image. Image follows reality

last years the disciplinary fields connected to it reached to investigate also the more complex scenarios of the Landscape Design embracing its natural and intangible environmental values.

In this context, the concept of landscape, apparently clear in the use of the common language, they show themselves, instead, divided between two meanings: on one side its scientific ecological origin and on the other hand the phenomenon – perceptive one.

The scientific trend is based on an ecological/technological study, tending to define the landscape as objective and independent reality inserted in a specific environmental context.

The second origin defines, instead, the landscape as image of reality, as an expression of the cultural and perceptive relationship that men have with reality, as a group of exterior and visible aspects of the sensorial features of the territory (Umberto Toschi, 1961) … as an inclusive result of all men’s sensorial activity, that acquires an important operational value in man – nature relationships and so it represents the same vital mediation between man and environment (Eugenio Turri, 1974).

In this way, the actions made for the renovation of the instruments of plan and project, they register with no doubts a deep modification of these concepts, compared to the concepts that gave birth to it during the first half of the Century.

The didactic wealth between the cultural references, that are expressed in the fields of phenomenon – perception applications, and the scientific disciplinary contribution today seems essential for the increasing articulation of competences necessary to deal with the complex scalability of the contemporary project. The attention stays focused on the same project, but this is meant mostly as a control instru-

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ment of complexity and of regulation of the balance, able to bring technical innovation through creativity and an integrated approach.

Each new design intention follows a strong technological renovation, new formulas for the sustainability and new schedules of composition, but often the final choices find the bases of solutions in the intelligence and reconstruction of an intelligibility relationship between the parts. It’s about equipments already experimented that, anyway, recombined in a new strategy articulated and related to the habitat’s environmental features, they time to time adapt themselves to the social and cultural context and to the specific purposes of the site.

In this way, the most efficient instrument reveals to be exactly the one of landscape design, since its systemic, integrated, multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary ideal combines the physical system with endogenous and external dynamics on a social-economical level, and the needs to transform the territory with the specific local resources.

In conclusion the road to follow is still long and if even each innovation implies its malfunction, that is its accident (Paul Virillo, 2002), the discussion has to be continued: designers, companies and producers, technical offices of public and normative companies, and also the scientific community and local populations,,, they can act following their competences, they can feel that precious certainty that can’t be dictated but only lived. We can paint everything, we just got to succeed to see it (Giorgio Morandi, 1978).

Emanuela De Leo

THE LANDSCAPE CALLS ITALY

Emanuela De Leo

There is still one IMAGE to tell about : the REALITY of landscape.

[The landscape of lakes of Salto and Turano – Rieti] In 1939 the creation of artificial levees along the two rivers deeply modified their landscape dimensions that acquired a new image of a valley, keeping anyway an historical mountain reality.

More than ten years have passed since the underwriting of the Landscape European Convention, and since then in our Country, traditionally late compared to the rest of Europe, there were launched a series of laws aimed to the protection and development of the territory.

It’s been already ages that public and private companies with the aim to protection and the design of the “landscape heritage”, requested the participation of technicians and professionals in the field to answer the request dictated for the territory’s restoration. This rediscovered interest for the landscape in the last decade started in Italy an increasing task of high formation.

The plan of new professional figures able to review, plan and protect the design culture of landscapes, brought into light many specialization classes, masters, workshops etc.

The Istituto Quasar in this context is a stable educational reality, two-year courses and workshops deeply deal about themes of actuality of architectural landscape (environmental sustainability, renewable energies, public areas); at the same time with the didactic activity, a careful organization creates continuous interdisciplinary exchange moments and cultural events, that are transformed into stimulating occasions of growth and confrontation about contemporary design themes.

The didactic offer of the latest years in our Country demonstrated to be able to improve itself more and more, reaching to keep up with the times and with the rest of Europe. If from one side Italy actively answers to the international requests , training professional figures to be able to answer and solve design challenges, on the other hand, instead, the landscape architect in the close future has the responsibility to definitely go beyond the limits and borders in which he is forced to move, joining ethic and aesthetic, scientific and cultural knowledge of places.

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THE LANDSCAPE CALLS ITALY

The purpose to reach is the one of filling and revitalizing a stoned and static situation that in our Country prevented to express a new logic of open and dynamic design knowledge and ideal. The Italian interest for architecture of landscape left unsolved some important matters tied to the professional recognition and independence that are instead fundamental and imposed in the European and international context. For too long the superimposition of professions closed the landscaper figure in a gate made only of tasks tied to a healthy reparation of cities or the environmental protection, excluding him from the transformation project.

In Italy, the landscape architect earned the right to reach a disciplinary independence definitely releasing himself from the “decorative landscaper” definition, without denying the historical tradition that sees the gardener as a landscape – horticulture genus.

Observing critical and up to date debates about the landscape architecture in Europe, it seems clear the need to include our Country in an imaginary border in which projects are discussed, spread and realized.

For too long it was pervaded by a long critical – cultural hibernation from which today seems that we are slowly waking up, moving toward a scenario that shows a wish of rebirth .

A renovating trend is slowly moving toward a new eclectic and suggestive period. To the moment of the economical and ideological crisis that we are living could ironically correspond a re-orientation of thinking and a restoration of the design values. This one maybe is an optimistic ideal, but the review of the past as paradigm and the general tendency to review and analyze past attitudes could bring our Country to an idea of innovation.

In this scenario the cultural exchange becomes a necessary and unique condition for the birth of new references, subjects, design and technical proposals. Environmental sustainability, renewable energies, the construction of new public areas, attention to the context, morphological analysis, they all will be the new interpretations that will absorb the design activity of future years.

It has to be recognized that Italy’s theoretical ability gave an important contribution and help to the new project experiences: the starting point for a new cultural trend could start exactly from the operations of incentives and debates on a national and international level, and the necessity to create a restored theoretical body could bring to an inevitable and waited changing of paradigms. To the new generations of landscape architects is the task to join new languages and disciplinary origins, past architectural models and new design actions.

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Gianmarco Longano

THE DESIGNER OF VISUAL COMMUNICATION

Gianmarco Longano Education, professionalism and application fields.

The design of visual communication is a heterogeneous discipline that has as a subject the design and graphic realization of works made with different productive techniques and different supports of destination, material and virtual. This activity includes different steps that go from the meta-project, to the project, to the executive project and to the possible assistance to production, in two words: conception and realization.

The biggest attention that in these years was given to matters about landscape by specialized magazines, issues and contests, is bringing the attention on a new season whose results already start to show out. The landscape project opens, therefore, to new courses and it is more and more aimed to a seducing typology ready to compare with incentives that come directly from architecture, arts, vegetation. The landscape project is ready to measure itself with interferences between experimentations and prototypes, substance and light, nature and artificial.

The designer’s competences are many and they can be acquired first through a basis of studies, and after with professional experiences. The system of visual communication can’t stay without resorting to the theoretical and methodological thought, to disciplines that deal with the theory of shape and field, with the structures, and with the psychological relationships. A virtual composition is made through a totality where each element has certain powers that tie it to others, and it’s not possible to modify one of them without influencing the others.

According to Pythagoras numeric conception, three is the first real number because it has a start, an average term, and an end. from Pythagoras writings, it was observed that the structure of the human soul and the entire world’s one were composed and made perfect through relations and proportions between numbers. Even the Palladian ideal is based on the commensurability of relationships: “In tute le fabriche si ricerchi, che le parti insieme corrispondano, et habbiano tal proportione, che nessuna sia, con la quale non si possa misurare il tutto, et le alter parti ancora.” (“In every factory should be researched a proportion that should correspond to every part, and this proportion should allow the measuring of

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THE DESIGNER OF VISUAL COMMUNICATION

everything and every other part”).

The path that introduced our discipline started in the 20’s of the last Century in which Pavel Klee dealt with the studies about the “Temporalization of form” and Wasilij Kandinskij about “Point and line to surface”: Here the first theories of Basic Design are born. In those years Charles Morris, semiologist, introduces the ideals of “syntactic component”, expressible in “structure”, “semantic component” expressible in “meaning” and “pragmatic” component expressible in “function”.

In the end, if we consider the discipline of Basic Design trough the experience of Ulm (Hochschule für Gestaltung – High School of Graphic Design and Industrial Design of Ulm. Germany, 1953 – 1968). we could see how it brings all the attention, other than on the physical and perceptive form, also on other components such as line, space, volume, color, texture.

The didactic of Ulm provided, other than workshops about the acquisition of a practical knowledge, theoretical lessons that had to give to students a proper cultural baggage. In this school the borders toward interdisciplinarity got expanded.

Tomas Maldonado, designer, theorist and teacher, that for a long time was director of this school, believed that the designer trade was the one of a “technical intellectualist who has an important social role from where come responsibilities of the ethic and cultural collectivity. For Giovanni Anceschi, respected theorist of Basic Design, the didactic system of Ulm became the referring model for the teaching of Design in the world. On this aspect is based part of the theories that will occupy, till our days, the didactic of design classes. The basic design, other than to examine the formal and structural interpretations, it continues to work on experimental practices.

Today the research of an equilibrated relation between analog

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and digital aspects of conception and realization, it changes the point of view and actions reintroducing a path organized around the project’s methods and culture. The examination steps and the compositional theories that start through the identification of the problem, documentation, inventory, invention, experimentation, verification and technical and executive optimization.

The introduction of information technologies and the use of software increased the production quality and the execution speed, but it also increased the risk of evening out the level of offers of graphic works. The traditional design stays always an excellent instrument of investigation and it’s proved that the body’s exercise develops the ability of thinking. In didactics there is the necessity to introduce the drawing as a design basis complementing it with the use of careful assisted drawing with a computer, especially at the beginning of studies.

Therefore, often students and professionals draw thinking on what they will do on the computer after.

New expansions of application fields In the Design of visual communication the idea of shape meant as brand, is the usual code of a brand. The brand identity or visual identity, has the task to make its issuer recognizable, and to build a differentiating memorization in people’s minds.

Companies design as to anticipate the needs of man and their success is defined by a precise strategic choice. For example it was observed that the construction of a brand doesn’t depend just on communication but on the essence that the company gives through the relationships with clients, service providers, employees and stakeholders.

The relationship creates reputation

Gianmarco Longano

services.

The company’s strategy is a recent frontier of managerial models and it’s promoted by organizations such as the Design Management Institute of Boston. Some Italian universities have already introduced a master in design management based on the project’s sociology and on the way goods and services should be innovated. Products, their utility and their social meaning fall fast in disuse and the companies have to always propone new ones anticipating the needs of demanding customers. The theory is called “Design Push”, in which the product’s innovative power makes the difference. The objects are changes not because they stop working, but because they stop “meaning” and no longer inspire people’s imagination. Companies have to go, as Pelè used to say, where the ball will be and not where the ball was. Here design comes into play, meant as thought about the possible. Some companies have already introduced these strategies investing on research and development centers to transform innovative projects into useful technological solutions. The ideas are proposed and the development center will bring the project to life. In this way products are no longer born from market researches and not even from the survey of customer’s needs, but from the ability, often visionary, of identifying taste that the costumers didn’t know to have. An example under everybody’s eyes is the iPod and many Apple products; the strategic choice, spread by Steve Jobs, is a model of management based on Design theories. Companies are getting close to communities with the aim to convince them; they weave together conversations, intercept interests, introduce new subjects and solutions and they propose themselves as option leaders of a field .

The online dialogue anticipates the sale of products and

After this, it follows that the real challenge for companies is to keep themselves technologically updated, in the communication quality and in the choice of social media. To be present on social networks, release the mobile versions of their website or create an “app” for main mobile devices, it implies to keep step up with system updates and with devices launched on the market.

No brand can appear outdated when it communicates in the digital field.

Companies are forced to modify their communication plans at least two or three times a year and they have the necessity to invest on internal and external resources creating, in this way, on the market, a request that is able to set the new designer generations. Today the design processes can be applied to a new discipline: the user experience (UX). This so said “of user experience” discipline studies the processes and flows of the informative interface architecture on different levels. It analyzes the experience and affective features, the meaning and value attribution tied to the possession of a technological product and to the interaction with it. It implies also personal perceptions on features such as utility, usability and efficiency of the system. The UX puts in the field the identification of users needs, practices and meanings that lead their daily actions representing a surplus value crucial for the design of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) systems and services.

The Design perspective moves from the consideration of users such as Human Factors, passive users in an ergonomic perspective of a man – machine system, to Human Actors,

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THE DESIGNER OF VISUAL COMMUNICATION

WEB & INTERACTION

Emanuele Tarducci active users that select, adapt, build kinds of interactions pushed by reasons, purposes, interpretations and by the ability to coordinate their behavior.

In this contemporary scenario the design basics are always useful, because they teach to develop the ability of thinking, observation, reflection, survey manual design, multisensory and kinesthetic approach. The opportunities in the new markets are many. each young designer, following his own field of interest or of opportunity, can analyze and deal with specific paths in the different fields of communication and interaction design.

Robot rabbits that practice Tai-Chi with their ears, when your Spanish colleague comes back from his siesta, sneakers that after running download on the web the training session just made, weight scales that “fool you around” on Twitter if you don’t follow your diet.

The spreading of digital technologies is reached to invade our existence, asking us always more efforts to control the increasing complexity of systems, environments and digital products. We daily deal with many of them trying new and profitable relationships, sometimes the expectation is hardly disappointed, in others everything succeeds really easily, almost magically.

Today the production field of technological artifacts and digital contents lives a relationship, often not yet mature, and aware of the real needs of users and of how it’s possible to satisfy them. Not being interested in the real sustainability of what is produced, we answer too often with the shown and overflowing use of technologies, producing with a sort of overexcitement given by the availability of resources and instruments.

Much of what happens is caused also by the speed with which technologies develop: being available for the use, they create small and continuous revolutions corresponding to unexpected changes of paradigms that can require even much time to be fully understood, both on a cultural and behavioral level.

It’s in this context that the Interaction Design – a discipline that deals about the complex field of the interaction design and of the possible relationships with systems, environments and digital products – expresses its specificity. It’s a practice

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Emanuele Tarducci

that connects and has the contribution of many disciplines that historically helped in the definition of its action field.

The Interaction Design term (IxD) was coined in the middle of the 80’s by Bill Moggridge, for the necessity to identify a rising branch of informatics that started to deal with the necessity to include in the design of its products the possibility of interaction with different digital contents.

In the beginning of the 80’s the interaction design rises in the research field of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) that expresses itself as a specialized branch of informatics.

It’s during that time that the calculator is definitely moved toward the Personal Computer dimension – also thanks to the introduction of the first graphic interfaces – opening the possibility to use new electronic devices to a wider level of users, now no longer belonging to the technical field of informatics.

But it’s in the 90’s, thanks to the arrival of the Home Computing, to the increasing spread of internet and to the always bigger presence of digital and interactive products, that the Interaction design definitely sets itself as a discipline able to “[…] shaping digital things for people’s use”. From this moment many other disciplines will help in the definition of an extremely articulated field of action and research in constant growth, able to include from information engineering to philosophy, from cognitive science to robotics. A discipline in constant development that is connected, often informing them, with other work realities.

To describe the wide possible scope fields of the IxD, it can be useful to refer to the diagram representation made by Dan Saffer.

Therefore, what will be the scenario which we will have to deal with as persons and designers?

The actual context, so as the future one, sees users and designers associated by a common necessity: manage complexity.

Two groups of theories are the two sides of the coin and are necessary to solve this need; one for design, and another to acquire methods to deal with it.

As designers we would like to be able to manage this complexity succeeding to propose more and more seducing and desirable products, as users we would like to nullify the complexity concentrating ourselves on the experience with intuitive products, easy to understand, pleasant to use, exciting.

Historically men were always forced to adapt themselves to technology, the motto of the Universal Exposition of Chicago of 1933 is indicative, it used to say: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms”. Today the design practice and the

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WEB & INTERACTION

technological possibilities allow us to imagine a completely innovated approach, proposing natural interaction modalities able to ease intuitive relationships between users and digital products. All this allows us to enrich design including emotional and experience aspects tied to the interaction with these artifacts.

In light of these innovated possibilities, one of the most exciting points for future designers will surely be the one of succeeding to trace new connections between digital products and people, between the dimension of a single person and of a community, succeeding to integrate aesthetics and ethic, technology and sustainability, proposing solutions sensible to the context, rich interactions, satisfying experiences. The actual evolution of substance and the many contributions that come from disciplinary fields on what it is based, helped in the definition of important research currents and new possible operation fields, that characterize the future development of design for interaction.

Between these the cognitive sciences, that in the last decade succeeded to define new theoretical perspectives about how cognitive processes are influenced by the relationship between mind and body. It’s the theory of the Embodied Cognition that analyzes new possible relationships between body and perception. A theoretical approach that is transformed in the action field of the IxD, in the idea of embodied Interaction. A theory that, considering the body as a perceptive opening to the world, proposes a series of design theories that have the purpose to put in a harmonious relationship the technological – functional and the aesthetical – formal features with the motor abilities of who interacts, the emotional features and the context – even socio-cultural – in which the action takes place.

It’s in this meaning that the Embodied Interaction theory sets itself as a possible connection between digital environment and physical space. The interactive experience is created, but

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also mediated through the body dimension of the user. The perception of a possible interaction pushes to action, the action influences perception, in an intrinsically dynamic process that doesn’t punctually end during time.

It’s in this way that the consideration of these new involvement plans – aesthetical, motor, spatial – brought to the definition of what we define an “increased” theory of the Gestalt: the Interactive Gestalt. A dynamic and kinesthetic perceptive process, where stimulus and actions develop with time and space, getting integrated in a continuity form.

It’s in regard of this articulated working context that becomes necessary the definition of new competences - such as the Interaction Designer one – able to manage the complex field of the interactive design, with the purpose to succeed to harmonize needs and desires. In a world that changes fast, it’s necessary a knowledge of design built by many and for many, a knowledge that can be accumulated and transferable, able to get the features of a research activity, to create critical reflections about design activity, but also able to produce innovative ideas and proposals.

A challenge that also even teaching has to be able to collect, understanding the importance of research through experimentation, as an instrument to define and develop abilities and the design sensibility of future designers.

“Creativity is thinking up new things.

Innovation is doing new things.”

Theodore Leavitt Looking at the future, I strongly believe that the competence of each design activity has to be searched in the union of creativity and innovation.

Barbara Martusciello

PROJECT, CROSSOVER, INTANGIBLE REALLY MATERIAL ART PRACTICE.

Barbara Martusciello Since forever, art gave a precise design. It seems to us even excessive to affirm it here, today, but anyway we will see how it’s not like this. For example, commonly, we can think that the Art Brut (that in the Italian language is called Arte Grezza and in English Outsider Art), meaning that special branch of spontaneous creativity of outsiders, of the interrupted – commonly called, before Franco Basaglia, crazy or fools, or mentally ill – and of suffering people on a psychological level, it doesn’t have a plan just because it’s different from how usually it expresses itself.

At the end of the Second World War, in a Europe still tormented by war tragedies, and in a slow restoration, art got oriented to the primary vitality of actions, the eruptive power and drama of substance, the painting action with a restoration of an original unconsciousness and a respect for the expressive instinct. And so the informal was born and set itself in its different conjugations.

It’s in this perspective and in these years that the French artist Jean Dubuffet, looking at the historical roots of Surrealism, but also Expressionism, created works that showed these new interests and, at the same time, gave life to a collection of childhood drawings and others made by patients of psychiatric hospitals. The dedicated exposition that he organized in 1947 had a really strong weight in the international postwar society – especially Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, with the COBRA group, acronym that comes from the first letters of the cities manes – opening to other artistic worlds where the original inclination and the impulsive practice were ruling.

To work out of the common aesthetical rules of Arts doesn’t mean to give up to the chaotic flow of unawareness: even

when authors of the past gave a theory about the abandonment to chance, set as a standard on which to set all their research – here comes back the Surrealism in our context and with it arrives the following analysis of the 50’s Action Painting that owes a lot to that avant-garde trend – so: design is supportive. Therefore: to chose to not build compositions through a controlled program it is a project and because of this it depends on its rules, even if alternative. If Art is mostly ideal and the ideal, many times, has nothing to do with intelligence or with the logic of ideas, as Dubuffet used to say, who in this way wanted to remark the lead of instinct and fantasy over reason (common), so even the opposite or the absence of that mentioned “logic of ideas” has an own structure: complex, often not understandable for most of people, but that helps and gives substance to all the aesthetic and poetic architecture of its conformation.

Naturally, every artist who carried out his experimentation made it starting from his own peculiar idea, and it’s clear that in all the History of Arts it’s possible to surely find conceptual treatises and formal yield, therefore his own plan. This was also when it anticipated its wild side or political side, of countercultural resistance, a sort of urban “semiological battle” (Umberto Eco, words used in 1967 during a conference in New York, and then made as an article and then essay), as in the Graffiti and Street Art cases: these artistic phenomena from under, they had their design, it was really phenomenal, no way immaterial, even if it was temporary.

This design was already in its way “open” (Umberto Eco, Opera Aperta, Bompiani, 1962), meaning that it was ready to include other signs and other hands coming from other artists and different “crews” that put their works on the ones made time before by artists and groups of their similar “off”

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PROJECT, CROSSOVER, INTANGIBLE REALLY MATERIAL ART PRACTICE.

work; and following on. Till here, indeed, their realization was interactive rather than “open”, meaning that it was showing reciprocity of action and changed with the change of input that comes from the other. But the train and subway coaches tagged and drawn by these artists, following their fixed function, so moving, somehow they imposed even to the watcher his movement to succeed to see the compositions, to catch the drawn details. Therefore, forcing a bit of Eco’s original concept, the necessity of an active intervention necessary for the work’s observation by the spectator transformed this into a customer. It’s in this way that street design from personal became collective, from closed (in its marginal social reality and in the crew) to “open” : bearer of an alternative knowledge and of a new cultural value that we can already define, here, immaterial.

Let’s now make a big jump in history, generational, but most of all theoretical, to identify in the Programmed and Kinetic Art an example of complex design and “blur” and, in that really special case, often tending also to design.

Precedents can be found in 1952, the year of the Manifesto del Macchinismo of Bruno Munari who, with his anticipating concepts, brought to a revaluation of the poetics of Futurism, Dadaism, Constructivism, of De Stijl, Concrete Art and of Bauhaus. In Munari’s farseeing ideas, the artist was seen as an actor among actors – in work groups – in a new collective ideal of the genius and of design. Here comes back this amazing concept, the one of the PROJECT, that in the rich Italian language has less efficient synonymous and has wide meanings, differently defined. Project, from the Latin: pro, in front, and jacere, to throw: what’s thrown in front. The aesthetic – ideological programming of Kinetic and Programmed Art really threw a lot in front of itself:

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experimentation of mechanic-electronic devices, bright and/ or purely graphic that transformed spectators in participating characters of the work; so, the new function of art and of its author (often in plural), concentrated itself in many amazing objects-concepts, it was innovatively - and thanks to some experimentations of Nuclears and of Lucio Fontana – in relation with science, with its methods and with technology, and also with the social context, on the path of a tangible change. This through a political act, a critical commitment toward the System (Art, but not just that). This is a plan of work; as we understand, that was born as “An analysis of various moments in which contemporary art has to deal with disorder (…)”. Art and artists rise up “in front of the provocation of the Case, of Undefined, of Probable, of Ambiguity, of Multivalent, with a reaction of contemporary sensibility to the suggestion of math, biology, physics, psychology, logic and of the new epistemological horizon opened by these sciences” (U. Eco, quote, from the introduction of the first 1962 edition). Out from it came a new relationship of arts with the different subjects that it influenced, being influenced in return and finding in mass medias a powerful media instrument.

But this is another story. Our story sees a not retinal planning imposing itself, to then be outclassed by Pop Art, big mastodon that won in everything and from the famous Biennale of 1964, it won also in Europe and in all of the world. The Kinetic and Programmed Art had an immediate success with its concrete design, physical, succeeding to create a contiguity between material and immaterial where this second element – concretized here in the experience (to do and to make to do), and in the production of knowledge – it is an essential entry in the entire optical research: and it’s that particular entry that creates the transformation and, in fact, the being in the world. This, we already said it but it’s worth to repeat

Barbara Martusciello

it , thanks to a renewed trespassing between peculiarities.

All the Art and its most recent History are made of this crossover and of a set of its own specific that is expected – ah, big grandfather-Duchamp! – also the loss of heaviness and value more strictly tangible related to a diffused determination, accelerated by innovation of information technology, electronics, and telecommunication, and by the power of mass media: this happens both outside, in the world where art lives, and in the same language. From Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio, from Umberto Eco to Gianni Vattimo, to Jean-Francois Lyotard, the theme is dealt in all its possible sides and it’s traceable in many contemporary productions.

If some anticipating resonance is traceable, an example is the hypothesis about the creative use of the radio, with the futurist Manifesto La Radia (October 1933) of Marinetti and Masnata – where they talk about “word-atmosphere” – but it will be surely Yves Klein to present a mixture between incorporeal and tangible, material and immaterial, in a practice of synesthesia that the French artist carried out so nicely. Its phrase is not a case: “long life to the immaterial!”.

Here we should give an essay on History of Arts following and analyzing the many contributions of artists able to imagine intellectual and formal codes connected to these new scenarios. Surely, the 60’s and 70’s experimentation reflects this complexity and thinks on this transformation. The list is long: it goes from artists such as the mentioned Lucio Fontana and his previous hypothesis and television experimentations to Nam June Paik, to Vasulkas, to Bill Viola and to the many historical and more and more recent video-arts; it transversally embraces the Conceptual Art (what is more immaterial than idea, that is more supporting than an artwork when it doesn’t fully substitutes it? Sol LeWitt docet),

the Performance and Body Art with their documentations, making real entrances in the legend: just think on Give peace a Chance of Yoko Ono and John Lennon of 1969 that took place in beds of hotels as artistic and political exhibition. This overview can’t leave out the flow-Fluxus: between its various expressions, I mention, one for all, the Variation 5, 1965.

John cage and Cunningham, in collaboration with Paik, created in it a situation with magnetic fields connected to microphones and cameras and able to produce sounds and images if stimulated by the presence of a performer. Moving inside that mentioned new stratified scene dominated by the incorporeal, we necessarily touch even some particular immersive experiences: in this case, how to not remember the original experimentation (almost as psychedelic environment) of Mario Schifano with his band, Le Stelle di Mario Schifano, with who he conceived two concerts – in 1967 in the roman Teatro di via Belsiana and Piper – as an avant-garde multimedia event? It was a move that brought, in spectators, experiences more than ever immaterial (of material stays a nice vinyl cover, created by him, that today has a considerable economical price). We talked also about the sound, and many were the acoustic and musical experimentations connected to visual arts till the most recent shows of the so said Sound Art – looking first to the futurists Francesco Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo but without to neglect the previous (1907) hint of a new aesthetic of the music of Ferruccio Busoni – who, all together, even if with their diversities, are consistent languages that also operate inside of an immaterial grammar.

It’s clear how the always new expressive means and the many kinds of technical reproduction brought art to an expansion of its traditional supports made of solid substance to which were added more immaterial ones: from the video-

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PROJECT, CROSSOVER, INTANGIBLE REALLY MATERIAL ART PRACTICE.

tape – that then was an instrument “of art and of fight” – to similar devices – languages used as against-information of art: here the Italians Videobase, 1971, and Comunicazione Militante, but also Raindance Corporation and then Guerrilla Television distinguished themselves; art/tapes/22 (Florence, 1972-76) and the activity of Lola Bonora in Ferrara.

How to not add to this context also the digital complexity starting from the first Computer Art (and the work of the Italian Ida Gerosa, between the really rare women of those times, deserves to be mentioned)? We so inevitably reach to the more incorporeal new media art (Tommaso Tozzi and sTRANO-nETWORK, Antoni Muntadas, Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici, Pietro Grossi, Giacomo Verde), to the net art, to the artistical association with Second Life, and to the socialnetwork, but also to creative urban tactics (Feed-Trasforma Roma), to workshop organizations interested in the transhumanism and in the trans-architecture (High) and including in this overview the Participating Art (Cesare Pietroiusti is a first protagonist of it with colleagues often attributed to the same research), the production of interactive creations (Studio Azzurro, for example) and the art of involvement and of the collective experience in a more general meaning (sometimes with a ethic ideological proceeding: for example of the GiuseppeFrau Gallery in Sardinia that works immaterially but at the same times is busy in really tangible actions on the territory with its really young artists).

It’s by now clear that the terms-concepts of immaterial, liquid, blur, belong to the here and now of art as really concrete reality (and this affirmation is not a contradiction!) and more widely they belong to the contemporary planning and cultures: our present is based on this fluid platform and this will more and more deal with our future. What is sure is

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that we will continue to design. Considering the period of a difficult crisis, of economical recession and the questioning of contemporary political-capitalistic system, of deep social movements, of moral and market reconsiderations, therefore, of also deep cultural reflection that invests creativity and all the visual arts, maybe Emil Cioran is right when he said, in Anathemas and Admirations (Gallimard, 1987): “On a gangrened planet, we should abstain from making plans, but we make them still, optimism being, as we know, a dying man’s reflex.”?

Obviously Cioran examines everything through his astute provocative verve and his radicalism: who does didactics, who spends himself in disclosure, who feels the responsibility of the future that passes through the youngest generations, he can’t and doesn’t have to think to a “dying” tendency of his world and his times but he has to hold on to that “optimism” that the Romanian and French adopted philosopher said: to design yes, but a real, deep regeneration that goes through the ethic-compatibility, eco-sustainability, Culture and Arts, research, innovation, experimentation. We are all involved in this renovating mission, because for real “We are history, nobody has to feel excluded from it” or feel the right to pull himself out from it.

Massimo Mazzone

ART ARCHITECTURE TERRITORY. AN ANARCHIC POINT OF VIEW

Massimo Mazzone Introduction.

I know the Istituto Quasar’s fame since many years, years of innovative courses that offered to students what Universities didn’t offer yet and I know Benedetto Todato since 2006, since he supported the first free post Lauream never experimented in Italy, born from a project of the independent group of artists com.plot.S.Y.S.tem (complotsystem.com). The project, realized between 2006 and 2008 through an Interfaculty agreement, it saw Valle Giulia, Roma Tre, Beni Culturali Viterbo and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, give logistic support to a Course that had teachers such as: Alberto Abbruzzese, Vito Acconci, Jose Juan Barba, Gianfranco Baruchello, Nicoletta Braga, Vito Bucciarelli, Eleonora Carrano, Francesco Cellini, Vanni Codeluppi, Giuseppe Dematteis, Franco Farinelli, Mauro Folci, Umberto Galimberti, Sara Gonzalez, Juan Jose Lahuerta, Fulvio Librandi, Patxi Mangado, Antonio Manuel, Fabio Mauri, Giorgio Muratore, Helio Piñón, Francesco Proto, Teresa Rovira, Maya Segarra Lagunes, Carla Subrizi, Robert Terradas, Alberto Zanazzo and many other illustrious ones.

This project then created other processes of analysis between art, architecture and territory, such as the Rassegna Transiti/ Confini Contemporanei, two participations to the Biennali di Venezia Architettura 2006/2008 in the Padiglione della Repubblica Bolivariana of Venezuela, the birth of an International School of anarchic inspiration, called Escuela Moderna/Ateneo Libertario, (escuelamoderna.eu), and in the end ExPolis, a Festival of Arts that will end this year.

This to say right away that the intention is the one to enter into the merits of matters about aesthetics, didactics, free teaching, politics and all those procedures that are set even one meter beyond politics, through society.

Which is the revolutionary aesthetic?

I begin this speech, as I already recently did in Milan, Madrid and Barcelona, with the image of a writing on a wall, photographed at the University of Granada. I think that this writing could be done on a wall of every place where people think and study. This image is also the one we use for the workshop with the same title of May 26 at the Triennale di Milano for the occasion of the ending of the ExPolis 2011/2012 project, (http://www.triennale.it/it/calendario/calendarioeventili st/1088expolis2012qualelesteticarivoluzionaria).

ExPolis is a festival of Arts that received many important collaborations and that took place in Milan, Rome, Barcelona, Madrid, starting from the collaboration of Public Authorities and private subjects but also thanks to the design contribute of a stunning number of independent subjects and organizations that in fact don’t belong nor to the State nor to the private companies, demonstrating that the complex reality of the today’s world is not made just of the State and companies

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but also from single people, organizations, in other words from Society. Furthermore demonstrating that when we work on a shared purpose, putting into practice the mutual support, the direct action, the cooperative spirit, the abolishment of hierarchies, things can be realized also and especially between subjects that have methods and procedures really different from each other. Instead, each difference becomes a wealth, an idea of reflection, an occasion of learning to conjugate the to say and to do. All the speeches realized, of a seminary kind, or performing, expositive, textual, theatrical etc. underlined a multiplicity of critical points of view about reality, real focus on the controversial Public/Private relationships, between University and other Cultural Institutions, between political subjects, groups and independent organizations.

Leviathan.

Let’s think for a second, therefore, what we really are not missing in our life? What we are not missing is the State, the horrible Leviathan with its instruments, the crosier and the sword, the enemy of freedom and dignity, the one that forgot Democracy and sets itself more and more at the service of a neo-liberalist finance, creating wars, colonialism, mistreatment, underdevelopment, police state and destruction of Common Goods, in favor of the insatiable hunger of wealth. In a recent past at least in Europe, we all lived in the illusion that the future was going to be progressive, that wellness was sooner or later going to reach everybody, that it was just a matter of time, we lived in wealth’s lie. In the end the illusion ended. The training ground of this new enclosures, in the meaning of a privatization and reduction of rights, the political workshops of this methodological plagiarism were first Pinochet’s Cile and right after Thatcher’s Great Britain, Reagan’s United States, and however in the 80’s and 90’s, during

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the highest neo-liberalist propagandistic push, an important mass of artists, architects, researchers, activists, academics, left improbable careers in Universities and in professions, each one of them starting in his own way to put together the cobwebs of thoughts organized in a different way, independent, that others called alternative, antagonist and disobedient, and that showed something of its identity already in Seattle, in Porto Alegre, for example with the appointments of the <Social Forum> but also in the insurrections of the Chiapas, as Manuel Castellis has well analyzed in his famous Trilogy. Not by case, on January 1st 1994 marks at the same time a turning point in the construction of the W.T.O. He marks the enter of the NAFTAin Latin America but also the beginning of the Zapatista revolt.

Massimo Mazzone

Indignant squares.

When a cultured class comes out from a cage and takes the path, the situation can evolve and the many <occupy>, toma la calle!, the 15M against the World Cup in Brazil, were born those relationship processes developed by people that came out in time from the social illusionism, in some cases with fights for the territories defense or in opposition to the infrastructural projects of questionable quality, others as in the cases close to us, building an aesthetic and operational procedure that put liberty, emancipation and identity before stylist and academic paths. I talk about an archipelago of research people and groups that analyzed the city and the social relationships from a new perspective developing the heritage of the Internazionale Situazionista, the commitment of Gastone Novelli, Piero Manzoni, the results of the ideal of the Autonomy and Workerism, the critical Marxism of John Holloway and Werner Bonefield, the analysis of Colin Ward and Murray Bookchin, the Brazilian experiences of Hélio Oiticica ,L.Clark, L. Pape, A. Barrio, C. Meireles and Antonio Manuel, the North-American one of Acconci, Burden and Gordon Matta Clark, the analysis of Focault and Chomsky, developing that thing that now we call “active citizenship”. We think on authors such as M. Rakowitz, K. Wodiczko, Teddy Cruz, Juan Simo, Skart Beograd, exyzt!, Koine, Y Liver, com. plot S.Y.S.tem, ON/Stalker, Shigeru Ban, s.o.s. workshop, J. P. Macias, Martin Ruiz de Azua, A. Zanazzo, Democracia, Santiago Sierra, Domingo Mestre, Hackitectura, Todo por la Praxis, Mauro Folci, Ctrl+Z, la Minuscula, Autoformado, Global Project, LUM, ESC, Sale Docks, Makea, La Matraka, Hipo Tesis, Teatro della Contraddizione, Struddle3, LOT Perú, red de arquitecturas colectivas, Metalocus. What Stalker did walking, Azua did it with its basic house, Ciugeda did it

with its Recetas Urbanas, what Vyzoviti did with the Folding Architecture or Shigeru Ban with cardboard, complot did it building free post lauream and book cities, Hackitectura with telecommunication platforms, Skart singing in the ex Jugoslavia, Ctrl+Z does it in Mexico with auto-buildings, the Fabbrica del Sole with clean energies, Metalocus making the most beautiful magazine of the world without not even one page of advertisements, Escuela moderna/ateneo libertario mounting libraries and so on. I talk about archipelago and not of constellation because between these nice people we will not find starchitects but people that work and live with their feet on the ground, at ground level, a the street level, searching for new solutions, between the last ones, in suburbs, between gypsies and immigrants, dealing with poverty and underdevelopment that others created. These are some between the ones that in the 90’s were protagonists of research about the arts, architecture, sociology, they left their original disciplinary field for a complex field of analysis and investigation. Many contemporary visual arts were stopped to sell themselves to the best bidder, leaving a servile and ancient procedure, instead much architecture left (and it was about time!) every contact with the building industry conjecture and with the furnishing sophisticated bourgeois houses, transforming the usual procedure in a shared cognitive and relational process. We need to recognize also that relational, city and habitat themes, the directions

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of forced urbanization on a world scale, got into the cultural debate, in fact some famous architects and curators, at the moment to direct prestigious Expositions realized it, I think on Mutations, on the Biennale of Fuksas in 2000, on the Biennale di Venezia of Visual Arts taken care of by H. Szeemann, on the Biennale of A. Betsky, and generally on the NAI policies of the last years, a sign that changes, that took place on global landscape, were clear enough to be registered also at the top of the pyramid and not just at the base.

The big fish eats the small fish.

We live in an age of the strongest financial capitalist attack against society, today the neo-liberalist lie shows its real face: anyway, this same age is the one of the continuous revolts, of riots, of insubordinations and today there doesn’t exist a place on Earth where the exploiter could really sleep good for long. Actually the actual system of powers is used since a long time to wisely manage the defense of its own interests, with a big quantity of means and immorality, in education, communication, propaganda, in the work of colonization of the collective consciousness, other than obviously in the use of power. Another thing that we often find is the sad scene of a supposed formal democracy populated of technocrats, of a power that tolerates the taking the road from populations, tolerates and integrates the occupations/shows, tolerates the promotions and wins of referendums that punctually then are not applied giving illusory rights, on the condition that at the prearranged date everybody goes in a disciplined way to the election ballot boxes to spiritually and materialistically reconfirm the old power bureaucracies.

In the bipolar Countries it’s about to change a pseudo left wing also psychologically capitalist, or the usual hypocrite and

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xenophobic right wing, the only alternative seems to be the one to not participate at all, a thing that leaves Parliaments in the hands of the <technocratic right wing>, blessed in worlds by markets. In the end, this that since time some call <crisis>, actually it is just capitalism, and anarchists already understood it one century ago. And I’m proud to deal with such a complex theme in this occasion that is also the twentyfifth anniversary of the Istituto Quasar, because I’m sure to find an environment intellectually open to discuss also about uncomfortable positions as to deal with themes of autoorganization, didactics in and outside Universities, and so I’m proud to highlight a libertarian theme reaffirming the anarchic point of view as an organization model, and Anarchy as a practice made by good people, people that understand liberty and quality of relationships more important than economical interests and of power management that always reveals to be short-sighted and destructive in both the long and short paths.

Massimo Mazzone

The State of Arts.

Everybody knows that art’s health doesn’t seem to be the best and we more and more ask ourselves how much our society still feels the need of original art and intellectual works even if the answers don’t seem so positive. Even the role of art didactics in the visual and architectural culture suffers a radical change with huge consequences for the entire society; the monopoly of the “gouvernance” of images and consciousness world was an exclusive field of arts through ages, instead today it’s transformed in the hunting field of the postmodern economy . The so said capitalist culture spread in a propagandistic way through a business mentality and through the adoption of a technical slang) changed by finances and companies, it forces us to accept the radical transformation of every Public and collective resource (intelligence included!), in <services>, following an exact project that is concretized in the W.T.O. (World Trade Organization) and I.M.F. (International Monetary Fund) policies. In fact, today even life is reduced to <services>, which is the new word to define goods and seems that everything should and could be commercialized, and already to call, rename, and reduce Goods to <services> demonstrates an influential and damaging linguistic economy that realizes the indisputable order of capitalism. Yet the soul of the original market was the idea of property exchange in a space, therefore the exchange in a predefined physical place and time, and that today is extremely expanded in a totalitarian way, swallowing each second of existence, so today the so aspired market (at least compared to stealing) doesn’t show itself no longer as the place where people exchange Goods, experiences, profits and also knowledge, emotions, languages, ways of being, but instead it shows itself as a perfect cage or prison, volunteer reduction into slavery, main instruments of “thinging” and alienation.

In fact today, to sell water, energy, formation or the same life, it’s not different from selling political ideas, consumption goods or information. Once trade, confined in a defined space was the opposite of war, today instead it’s more like war is the soul of trade. The erotization of goods, the consumerist aesthetic, tries to substitute

the aesthetic of arts, publicity tries to set a certain conformism able to define what’s good and what’s bad, following the customer’s hope of life as a last frontier of a fetish ideal of the product. And talking about conformism, school is not exempt from this, instead, it seems to be in every order or level, exposed to become a good training ground of conformism for a weak if not resigned society.

In front of this we find a strong worldwide Resistance, detailed, really well organized, really diversified, changeable in shapes, really a fighter and no way ready to give up to the constituted power, even in a philosophical doubt, in the critical skepticism that this Resistance has and that brings it to not embrace a priori or not critically a slogan or practice as in the recent past, whose results are already known. For this I think, instead, that the inheritance of the libertarian thinking, direct successor of free thinking, comes back today with great actuality, exactly because as an endless theory of a single person or groups work without getting paid, but for an ideal, without fear and pause, they work to ask always for a bigger independence, a bigger freedom and surely not jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, where fishes, all the big and small fishes that we talked about before, sooner or later would be found cooked.

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What is teaching?

It seems to be a transmission of knowledge … and what did schools become today for which we so much fought? Are they really those ideal places that we always declare or are they instead domesticating paths of a human person related to the intangible values so useful for the capital, therefore enslavement to the State, inviolability of private property, money worship and belief in some god? Today education seems to be less inclined (except for rare and transversal exceptions) to develop people, instead it tends to conform everybody to its own invisible and unwritten law, the one of respect of tradition, and exactly because of this, for material inexistence, for a certain invisibility, this law sets itself on a living humanity, as a tombstone sets itself on dead people’s bones, not missing to attest its work as a bureaucratic Title; what comes out from its process we can admire it in the systematic unemployment of young people, in the underemployment , in the poverty of young generations of the richest societies of the world go through, generations for which nor the State nor faith, and not even companies provided a role, Today, referring to ultra-schooled generations, many authors talk about <creative class>, a new class not based on work and material production and on the traditional institutions but rather on their own creativity and linguistic competences in the post-Ford age. This definition of “knowledge worker’s” in class, is based on their really high formation and on the mainly immaterial aspects of their work. However, in this field we will not find, if not in rare cases, a connection between competences and earnings, between educational qualifications and economical value, so these workers find themselves underpaid or excluded although the extreme importance of their linguistic and relational abilities even if all are really aware of the main role that they have in our economy, that capitalist economy. For this new <class of hyper-schooled used>, schools and Universities (Public and/or Private), the same

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that provided and provide to their amazing formation, are the same that often provide the complete economical and social downgrading and in fact, almost as self-defense, independent courses are born, paths of self-valorization and self-formation that represents the only way of mobility in the asphyxiated labor market, and most of all to live a rich and fascinating life.

Salud y Anarquía!

Let’s add, recalling Milton Santos thoughts, that in the postFord society also the immigrate or the unemployed, to mention two categories whose fragility is known, allow a big increase of profits to companies, from one side passively lowering the price of work on the market for who is working, on the other hand accepting more and more disadvantageous conditions and, in the end, representing a target for the propaganda and publicity.

In fact, these strange categories of social actors bio-politically pay on their skin all the disadvantage of a condition of humiliating submission and, while they pay for it, they also suffer social exclusion, Historically doesn’t result no social, political, aesthetical or essential progress automatically achieved but always at the price of hard fights from oppressed classes that at a certain point find acceptable a certain condition. The paradox is that never as now the State asks our approval to confirm its power and alliances to the detriment of society. And because of this today as never before again come current the libertarian Walk of Patagonia , the basic trade unionism, the mutual support, the direct action, and these are things that we see in the continuous claims, in the squares and Exchanges occupations, in strikes, in the rising of many blogs and publications, associations and committees that claim direct democracy, social ecology, justice, and schools (of every kind) that insert the intervention in public areas, in their courses, refusing the ministerial conformism, hierarchies, authorities, deploying a series of instruments that seem more and more suitable to build social webs made by and for those who didn’t abandon the idea to work hard for Common Goods, and that didn’t stop to each day to plan and build an integral revolution of traditional ways of thinking and living.

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AUTHORS Benedetto Todaro Architect, Professor of Architectural Design at the Faculty of Architecture of Sapienza University of Rome, Director of the PhD School of Science Architecture of Sapienza, (SDSA). Coordinator of the PhD in Architecture and Construction (DRACO).

Among the founders of the Istituto Quasar and current Scientific Director Orazio Carpenzano Architect. Professor of architectural design at the Faculty of Architecture of the University “La Sapienza” of Rome. Expert member to CSLLPP. He directs the DiAP Architecture and Contexts workshop(ARCO). Since 1990 he founded the Urbanlab studio with Alessandra Capuano. He coordinates the work of the architectural design of the building of the Rome’s Interport of Fiumicino airport. He undertook trajectories about the twine between creative processes and new technologies in the ALTROEQUIPE field. He directed the Isstituto Quasar 2000/2007. Projects and writings appear on national and international publications. He received prizes and awards.

Massimo Locci Architect and architecture critic, he wrote many books and essays of urban analysis, architectural history and criticism. His projects and essays have been published on Domus, Casabella, L’Arca, Parametro, D’Architettura, L’Espresso, Panorama, Wettbewerbe, L’Architetto italiano, Le Carré Blue, L’Architettura C/S, Il Giornale dell’Architettura, Controspazio. He taught as professor on contract in several Italian Universities (Rome, Potenza, Ascoli, Naples).

Federico De Matteis He is an architect and teaches design at the Faculty of Architecture of the Sapienza of Rome. At the Istituto Quasar, since 2001, he teaches courses of Criticism and theory of the arts and of the interior space, trying to guide students toward a synthesis between theoretical reflection and operational practice.

Alfonso Giancotti He studied architecture in Paris and in Rome. A pupil of Maurizio Sacripanti, he held since 1995 professional activities of research and publications.

He is a researcher at the Faculty of Architecture of La Sapienza of Rome where since 2005 he held the role as Teacher in the architectural and urban design field.

Luca Leonori Architect, with Laura De Lorenzo and Stefano Stefani works in the fields of industrial design and graphics since 1980 in the “Graphite Design” group. His professional activity is expressed also in the interior architecture and in installation. Didactical Director of the Istituto Quasar of Rome since 2009.

Franco Bovo Graduated at the Faculty of Valle Giulia in Rome in 1976, he practices a freelance as a designer of civil and residential buildings, sports facilities, interior architecture and furnishing. Teacher at the Istituto Quasar since 1990, he is currently the coordinator of the courses of interior furnishing.

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Emilio Vendittelli Degree in Architecture. PhD in Furniture and Interior Architecture. He continued his research activity with a scholarship for post-PhD, and later as a member of the Murst 40% research team for the research unit in Rome. In 1997 he published the book “La casa fredda” and in 2005 the book “INTERNI 70”. He taught in several Italian universities, using innovative didactic and formative methods collected in the Nu.D.A. project (Nuova Didattica Attiva).

Cristiana Costanzo Landscape architect, PhD in “Environmental Design” at the Sapienza University of Rome, where she was a researcher and teacher; second level Master in “indoor and outdoor environment”. She participates in various national and international workshops and contests, receiving awards and commendations. In 2010 she got the “Ippolito Pizzetti 2009” prize from the AIAPP, with the recognition of EFLA and IFLA. Emanuela De Leo Architect, born in Messina on 01.02.1973, she lives and works in Rome. PhD in “Architecture of parks and gardens and territory planning “. Since 2006 (she is a teacher on contract in “history of modern and contemporary garden” at the Faculty of Architecture of Rome La Sapienza. She deals with architectural design from the territory scale to the private one; interior design for apartments, hotels, boats and private places.

Since 2010 she is partner of the zerocinquearchitetture studio.

Gianmarco Longano Art director and graphic designer, he is the didactic coordinator and teacher of the Graphics and Visual Communication course at the Istituto Quasar Design University Rome, AIAP senior professional.

He is responsible for communications, public image and events of the District 2080 of the Rotary International.

Emanuele Tarducci Architect and Interaction Designer, expert in electronic technologies applied to themes of Design and Furnishing. He is a teacher in different Italian Design Universities and Schools, since 2008 he is the didactic coordinator of the Web & Interaction courses of the Istituto of Quasar of Rome. In 2009 he was included between the 190 young creative published in the European Yearbook of Creativity.

Barbara Martusciello Barbara Martusciello is an Historian and Art Critic, Independent Curator, writer and teacher, popularizer of contemporary culture and visual art. She is a member of the DIVAG Commission, Divulgazione e Valorizzazione Arte Giovane on behalf of the Soprintendenza Speciale PSAE and Polo Museale Romano. She is co-founder of the webmagazine www.artapartofculture.net, for which she is also editor in chief.

Massimo Mazzone sculptor, activist.

Studies: sculpture, Academy of Fine Arts, with N. Carrino, postgraduate in: art architecture territory, history of architectural design, culture of the project in the archeology field (with F. Cellini, architecture Roma Tre), PhD student ugr, Granada d.pto dibujo, spokesman of escuela moderna/ateneo libertario, teacher of techniques of sculpture Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, Milan.

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RESERCHES & PROJECTS REFLECTIONS AND ACTIONS APPLIED TO EXPRESSIVE FORMS

architecture, design, graphics, interior and exterior installations art, environmental readings, disciplinary intersections, creation of virtual images, interaction between real and virtual.

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in three sections:

PUBLIC EVENTS

studies, researches, initiatives of cultural promotion: expositions, conventions, meetings and events aimed to the general public

DIDACTIC WORKS EXEMPLA

Practices and projects made during the execution of the institutional formative plan

SOCIAL INTEREST

Studies and projects made by teachers and students in collaboration with public administrations, public and private authorities, workers and companies.

Projects of social utility, for promotions of ethic information, for the requalification of public spaces and for the development of innovative projects for companies.

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PUBLIC

EVENTS

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studies, researches, initiatives of cultural promotion: expositions, conventions, meetings and events aimed to the general public

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PRODROMES OF THE FOUNDATION: The incubator of via di Porta Pinciana 10, Rome 1972-1987 The roman Merzbau from which the Quasar experience started

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[…] The ground floor of a building of the end of the 19th Century. In a place that before was set as a workshop, composed of an open area of double height that joins the road with the interior courtyard, an architecture studio is in preparation and it is aimed, in the designers intentions, to become a meeting point of cultural exchange. This main wish is at the bases of the project’s choices: the same position on the road is the emblem of an availability to a dialogue and to the contact with the most alive and unpredictable features of human reality.

To realize an effective communication, the idea was followed to put a strongly characterized image with a close eye contact with the outside. An image able to subject the space in which it’s set to its own laws of organization laws and equipped with a complex organization that guarantees some levels of freedom and of evolutionary possibilities.

The linear metal structure deeply immerses itself in the environment, organizing itself on two work levels: on the ground floor and on the higher level.

Each element: tables, containers, illumination, etc. refers to this basic structure that, placing itself cantilever from the surrounding walls and leaving free the floor and the ceiling, it organizes itself in two parallel and overlapping nucleuses, the higher one leaning on, the lower one suspended through tubular tie-rods.

Helicoidal stairs connect the two levels, not wanting to divide the space, the higher level is made by passages and by working areas in continuous eye contact with the lower part.

The generalized use of metal allows this transparency, the only diaphragm with the road is made by a glass wall that guarantees the highest level of integration.

The different sections of the “machine” differ for their dimensions and formally depending on their functions. The lower nucleus on the road level can assume the double function of elaboration and exposition place, the higher one is aimed to design and for small meetings. […] from: Ottagono n. 33, 1974

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“THE PRACTICE OF DESIGN BETWEEN HANDICRAFT AND INDUSTRY: the case of the roman environment” December 4th 1987 Palazzo Balestra, Rome A workshop that sees the participation of the most known designers, craftsmen, industrialists and university teachers about the relationship between design, handicraft and industry of the roman environment. Among the participants: Mauro De Luca, Fabio Lenci, Andrea Mazzoli, Giorgio Muratore, Paolo Pallucco, Giovanna Talocci, Alessandro Tiveron, Benedetto Todaro, Eduardo Vittoria.

Benedetto Todaro three preliminary questions as a start of the discussion: • Rome, its urban environment, its buildings furniture and ornaments are the historical results of an artisan work of a really high quality, made and accumulated during the years. Today the production task goes mainly to industry. Does this condition, in a not really industrial city, necessarily bring to the end of quality or can we see shapes, maybe different and changed, but not for this less qualified, for a future production of material quality diffused in the city?

• Is it right to think that design, reinterpreting the strong points and potentialities of the artisan product, could set themselves as an efficient instrument to transfer ancient artisan knowledge, aesthetic values and familiarity, proper of the artisan mastery inside of industrialized and serial productive processes that we can currently set to increase the quality of the industrial product?

• The hybrid context of the roman productive environment: no more and not only artisan, not yet (and maybe destined to never become it) properly industrial, could it help the rising, almost by natural selection, of a professional figure suitable for an environment like that, able to manage the relative indetermination of the available productive modalities guaranteeing respectable qualitative levels compared to the previous historical ones?

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Eduardo Vittoria I don’t know if I’ll succeed to answer to these three questions, even because I don’t have a precise, specific competence in all of them.

Anyway, I want to start from an affirmation I believe that it’s needed to contest the fact that very often today we put in crisis or doubt about the validity of the modern trend. The modern trend was born giving a new name to things, expressing a new way to represent them and satisfying also the needs that have a frame of interests wider than the one of the traditional ruling classes, bourgeois and aristocrats, with a different way of dealing with problems; this coincides with design, design out of modernity, in my opinion, it is not possible. So the matters about handicraft that today can be re-proposed have to be reproposed, but in another logic, and the starting point is the continuity break. I believe that it would be really bad if we decide to revaluate handicraft as made

in small series, by manual creativity, etc. The modern culture luckily made a clean sweep of certain facts, the manual culture is not in contrast with the intellectual one, it is a part of the general culture of men and with which men go on. After all an important fact exists, that in the industrial society the project comes before the product, it doesn’t come with the project in the artisan production, the project is carried out at the same time as production: the glassmaker that makes glass, that works in the workshop, that shapes a lamp, etc. ideas and creates the product at the same time; this is completely different from the production method of the industrial society in which the project comes always before production, with all the risks that this brings for the following sale steps. … in the last years and mostly in the postwar years starting from the 50’s, mainly because of the influence of the French historians of the Annales, it developed as an initiative of anthropologists and archeologists another kind of attention to the so said “material culture”: the big claim of this century is recognizing that culture is not just the alphabetized one, not just the written one, but also the one that is transmitted through objects. Design is a cultural matter, it is an aspect of the industrial culture, it is the

qualification of the industrial culture that is organized in management culture and culture of the product.

It’s not by case that the two big schools that were born, the Bauhas of Weimar and the Soviet, Russian Vchutemas, actually, they are two schools that set in first place not the production of Object, but the formulation of a new didactic in the production of objects.

This makes the passage from a design of an object to a design of the process. How this is done today is a problem that I constantly deal with, because I hate words that don’t mean nothing: it’s nice to say “design of processes”, but then practically, in front of a piece of paper what does it mean? But it’s clear that the word demands a way of designing that it’s no longer the traditional one, it is another kind of circularity, of design, of design uncertainty, of undefined design, but definable in its making, in its developing, in its trying and retrying, therefore it is a certain kind of project not conceived in the traditional terms of the nineteenth-century project, traditionally represented by plants, sections, prospects, but in another way.

This matter about didactics as a point of the innate innovative process, both in the Bauhas and in the Vchutemas, in these latest decades, starting mostly from the 70’s, are humiliated,

are denied, seen just in their formal key that, clearly, has positive and negative aspects, even more negative than positive, I don’t know, but anyway loosing the sight of the real problematic contribution that instead was innate and that was left halfway for the tragic conditions that developed in Europe, Nazism on one side, and on the another Stalinism, which eliminated all the ones who were asking themselves this kind of problem, but it’s a process that has to be resumed, I don’t say that has to be continued, but reviewed under a light not of fake interpretations, and not even of fake eulogies, but as process of a design that doesn’t have matches with the past. So do the artisan problem and the auto-design exist? I don’t know.

The Romans that I know are stucco workers. To a Roman design I would ask more for a design of useless spaces, I say it in a provocative way.

The second point that is set after this is the one of handicraft – industry: how to interpret the artisan knowledge?

I believe that we can move with this affirmation about the material culture and design as an expression, as it’s part of the disciplines of the material culture and of all the background that is behind the material culture. This allows us to analyze in flashes themes that today are close to us in the intellectual formulation, for

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example all the theme of the tents that is the theme of the nomad populations and so of a certain kind of object really transportable, really light, really flexible, easy to mount etc., it is a problem for us, that kind of tout court not transferred knowledge, but that kind of experience not to be re-earned, but to be re-analyzed from the start in the modern point of view it can be useful, but this can value for that period as for other experiences.

So at this point I would set the theme no longer in the meaning of a continuity (we first analyze the nomads, then the MiddleAges, and then the Baroque etc.) but mostly as personal curiosity: I give a big importance to the personal way each one of us moves, organizes himself and activates his intelligence for this problem, the way he is stimulated by certain feelings instead of others. I use three really provocative expressions, I talk about a culture of the “dilettante” but revaluating the word “dilettante” in the eighteenth-century’s meaning of the word, when the amateur was a curious man, a man that was curious about reality, about every kind of reality, from the naturalistic to the pictorial one, who observes objects, who analyzes them, who used to do poetry, who used to interpret, translate, therefore a man stimulated by his humanity to analyze in the field of knowledge. French people use a more happy expression

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that is the “en amateur” culture, of amateur, that is more exact than the “dilettante” one that we have, the one of originate technologies, meaning that we work, that we deal with or analyze big periods, we always have to do, we deal with technologies that are completely different from the ones used till then. When Picasso or others use the papier collè they use a kind of expression, a kind of technique that surely it’s not conceived in the previous periods, the collage and the papier collè are different techniques, the way of using the spatula is different, it is all another way and so it is deviating in the common meaning of technologies, it’s not making a brick a bit bigger that for example we can change technology. This means nothing. Clearly something else has to substitute that kind of component, we need to try to analyze what means the theme of the design of processes, what it involves.

We don’t design the process of the production line or of the industry, but we have to understand how that process happens to understand its stimulations, inventiveness, I have to say that this kind of problem obsesses me, but it’s not clear for me in the concreteness of daily work.

To summarize I would say that, in my opinion, it’s necessary to give back to the two big schools their real meaning of how to teach to design (till then

there were only art schools which are another thing). The first two big attempts come at one side from the Russians and on another from all the center of Europe with the Bauhaus; about the origin of the industrial design, the date is set at the beginning of this century (connected to the different ways of thinking and to illustrate reality and so to also differently admire it) and in these last years, in this second half of the century the revaluation of the material culture, of the valuation of the object as an instrument, means of communication; the object has the same value as the word, poetry, makes culture exactly as each other alphabetized expression of men. The last point to set, as Valéry used to say, “past not in the order past, present, future, but between present and future”, meaning that what seems present sometimes is already past and already future, therefore to insert past between present and future, so analyze the past with the eyes of the present and to know how to read the future by joining past and present.

Giorgio Muratore I start from your conclusions: you mentioned Valéry, the sentence that you put in quotes seems perfect; “set past between present and future”: who could ever not share it?

It’s enough to understand each other on what we want to say.

I remember many years ago when “Eupalino” was presented that not by chance is a name that is mentioned exactly by Valèry, the same sentence was used, just that instead of Eduardo Vittoria pronouncing it, Paolo Portoghesi did it at the Piper in a mask.

So here something is wrong, because in my opinion this fateful date, you put the 20th century as a division between two cultures, two ways of seeing in the end the same things (that anyway can mean things extremely different) maybe should be erased.

Enough of these avant-gardes that invent a new way of making culture, school, city, architecture, everything. I think that we are, yesterday as today as tomorrow, more and more

In the history and sooner or later we’ll have to deal with this history; maybe Valéry meant exactly this; the schools that you emblematically mentioned to which we could surely add the School of Ulm. which completes the trio, are exactly those which cut ties with history creating, in my opinion, almost irreparable damages.

There were needed more or less fifty years to patch up a bit and who knows how many years we will still need to fix the situation and bring it back to a respectable level, meaning that making a statute for the school in which the History of Architecture and History of Design subjects are missing means to have a certain kind of attitude towards the past and our own roots, it means to hide them, to make censures that today are no longer acceptable and so I would go back to the exhortation of our introducer to try to understand this relationship between past and present, but most of all between present and future as we can verify, substantiate in a situation as the roman one that clearly for its formation and tradition is far also from this kind of avant-garde choices that were more naturally accepted by situations as the German or the Russian ones at the beginning of the century that clearly developed into two extremely different ways (and as usual here it seems to try to recover a part of history of roman culture that was removed until today),

because, talking as an architect more than as a historian of Design, if we browse one of the latest guides about roman architecture we pretend that it’s all a big environmental situation, we see that the history of Rome is made censoring many presences that instead were important in building, for the definition of the physical structure, of the today’s city structure. For example, some parts of the theme about the 30’s are still taken with a grain of salt, as if our hands would get dirty if we talk about Marcello Piacentini, just because when he was creating a house he used to call his friend, who was a designer, to somehow (he already knew this) add to the too modern buildings a bit of relationship with the academic culture that at that moment he needed to demonstrate a certain thesis.

In my opinion we are still dealing with a kind of historiography, a kind of critique typical from the second postwar and personified

by Zevi, Benevolo, and later on

by Tafuri, who cut ties with this tradition, they pretended that this didn’t happen, that only the Terragnis lived in Italy, but even “that” Terragni (not even all the character) and they forgot that the city developed following other orientations and traditions.

Talking about architecture of the city (but clearly the theme about Design is inside this dimension), - the wish to cut this discipline in its own disciplinary dimension is a process completely artificial

and, in my opinion, also dangerous: it means to make that operation of sectoralization that was made for many disciplines, for example: City Planning, a typical operation of the 50’s in Italy and of the 30’s on an international level, that brought to disaster the city and urban culture of the last years. Maybe many militant town planners of a few years ago are embarrassed, today they talk about other things, they have also changed name to their discipline, they talk about environmental impact that maybe means something else. I think that in the end Design has to follow its own way, because if we continue to want to make it more disciplinary trying to give to it its own independency that surely it doesn’t have, it will lose that quality of its relationship with historical culture, with the real evolution of the physical world through which it developed.

Surely Rome offers a really unique scenario, because if someone asks us “what is the roman design?” the first thing that comes to the mind of a visitor of certain places of the roman design is the Perspex, tortoiseshell, chromed brass etc., but that is not Design, it is trash, that unluckily for some years characterized this local reality; then, in Rome as in other places, there are other different cases of other operations, probably with really high risks also for industry and culture.

I don’t believe that there is a

local environmental quality that can bring this. The only thing that surely should be recovered is instead this relationship with some traditional cultures of the place. Vittoria was talking about stucco workers, the theme could be enlarged to many other professional dimensions, as handicraft or small industry, that surely Rome has, but that at this moment seems to me not really connected. Maybe in school and in all its levels of organization, that could go from university to other didactic facilities the effort should be done, to try to analyze a particular matter as the local one, to see what there is of positive and designable through these different relationships of power.

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born, that quit every possibility of relationship between Design and industry. School classes are by now getting adapted to prepare these people, let’s also hope that productive powers will accept this and I would like that also the political powers start to see the roman problem in a different way…

Fabio Lenci An artisan could well build prototypes for industry, often industries don’t have time nor the ability to create prototypes that could be mass-produced and so they give the problem to others out of the company asking craftsmen, that with their competence are able to carry on these things and often, collaborating with this craftsmen we create prototypes that are much closer to the reality of mass-products… …often an architect who until that moment only made buildings is mistaken for a designer and we think that if he is able to build a nice house in concrete, he will be able to create an injection moulded product with all the proper features, technologies and abilities. They really are two different things … … “products” not suitable for mass-production could come out and so not saleable products are born, with production problems, completely wrong, and from this experience some differences are

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Paolo Pallucco …There is a phrase of Rimbaud that caught my interest, a poem that says: “One must be absolutely modern” and at the beginning I made this phrase mine and I understood, maybe too late, the importance of this phrase; it’s important to valuate this thought, because I find the need to look forward, to search; I believe that the walk of a designer has to be solitary. I don’t believe in design groups, I believe that sensibility and culture are two completely different things.

So it’s maybe true that I do what I like, but why shouldn’t I? However I don’t have those typical lunatic moments as those legends of design, I go on

in the creation of my personal concept, I discovered this in Japan in 1982. …I didn’t know how to choose if something was nice or ugly, then in the university I read a sentence of Leon Battista Alberti that said: “Perfection is when there is nothing to take off and nothing to add”.

This was my first brick and then I started to walk putting these bricks, always ready to change them with others. For example I always created interior settings using the color white, then I read a sentence of Wittgenstein that said: “I don’t use white because it is the color to show off”, thinking on it I realized that effectively there are many situations in which the color white is used with the purpose to highlight, for example when people get married they dress in white etc… hating to show off, I made this concept mine because it answers to my principle, to my need. For me simplicity is important, and for me simplicity is also poverty. …a friend of mine, who is an architect and works with me, gave me a book by Miller where, about modern man, quotes a thought of Jung.

After affirming that modern man is the one who is aware of the immediate present and he continues saying what follows: “He is rather the man who stands upon a peak, or at the very edge of the world, the abyss of the future before

him, above him the heavens, and below him the whole of mankind” … the man that we can rightly define as “modern” is solitary: and in this way he became “not historical” in the deepest meaning of the term and he alienates himself from the mass of men that live just inside the limits of tradition: an honest practice of modernity means to voluntarily declare bankrupt, to pronounce the vow of chastity and poverty, in a new meaning, and (what is even more hurting) to renounce to the halo that history gives as a sign of its sanction. To be “not historical” is the sin of Prometheus.

Andrea Mazzoli First of all I would like to remember the architect Mario Ridolfi, a figure a bit particular, who perfectly fits in with the roman tradition that starts with Borromini or before, he is a designer of buildings that succeeded to design processes as professor Vittoria said, meaning that he succeeded to dress up these buildings with a skin in which the knowledge of craftsmen, the weaving of bricks, the laying of floors, the design of window fixtures and of balustrades was a kind of design that usually architects don’t do and that it’s really close to the design of craftsmen and not for industry, Said this I would like to quote two facts: one referred to the artisan ability of Rome, even if that fact that testimonies this ability is negative and it’s the phenomenon of the so said “roman style” of the 70’s, when there was the mirage of Arabs, it was a wasted occasion on the project’s point of view, but not because of the craft-men, but because of architects and interior designers, but it gave proof of the artisan abilities

like a city as Rome, not limited just to stucco workers or to marble workers, but also to upholsterers, metal workers, to who works with stucco, wood, etc… end of the first episode.

The second episode, instead, is more recent and it’s from Milan.

It’s the Memphis phenomenon, that I don’t want to analyze, I don’t care about the formal results of the operation, but I want to make a consideration.

The Memphis phenomenon, paradoxically, would have had better results about knowledge of how to work objects if it had taken place in Rome instead of Milan. Actually Memphis objects, thinking about the “Toilette Plaza”, which is the most clamorous example, it is an object that Roman craftsmen, who worked for the Arabs, would have known to do better than the ones in Milan.

Alessandro Tiveron I believe that the most correct definition is that: the craftsman is the designer of himself; he is the one that designs what

he does. Furthermore I believe that a real relationship between designer and artisan could be born just in the measure in which a craftsman is no longer a craftsman.

I don’t believe that operations that involve together Design, handicraft and industry could be studied if not giving to the artisan the role to advance his own initial experience that, already proven in the field of technology, could be meant as an industrial moment, enriched by the Design contribution. The manual skill is not opposed to the intellectuality of operating, it is just the moment in which intellectuality brings it to a shape.

I want to say that this peculiar quality excludes the craftsman from a concrete relationship with the designer, meaning that he is the user of the creative intelligence of this last one. Instead I see possible a meeting of experiences and a concrete collaboration for the development of projects in which, to the formal geniality and to the creating exuberance of the designer is connected the knowledge of materials and the competence of processes acquired with the “experience” from the craftsman.

Gianfranco Luberti “Industrial Design” means functional product, well done and that answers to industrial executive processes. The industrialist, when puts a product into production, has to receive from the designer an executive project that considering the single manufacturing, of the features of the used materials, of the operational possibilities that are allowed by machines.

What we should succeed to do is to remove the idea that who does this job is an artist from the mentality of the industrialist. he could also be an esthete, someone who likes beauty , but most of all he is someone who, when designs something, he makes it according to the real techniques and, unluckily, the roman reality is the one if an infinity of people that believe they know how to do Industrial Design and interior architecture, making the most strange things as possible because there is a strange correlation “strange thing : nice thing”. Instead the truth is a different one: well made-functional-well designed thing/nice thing. About handicraft I believe that it could produce prototypes for industry, but it is a marginal work, that can hardly put consumer goods into production, and this limits the possibilities of collaboration with the Industrial Design. The industry commits

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the design of its products to affirmed designers, almost never to the youths. From many industrialists, the need to produce well designed products doesn’t exist yet, but instead they use the name of the designer to attract customers.

Giovanna Talocci … teaching young people is really important, and the Istituto Quasar and many of us are directly taking care of it, but I see it in another way, in my opinion it is important to make industrialists aware, the mass of people, because if we succeed to create a demand of design, the industrialist will be brought to ask himself: who is the designer? For the magistrate a designer is he who lives of expedients, he is an unreal figure, therefore the effort should be the one of trying to inform people to meet more often as possible with roman industrialists and to make them understand that Design isn’t taking an already existing product, change something and put it back on the market,

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because it is know that this is a wacky operation, and anyway we heard exponents of the roman industry convinced that the way to make pieces of Design is this: “why call a designer? I copy it…”

Unluckily this behavior is really diffused in the roman area, but not in the area of Milan.

Once there is this awareness, even stages will be accepted.

We worked for Bernini, for the Poltrona Frau, we meet young people that go there, they stay one, two, or even six months without getting paid, then maybe they get hired, but they learn a lot, because there it’s normal to make design and teach design for an industrialist.

Mauro De Luca Probably the same theme about the workshop could have created a certain confusion: it made to think that design occupies or should occupy a central position, almost of mediation between handicraft and industry. Instead the relationship design – industry, since the deducible many implications, is the theme of the updated discussion, the problem of the relationship Design-handicraft, less actualized, tends to be historically limited in the period of time that anticipates the birth of the Industrial Design.

It seems to me that first of all we should distinguish the behavior of the designer: just when he is “respectful” as, for example, Ridolfi or Scarpa, then he becomes a fertile exchange and a mutual transmission of experiences.

Each time we deal with matters connected with the organization of public urban areas, we can’t see other than how it is

impossible to leave it outside of processes of manufacturing peculiar of the handicraft. In the roman context this is clearly visible: to the historical formal wealth and typical of urban furniture is opposed their daily high degrade and the low possibility to make changes/reproposals with industrial objects or processes of industrialized manufacturing that guarantee the same levels of performance.

For example, even if in a really different field, the work made by Filippo Alison for Cassina seems to me similar to the production of “furniture of masters” for its contents. The analysis made in close relation with the building techniques of the age and so the reinterpretation of the object in relation to the actual productive possibilities, were carried out in a close collaboration with craftsmen that, materially recalling the genesis of the object, they gave a whole series of prototypes functional at the verifying of the opportunity to proceed with the production.

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LESSICO CITTADINO:

lThe photographic eye and the poetical vision.

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Original critical work about roman architecture, aimed to analyze the theme about threshold through the interpretation of poets, photographers, architects, philosophers, art critics, communicators, with pictures, poetical readings, performances, events in Rome, workshops: • poetical expression as acknowledgment and appropriation of the environment • factors that influence the common appreciation of the environmental qualities • photographic itineraries: from instrument to language, from language to code

lessico cittadino elements of architecture acknowledged through the photographic eye and the poetical vision written by Benedetto Todaro The city – between the most complex inventions – subject of many epiphanies, protean, it vanishes and appears in changed forms, and each one of these delineates similar and coexisting cities, whose respective margins are not corresponding but not even completely distinct.

Lessico cittadino reproduces, with a similar givenness this complex and ambiguous aspect, fragmented, of random readings, following the flaneur eye that alternates other phases if distension to the moments of diligence; the fascination of the banal detail to the direct connection with quality; the shown interest for his own intimacy to the respect for the monument and history.

The revision of commonplaces for the research of new definitions.

Then, to deduce convincing evidences, we wanted to search the linguistic intersections between different expressive forms: rare or usual images that catch and are caught by a lens that goes by the city roads as a deputy of the public perception; and poems, proofs of feelings and memories, of help given or denied by the metropolitan outside to the inside of conscience.

If of all the complex artifice made by the city we isolate just the parts that help or slow down the motion: these archetype urban synapses (that can be doors, windows, portals or passages, bridges and arches, or gates), correspond and are recognized in similar internal passages.

And the threshold that signs the limit becomes global experience and no longer an image (not just) and not even a built form, no longer an object (not just) and not even material, but a portrait of human experience.

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Selection and organization of poetical texts Biancamaria Frabotta

via di Porta Pinciana 10 – Rome telephone 06/4747954 – 461229

Project and photographic coordination Fabrizio Cerqua Salvatore Sanna

Graphical project of the catalog Giovanni Garroni

Essays by: Biancamaria Frabotta, Emilio Garroni, Filiberto Menna, Sebastiano Porretta, Benedetto Todaro Scientific consultancy Mauro De Luca, Filiberto Menna Collaborators Marinapia Arredi, Alfredo Benedetti, Maurizio Cavalli, Mariella Porta, Mariolina Ricci Poems by (with asterisk the unpublished authors): Giorgio Bassani, Dario Bellezza*, Edoardo Cacciatore, Giorgio Caproni, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Biancamaria Frabotta*, Jolanda Insana*, Valerio Magrelli*, Dacia Maraini*, Elsa Morante, Aldo Palazzeschi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elio Pecora*, Sandro Penna, Amelia Rosselli, Toti Scialoia*, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Giorgio Vigolo, J.Rodolfo Wilcock, Valentino Zeichen* Images by: Alberto Bravini, Tiziana Casseriani, Paolo Ferrari, Fabio Taccola, Maurizio Taurino, Loris Visentin of the Istituto Superiore di Fotografia.

Antonio Pintus of the Istituto Quasar General organization and coordination Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier Administration office of the exposition and press office Laura Boldrini Giuseppe De Luca Pierluigi Masini Gianandrea Russo

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Outfitting project Magdi Rizk Exposition outfitting Edilsama di Carlo Gilberto – Rome We thank: Gabriele Alciati, Councilor for the environment of the city of Rome Ivana Benedetti, Department for the Culture of the city of Rome Lucia Cavazzi, photographic archive of the city Gemma Cortese, Director of the Museo di Roma Rosetta Mosco Agresti, Ministry of the Cultural and Environmental Heritage Ludovico Gato, Councilor for the Culture of the city of Rome Emiliana Ricci, Museo di Roma Gianfranco Ruggieri, Superintendent for the Environmental and Architectural Heritage of the region Lazio. Ministry of the Cultural and Environmental Heritage Francesco Sisinni, General Director of the Ministry of the Cultural and Environmental Heritage The Istituto Quasar Cultura e Progetto dell’ambiente is a research and professional education center that works in Rome in the fields of architecture, design and handicraft.

The Istituto Superiore di Fotografia is a facility for professional and cultural education that works in Rome in the fields of photography, image and visual communication.

1988 by Officina Edizioni, Rome, Via Nicola Ricciotti, 11

Benedetto Todaro

Emilio Garroni

To proceed by fragments characterizes the modern work, it seems to be its convocation and design style.

Artwork can bring – actually, in theory always brings – transitions between its domain, if there is one, and the surrounding domains, for example between itself and an ethic behavior and a knowledge. But, since it can be dubious that it has a domain, it’s possible to think on it exactly as that thing that sets transitions between the various domains or between their expressions, for example between sacred and profane, between public and private, and so on, that the artwork gathers together, since it is exactly a certain gathering and not a separated domain. I believe that we can say more: that artwork is also and first of all – in its “essence”, to say so – the same “general transition”, as a condition of possibility or a horizon of experience, that it expresses in work.

[…] therefore it’s not possible to trace routes, but just to make small steps, to move a bit, make small transitions from a temporary state to a different one but always – indeed – temporary. […]the city – between the most complex inventions – subject of many epiphanies, protean, it vanishes and appears in changed forms, and each one of these delineates similar and coexisting cities, whose respective margins are not corresponding but not even completely distinct . […] this first, original exploration, wanted to isolate just the fragments with a bigger suggestive power, elements of a urban lexicon that answer to precise uses connected to the threshold, to the passage, to transactions, to the relationship between interior and exterior, in a direct or allusive way. […]rare or usual images that catch and are caught by a lens that goes through the city roads as a deputy of the public perception; and poems, proofs of feelings and memories, of help given or denied by the metropolitan outside to the inside of conscience.

[…] the experience is mediation, to be in the middle, therefore transition. […] paradoxically, the artwork is possible exactly because it is not “something”, but it is a “transition between things”. […] the artwork is an intersection of paths, not a path. It doesn’t happen on the road as an object, but it is the same to meet objects. It doesn’t clearly distinguish itself from what surrounds it, since it’s what surrounds itself […].

[…]And the threshold that signs the limit becomes global experience and no longer an image (not just) ( and not even a built form, no longer an object (not just) and not even material, but a portrait of human experience. Modern is in a hurry. doesn’t have time nor disposition to take care of the interval, of the moment of transaction. The continuous won above everything and the threshold is essentialized, it gets thin and it almost vanishes and gets substituted by rules […].

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Sebastiano Porretta Biancamaria Frabotta […]it’s the absence of the human figure in the context of the image, almost obsessive, that makes architecture a pure abstraction, a moment of graphical research, out of time and without space connection with other elements. […] in this way an artificial and metaphysical landscape is created in which it’s felt as a threatening and imminent silence, as a prediction of something in progress, that sees architecture as a silent and compliant witness above the parts, scornfully alienated from the human happenings. […] Since on a daily basis it is almost impossible to see architecture, we can’t do other than to reconsider it through a picture, a kind of paper déjà vu, that gives back to it that level of nobility on the scale of aesthetical values that suits it, not without some uncertainty. […] So all the range of symbolism is expressed in the multiplicity of forms that the threshold, hymen of architectural hourises, gets in the sum of elements that compose it. […] The photography and the photograph are the terminals of a culture of the image that gives up to ancient processes of acculturation. […]

from: La Soglia In limine as we are suspended on the way through the second millennium the symbol of the threshold comes back to torment us as an enigmatic but determined time limit.

The meaning of the threshold is one of the winning keys of the western thought and so also the center and origin of the space and time dimension of a big part of the modern poetry.[…] from: La soglia del corpo […] And even if in the poems by Valerio Magrelli the profile of lines reproduces “the notched shape of keys” the icon doesn’t cross the threshold of the body, even if it reproduces it in pure name, to the anxiogenic prototype of its endless copies.[…] from: la soglia della casa o l’io diviso. […] Just feet can force it, this threshold suddenly animated, awake, silent, and to recognize it, cross it will be “a matter of conscience”, a chance of bizarre and unreliable identity, as in Soglia di casa by Dacia Maraini.[…] from: la soglia della città […] After Benjamin, to put the spleen as basis of the modern lyric became a commonplace of the critical theory, as reception and defense of the people from the choc of the crowd.”[…] from: Roma soglia di poesia […] Even poetry (I think this is the direction in which most of people move, that for this occasion gave to Rome their original proof about the city threshold) could become the limit-point of a resistance, the auspice of a new and different livability.[…]

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PARAGRAPHS Filiberto Menna 1 There is a city as a project, as rational distribution of functions, as prevision of possible future developments: it is the city of dreams, designed by modern rationalism.

But the city in which we live is really different: full of inconsistencies, of ugly things, of an unsolvable mess: it is the given and not designed city, unexpected, aggressive and incorporating, that we would like different, but that is there and we can’t not deal with it, day after day. Anyway, despite disorder, inconsistence, the same ugliness, this city it seems to us more familiar, sometimes also cordial and happy, showing a tangible presence to which we would not be able to renounce.

The scene of this city, of the given city, represents the horizon in which the modern artist moved. He frankly accepted to deal with the new reality and with what it brought with itself, without consoling escapisms: first of all, he renounced a privileged and contemplative position, in front of a sight that the artist feels involved in.

Today the given city is dominated by mass media. The distance between subject and object get thinner at a dizzying speed: the relationship between the two terms is transformed in a sensorial relationship based on the visual perception, on the shorten arches of a stimulus and of an immediate answer as a reflex.

2 Paris at the middle of the latest century. Baudelaire noticed the changing with extreme clearness: he realizes that the new urban reality is not the done, the stable, the monumental, but “ the change, motion, fleeting and the infinite”; that the “daily changing of things” imposes “an equal speed of execution” to the artist.[…]

3 Paris, 1920. Le Spleen de Paris (prose poems) by Baudelaire are by now a classic. On the boulevard, Mondrian sits at a table of a small restaurant and observes

the constant flowing of the modern city: “The Cubist on the boulevard. Courbet in his studio and Corot in a landscape (…) everything in its place”.

Mondrian chooses the cubist location. He sits on the boulevard, observes the colors and shapes, hears the sounds, breathes the spring air, the acrid scent of gas, the perfumes of trees […]

4 The Sandymount shore in the Ulysses by Joyce.

The look of Stephen towards the changing appearance of things. Vision and meditation, motion and calm […].

The look of Stephen is not different from Mondrian’s one: both go through the depth of objects, they catch something that is, at the same time, inside and outside of appearances: “diaphanous, adiaphane”. […]

5 New York, the 30’s. Jazz and the impact of Le Corbusier with the big metropolis. […] Le Corbusier catches the new fact represented by jazz, by a music that, as the modern city, doesn’t allow a contemplative and detached listening, but involves the listener on a psycho-physical level. […] “Le jazz, comme le gratte-ciel, est un énvénement et non pas une oeuvre conçue. Ce sont les forces présentes. Le jazz est plus avancé que l’architecture. Si l’architecture était au point où est le jazz, ce serait un spectacle inoui. Je répète: Manhattan est un hot-jazz de pierre et d’acier. Il faut bien che le renouveau de l’époque s’attache à quelque point.

6 Manhattan. The “quadrillage clair” of the city represents the other referring term of Le Corbusier. [...] The scenario of Manhattan, aux ferventes silhouettes, gives to le Corbusier a feeling of unanimitè, making to forget the cacophony of everything. but, differently from Baudelaire, the city doesn’t bring him to a closure in himself; instead it gives to him the enthusiasm of a pioneer, of a constructor ready to grab a

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pencil and trace new plans for architecture and for the city of the future.

7 The work as an event, as vital behavior, it is the recurring theme, an almost obsessive motif in the modern art searching for a relationship between writing and metropolitan life. In Hannover, in the German cities, and then in Norway, England, America, Schwitters follows the roads searching for fragments of daily life, collects them with the passion of an entomologist or of a herbalist, and then he inserts them in his collages, transferring the metropolitan chaos in a Kleine Welt, in a small organized world where everything finds its place despite the apparent disorder of the Merzbild. […]

8 The journey inside the city is the heart of the surrealist poetry The Boulevard de La Bonne Nouvelle, the bad cinemas and the no-quality movies are the right place and the occasions for the epiphany of the marvelous urban. One of these privileged places is the Passage de l’Opera in the Paysan de Paris of Aragon and the entire city is the scenario in which Breton tries to make another dominant motif of the surrealist poetry: of eros is the basis of art and poetry, it is necessary to reduce “art in its simplest expression: love”.

On the background of the roads and buildings of Paris, of the cafes and of boulevards, Nadja is the open figure that ensures this passage […].

9 The lesson of Surrealists and of Schwitters spread out on the postwar experiences. In the 60’s, Ben Vutier was invited to the Biennale and declared that his participation will consist in the continuing to live his daily life for all the period of the exposition […].

The situationist deviation recalls the models of the urban peregrination, from Baudelaire to Surrealists, meant as a way of aesthetical approval of the city: the deviation is a collective

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experience that expressed itself with an “experimental behavior connected to the conditions of the urban society”. […]

10 The theme about the ephemeral, the restoration of everyday nature, even in its banal and continuous features, the awareness of the given and not designed city in which we live, the celebration of the present: all this creates the relationship between arte and city in the American field of the New-dada and Pop Art. […] Rauschenberg and Johns, Warhol and Lichtenstein, Dine and Oldenburg, Rosenquist and Wesselmann (but we don’t have to forget the English pop artists and the French Nouveau Realism) search for a direct, frank and open impact with the new urban reality and their position can be interpreted considering an extreme significant position of Rauschenberg meant to define the new poetry of the taking and of the reconnaissance compared to the historical Dadaism: “according to Dada it was about excluding , it was the censure against past, its deleting.

Today, in our opinion it is about including past in the present, the totality in a moment. I’m the present. I try to celebrate present”.

11 “ Real estate properties in Manhattan, a social system of our times”: it is a work by Hans Haache that signs the age of disenchant. The visionary excitement of Le Corbusier is by now far from this cold linguistic and ideological analysis about the image of the city […]

But what marks the new of Haache’s city and in its representation that he proposes us is the disconnection between signs and referents, that introduces a kind of empty space, a gap that divides and keeps distinct the two terms

(the thing and the sign of the thing). […] In Haache’s work the image is no longer the image of the city but it’s the image of the power that took control of the city.

12 piazza Farnese with jugglers, charlatans and acrobats of the circus, the cinema in Massenzio and at the Circo Massimo, Piazza del Popolo with the unforgettable show of the hot-air balloons that hesitating move away from the crowd, from the obelisk and from the domes of the churches, to get lost towards the Pincio, in the night sky. […]

There is a city of long times and there is a city of short times: “ the city has a structure that was created in the past and continues in the future; but it has also features that change day after day.

There is the city of long times and it is the one of the so called town planners; and there is the city of short times, and it is the one of designers […]” (Argan) […]

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[…] ancor lambiva il Tebro l’evandrio colle, e veleggiando a sera tra ‘l Campidoglio e l’Aventino il reduce quirite guardava in alto la città quadrata dal sole arrisa, e mormorava un lento saturnio carme […]

Dinanzi alle terme di Caracalla Giosuè Carducci

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Alberate a Rome Culture of trees, culture of space

Alberate a Roma The vegetal species in the definition of the urban quality Lessico Cittadino II written by Benedetto Todaro

Is it the tree in the city a simulacrum of a captured, delimited and domesticated nature about the urban surrounding that keeps and expresses a kind of alienation remembering other places and origins, or maybe in the moment when it gets urbanized it becomes a special building material, but not because of this different from the artificial complex of the city?

Alberate a Roma, as second definition of an ideal lessico cittadino makes a distinction between the trees that are in the city depending on if they are part of the more or less organic complex but delimited: parks, villas, gardens, or maybe they are involved, enmeshed and collaborating in the weave of the road composition, in contact with the daily life of the city dynamics.

The study is directed to this second condition and

in particular on the most unique case made by the organization of tree-lined areas, simple or multiple, that run along and define paths: the one the alberata.

The analysis continues the confrontation already started with lessico cittadino 1: Soglie, between the traditional standards that preside over the definition of the project and the ways used by common sense of perception and valuation of real results.

This wants to be a contribution to bring back the architectural design and its theories to their first function of instruments efficient to set up a new civilization of the built, breaking the shell of self-satisfaction and of selfjustification that were artificially created and that makes the most important limit for their efficiency.

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Trees in Rome Benedetto Todaro

I believe that from the analysis of the material here exposed, many people could be surprised discovering an unexpected and thick presence of trees in the city. In the images here shown Rome seems as a really green city and this is surely a surprise because it is surely not in this way that we know it, from direct experience. This diversity, this alternation between instinctive perception of the users of the city and the objective reality of the survey gives already the first hints of valuation about the function and its ways of relationship between the building materials of the urban field and allows the definition that shows up as another contribution to the catalog, of trees as a weak signal.

Furthermore, browsing the historical images, we can see that never in its history Rome had its roads decorated with trees as now. Surely, the unique belt of villas that the Rome of popes had and destroyed since about a hundred years were a unique and unique heritage, but anyway it was about vegetation for private use and even if people could enjoy better air, they could see just the tips of the trees that were appearing from behind the surrounding walls or by looking through gates. In fact the roads and squares were almost without vegetation.

The trees offered to people were few and famous so that some of these gave places names (as via dell’olmata). More frequent, but always with traces of the previous agricultural use, the groups or single trees were anyway out of every program and

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for precise purposes.

The use prevailing of inorganic materials in the setup of streets and squares with fountains, obelisks, stairs, sculptures…corresponded, in destined themes for an exclusive use such as a villa and a building, with the deployment of all the project materials and instruments extended to a control of plants proving thereby the availability of adaptable and comfortable artifacts in a wide range of situations. […] We can say that, at least starting from the 20’s, architecture eliminated from its field the art of composing with arboreal materials leaving so this work field without theoretical supports and new referring samples so that to trace significant and recognizable operations in the recent Rome it’s necessary to limit ourselves to some organizations that are more or less still readable in their original structure, a work of the only vegetation designer that Rome met since at least seven decades: Raffaele de Vico.

It’s not just about an ideological rejection by the workers, about a “disciplinary” rejection, today the logics leading the formation of the modern city beyond the design intentions tend to pay less attention to the useless components because they are not productive, in fact the quality of the urban scenario becomes not a value when we make decisions to not complain about them after the following inevitable lacks. But, and what’s more important to observe in this occasion, the contemporary culture of the projects got divided in many specialized branches all researching their

own peculiarities and independent statutes.

The specialization in vegetation design is one of these branches that, trying to define and organize itself, rightly trying to propose itself again as an actual value, it becomes a victim of its own division and while it builds defenses of its own fields from those same defenses it is kept prisoner and not working.

Culture of trees and culture of space Rosario Assunto

Who could ever count the trees that only in Italy were cut down in the decade between 1950 and 1960, but the phenomenon was worldwide (actually it is worldwide: the case of Amazonia should teach)? The total, even if we would be able to know it, I’m afraid it would be of nine figures.

And appealing to our memory, each one of us would bring a contribution of the many trees that many times with poison in our soul we would see cut down; and the noise of the mechanical saw was tearing our ears…

At that time, it would not have helped the anger of the poet who in 1883 saw the huge ludovisian cypresses; already cut down; they were cut down and lined up one next to the other , with all the roots fumigating towards the pale sky. The quote, that at that time was politically suspected, was going to make the authors of that massacre even more obstinate, it had the social excuse of reconstruction, of development. And then, the

trees themselves didn’t have, how to say, a good reputation. I don’t know if by tacit agreement or taken with pride, but didn’t they abolish the annual Festival of Trees? Somebody, the pauvre, was considering it as a rhetorical trace of the past regime, without knowing that the festival was more ancient. At the end of the nineteenth century, or in the first years of this century, the minister Guido Bacelli wanted it: sure about it, in 1911 he made to build the Parco, today called of Porta Capena.

We all call it Passeggiata Archeologica, and I’m one of those who want to enlarge it to the four cardinal points. But on condition that some cruel bureaucratic-financial installations should be removed from it; and that its boulevards should be cleaned from every trace of asphalt and open just to who goes by foot, on horse carriages and bicycles. Internal combustion engines, the ones on four wheels and the more evil ones with two wheels have to be implacably forbidden, because each one of those stuns and contaminates the air as if they were a hundred. People would enjoy it even for the teaching and cheering sight from one or more paths of the old electric tram that passes through it, that goes from one side of the city to another, fast, silent and clean, and that anyway it is still passing near it.

Well conceived and realized, the Passeggiata Archeologica was the release of the small valley between the Aventino and the Celio. It impeded its urbanization, that already in 1877 (but it didn’t have this name yet) Carducci was afraid that It was going to brush away every memory of when «ancor lambiva il Tebro / l’evandrio colle, e veleggiando a sera / tra ‘l Campidoglio / e l’Aventino il reduce quirite / guardava in alto la città quadrata / dal sole

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arrisa, e mormorava un lento / saturnio carme…».

We surely will not copy the maremma poet, who in one of his usual mood surges (“Febbre m’ascolta. Gli uomini novelli / quince respingi e lor picciole cose…”) reached the point even to call malaria in help against the invasion of urbanization. More wisely, Baccelli thought that it was good to plant pines, holm oaks, cypresses, laurel oaks and oleanders: healthy for breathing as delightful to see. But the Urbanization, and its twin called Motorization, asked and still ask for many sacrifices of trees: each time the enfant du choeur of the day is ready to fake a whiny threnody to then gush out in notes of rejoicing that more answer to its being.

“It is the price that we have to pay to Progress”.

In this way a sanctimoniously sad article ended, dedicated to the cut down Plane trees that for more than half of a century in four lines shadowed in summer, and gilded in autumn, a straight road of the modern Rome, whose houses once of the recruits of the facing barracks (in one of those houses Enrico Falqui and Gianna Manzoni lived for a long time) were lined and covered as Piazza d’Armi, were showing themselves so seedily yawning, facing on the green of the trees that now disappeared. […] We so start to underline how the culture of space is a horizontal and extensive culture, instead the culture of trees is vertical and intensive. And it’s not about two topological references: in the meaning that we mention now, verticality and horizontality, as features of two

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cultures in conflict, they define two ideas of man and, as a consequence, two opposite ways of our being in the world, of our behavior towards the world. We will say, then, the vertical man and the horizontal man. This last one is a man of space, instead the first one we can call him man of the tree. But why the man of the tree?

The shape of the tree is actually vertical. Rises from the earth towards the sky. It is an entity, even if belonging to a species, to a family as all entities.

As the tree has its roots in the depth of the earth, so the vertical man rises from the depth of his and everybody’s past (who doesn’t remember Thomas Mann, deep is the well of past?). And as the tree from the juices of earth, so the vertical man feeds himself of memory: a memory of himself as an

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entity and a memory of others, of entities similar to him. A memory of each one that is expressed to everybody as word. But also memory of everybody: the historical memory of itself that embodies traditions and shapes the image of places as identified places: that are not simple points in the space. Places even them vertical: as the man that recognizes himself in their image. And the tree rises towards the sky, in the sky pushes out its branches, qualifying the place where it rises up, not differently from how a tower or a bell tower qualifies it. It personalized space, meaning that in the world there can’t be two similar places. Exactly as in the really famous anti-empiricist theme of Leibniz, who many times wrote that in the world there couldn’t be two similar leaves, not even between the ones grown on the same branch of the same plant. And not even two drops of liquid, two splinters of stone could be similar. […] And the man of the horizontal culture is a man without memory: not because he lost his memory, but because he shirked it as an encumbrance that impedes the speed of going more and more ahead, more and more further, in a continuous accumulation of today self-based and self-justifying , that line themselves one next to the other without understanding each other and without to identify oneself with the other, because their time is a straight line, never curves on itself and never comes back to itself. And instead the time of the tree comes back to itself and gets curved on itself: a circular time as circular is the following of seasons, that pass one inside the other and always come back to themselves, each other of

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them bringing in itself the memory of the one that came before it, that in turn was the memory of the season from which at the right moment it was born.

The season of rest, and then the one of gems, of flowers, of leaves and of fruits. To each season its fruit, its grass, its vegetable. In autumn the leaves fall, but then they will come back.

The culture of space is not in this way: the culture of space doesn’t suffer diversities of seasons.

And to have the same fruits, the same grass and the same vegetables in all twelve months of the year, similar in shape but without smell and taste, the culture of space imprisons the trees that can’t be cut down because man anyway needs its fruits: the man lays a cap on it, they call it protection and the man condemns it to a forced temperature, to a continuous and always the same moisture . He hides the appearance of the tree, or better the appearance of trees. He transforms them in plastic balloons, similar to each other, geometrically set in an extension that is no longer a landscape (the landscape is personalization), but is impersonalized spatiality; in each point identical to itself, in the same way uniformity of those that once were vegetable gardens and lawns is identical to itself in each point, even that covered with plastic: now they are standardized, they became a mechanical shape, and also the ex-trees are standardized; they are organized in series with the purpose to quantify as more as possible those that once were fruits, one different from the other, but now they are products, and now looking at them you don’t know if they are artificial or natural. […]

Short observations about roman trees at the end of the nineteenth-century Massimo de Vico Fallani From the times of the imperial Rome, when we were making a distinction between the arbores silvestres – meaning forestry – and the mites or urbanae ones, good for the ornamental cultivation in the city, we need to go back to the nineteenthcentury to see again the planned realization of groups of trees made by proper ornamental essences, with the first Napoleonic plants. […]As we know in 1870 the aspect of the capital, especially in the suburban areas, reminded us very much the one of the solitary and dusty one of the medieval Rome described by Gregorovius.

The ruins, in their majesty, were still protagonists of the image, instead the two big gardens of those times, the Pincio and the Passeggiata del Celio, as isolated and without connections with the rest of the city, were out of the visual memory and of the idea of the city of Romans.

Anyway Rome was a city green in its way. Just that it wasn’t about gardens, but of an almost spontaneous agricultural green that the lazy economy of popes allowed to reach almost until under your house, even to escape from the unhealthy places of the surrounding country.

Each unused grass area was becoming then a spontaneous pasture for grazing or a field of hay, and most of the trees were used for leaves – as

the ones of mulberry or elm – or for wood, with the same elms or with holm oaks. In this rural image were included even places as the Piazza di Termini, were they were building the new monumental train station of Bianchi, or Piazza San Giovanni, or Piazza Santa Croce in Gerusalemme; without counting that, despite the supervision of the veterans set for the custody of the park, flocks sometimes were brought to graze even in lawns of the Passeggiata del Celio. […] In Rome, in 1870, the main trees were the ones of the strada Angelica and of the via Trionfale at north and north-west; the one from Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore at east, and at south the ostiense one outside of Porta San Paolo until the big Basilica, more or less around the direction of the Sistine city.

Even if the denomination of “passeggiata” is rightful of Ripetta, Celio and Monte Pincio, they were usually called also the salita del Gianicolo – initial nucleus of the more wide passeggiata Marcherita – the stradone di San Gregorio, the salita dei Cappuccini and the alberata di Campo Vaccino..

On the contrary of a tradition by now consolidated and beloved by Romans, that wants first of all pine and so they also called it Roman pine, the Pinus pinea, outside the gates of the suburban noble villas, from where it was giving a superb sight characterizing the profile of the city, that wasn’t the most represented tree, as not even the holm oaks were – that today influence the urban image

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from Piazza dei Cinquecento to the passeggiata Archeologica to viale Mazzini – and not even the plane tree, whose use was mainly developed, as we said, at the end of the nineteenth-century, in the installations at Prati di Castello and on the Lungoteveri.

Among the most represented plants there is the elm: in particular there were many at the passeggiata di Ripetta, at the piazza di San Gregorio, at the Pincio, at the stradone di Santa Croce, at the stradone di San Gregorio, at via di Porta San Paolo and at many others at the passeggiata del Celio. Anyway the most beloved elm trees for Romans were the ones of the salita dei Cappuccini in front of piazza del Tritone. […]

The green backstage of memory.

Roman trees in the pictures of a century Antonio Federico Caiola The really wide photographic heritage related to Rome, produced from the middle of the nineteenthcentury and the one of the twentieth-century were researched, studies, exposed and published in many occasions: the eye can investigate on the major and minor episodes of the history of the city: building, urban and environmental transformations; historical events and events of record; disappeared types, customs and “climates”. This time the unlimited documentary source was examined

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researching the most considerable and prestigious kind of “urban furniture”, the one of trees.

Surely photography couldn’t document its origins that go further back of the ones of the half of the seventeenth-century when the ruler Alessandro VII was busy giving trees that were at the same time “nice” and “comfortable”, the major suburban roads – the ones inside and outside the walls, that go through the wide green areas immediately adjacent to the residential area and that the most of them were traced at the end of the previous century by the energetic “Piano” di Sisto V. Set between the shadowed backstage – “siano olmi, veda d’onde cavarsi il denaro”, the pope ordered don Mario Chigi governor of Rome, on September 24 1656 – they were getting a more defined feature in the context of the city, getting tied to the monumental image of this last one that Alessandro was feverishly realizing with his architectural enterprise (v. R. Krautheimer, Roma di Alessandro VII, Rome 1987, pp. 119-121). […]

The plant world in the urban landscape Lidia Soprani […] In Rome the used arboreal species are more than the ones here mentioned; a choice was imposed privileging some very present and/or really significant species. […] The plane tree comes from minor Asia; it was imported in Italy really a long time ago and now it is spontaneous, as Platanus orientalis, in

eastern Sicily. The plane tree of our roads is a hybrid between this plane tree and the Platanus occidentalis from the lesser lobed leaves: it is called Platanus x acerifolia.

The plane tree is a long living tree that can reach even 500 years. Really ancient exemplars of Platanus orientalis exist in Rome in the valle dei daini of Villa Borghese and in the botanical garden on the slopes of the Gianicolo.

“Pinus pinea”, the Roman pine, is, among all the pines, the most known and recognizable one for its characteristic shape. An emblem of the Roman country, it’s shown almost always in the paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth century that illustrate it; even today, in which this landscape is almost completely modified by a strong anthropization, there are still episodes in which these trees are the main protagonists. […]

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The PLANE TREE seems to me as a dominant tree, with its big arboreal presence, with the shapes of logs and branches, important in the winter guise and in the leafy one. They give the idea of a big society of trees, with a solid majority of power, able to impose itself also in front of impressive buildings.

The holm oak is the mass of fronds to shape and make similar to a building, it is the metaphysical tree par excellence , it is a structure for the production of dense and controlled shadow, more than the other species and so it has the role of building material.

The PINE seems to be sent in suburbs and along the big roads from the party of plane trees that, since the past glories, allowed it some classic prestigious situations (Arco di Costantino) and some modern ones (Ministero della Marina).

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The HOLM OAK “Quercius ilex” is the scientific name of this tree very present on the roads and squares of Rome and of Lazio. It belongs to the genus of the oaks (family of the Fagaceae) to which belong more than three-hundred species of trees. Some are with deciduous leaves, others are with persistent leaves, others are of slow growth, and reach fast really considerable dimensions. The holm oak can become a majestic high tree and with a weighty log; but in hostile conditions it can also stay a small tree or even a big shrub. It has a really long life. Its foliage is evergreen.

The leaves are leathery, of a dark green color and polymorphic; they stay on the tree even for 4-5 years.

The ELM gave me the idea of the functioning of the papal Rome, sent to do the priest in suburbs, with the role of vicar of plane trees, to confess and absolve the sins of the building conjectures of the 50’s.

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The MAGNOLIA seemed to me as a high level secretary, hostess/hetaira of the industrial civilization, evergreen and all dressed up, with perfumed flowers; in this way it shows itself in Via Veneto and at the Eur, and in the free time at the Pincio.

The SOPHORA is the tree of the dull city: it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t succeed to impose itself against houses, but it exists as a problematic and disturbing presence acting its role in the metropolitan ritual of commutes, employees, salesmen of stores.

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The ALBIZIA and Robinia are the variety of the middle class: even different, but middle and disciplined, and we can also afford the transgression of pods and flowers.

The PRIVET is the minor evergreen, it makes a good impression with the buildings of the years 30/50, it seems the arboreal representation of the employee middle class, at home (via Cavallotti) and in the office (via Cernaia).

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The CYPRESS is monastic and ascetic: but so rare and solemn because it is the tree of dead people.

The PALM is an emblematic tree: its shape so particular and characteristic recently renewed its popularity increasing its presence in parks and gardens.

It has always been a really beloved tree among the different populations and can be considered, for some species, characteristic of the Mediterranean flora.

In particular the Phoenix dactilifera, the date palm, that is its present as a productive and ornamental tree, in all the north-African zone, it was already known and appreciated during the Roman age.

In fact palms of its species signed the turning point in the chariot competitions in the circuses of ancient Rome.

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Alberate a Roma: le specie vegetali nella definizione della qualità urbana / lessico cittadino II Palazzo Braschi April 20 – May 20 1990

Writings by: Rosario Assunto, Antonio Federico Caiola, Massimo de Vico Fallani, Umberto Santucci, Lidia Soprani, Benedetto Todaro

Nese (Journalist), Francesco Stefanori (Ufficio Tecnico X Ripartizione)

Scientific consultancy: Lidia Soprani, Maddalena Vagnetti, Sofia Varoli Piazza

All the partners of the Istituto Quasar that with their contribution allowed the realization of this Exposition

Iconographic historical research: Federico Caiola, Magdi Rizk, Rita Occhiuto

Istituto Quasar cultura e progetto dell’ambiente Viale Regina Margherita 192 – 00198 Rome Telephone: 8440144 – 867078 Fax

Compilation of the botanic records (in the Exposition): Monica Mendozza, Stefania Stecchi Compilation of the urban records (in the Exposition): Liliana Ricciardi Works of telematic art (in the Exposition): Giovanna Colacevich, Agostino Milanese, Giuseppe Salerno Press Office: Patrizia Russo Project and installation of the ex position: Magdi Rizk Graphical project of the catalog: Lucio Deverini General organization and coordination: Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier v We thank: Paolo Battistuzzi (Councilor of Culture of the city of Rome) Photographic archive of the city: Lucia Cavazzi (director) Anita Margiotta, Simonetta Sergiacomi, Simonetta Tozzi Central Institute for the Catalog and for the Documentation: Paolo Callegari, Serena Romano, Domenico Caporilli (Archivio Fotografico Caporilli), Mario Marcheriti (Vivai Torsanlorenzo), Elisabetta Mori (Archivio Capitolino), Marco

SIP – Direzione regionale Lazio

The Istituto Quasar has as object the study of relationships between man and the complex of the physical structures and of the objects that surround him, that are in the operational field of the Architecture and Design.

Since 1987 it works under the sponsorship of the Ministero per I Beni Culturali (Soprintendenza per I Beni Ambientali e Architettonici del Lazio) through an organization in four specialized Centers: Research center that makes studies, projects, prototypes and gives experimental support at the Centro di Formazione.

Documentation center that collects, organizes and allows continuously updated information and data for researches and academics.

Communication center that promotes meetings, expositions, workshops, congresses, cultural events and specific publications.

Training center that activates classes and seminars of post-degree and post-diploma specialization aimed to the training of specific competences with the purpose to fill the gap between academic training of the institutional structures and the more and more strong request of real competence.

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Festival des Jardins

International contest promoted, every year, by the Conservatoire international des parcs et du paysage, for the design of temporary gardens in the park of the caslte of Chaumont sur Loire (France). An international jury awards the best artistic installation proposals of small gardens coming from all places of the world and finances their realization. The exposition of the twenty-four gardens realized every year is open to the public from June to October. For two years, in 1996 and 2004, the projects presented by the students of the Istituto Quasar were awarded winning in this way the realization of their work.

One of these entered in the permanent collection of installations of the Conservatoire. Students and teachers were hosted in the castleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s guest house for all the duration of the works.

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Loire

theme of the festival: La technique est-elle poétiquement correcte?

Garden of the Istituto Quasar : Jardin de lavandes: Bits sans poids Participants:: Students : M. Addonisio, C. Congia, M. Fegiz, A. Lattanzio, M. Ragnetta, M. Savini, M. L. Tortora Professors: M.G. Cianci, F.R. Ghio, B.Todaro Une passerelle de métal survole en boucle une mer de lavande et de verveine et un petit étang, que l’on dirait déchiré dans le sol du jardin. Tout au long de l’été, le jardin sera un ensemble

de vibrations violettes sur feuillage gris. La lavande choisie est le lavandin “Grosso” très gris, très parfumé, très rustique chez nous.

Ce clone est maintenant le plus cultivé dans le midi de la France, à la fois pour son rendement en essence au kilo de “ paille “, mais aussi pour son rendement à l’hectare. Il est ici associé à la verveine rugueuse, une fleur bleu-violet qui prolongera une pseudo floraison en août.

Principales plantes du jardin: Lavandula angustifolia ‘Grosso’, Olea europea, Verbena ‘Murielle’, Verbena rigida (= Verbena venosa)

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Theme of the Festival:

Vive le chaos!

Ordre et dĂŠsordre au jardin

The Garden of the Istituto Quasar: MĂŠtaphores

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Participants: Students: Alessandra Bolli, Tatiana Cusi, Simona Grossi, Giovanni Maganiello, Daniele Meloni, Alessandro Ruggeri & Serena Viglietta Professors: M.G. Cianci, S. Greco & P. Lattanzio

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Complexité est le thème de ce jardin.

Au centre, une énorme boule constituée d’un ruban métallique qui s’enroule en spirale. À l’intérieur de cette boule, un arbre vivant qui s’en échappe par le bas et par le haut dans un apparent désordre.

Quel que soit l’aspect irrégulier, voire chaotique de ces deux éléments, ils

sont la meilleure réponse possible au développement de l’arbre. La complexité des chemins qu’ont du se frayer les racines est la solution la plus optimale (en fonction de toutes les contraintes du sol) pour que l’arbre puise sa nourriture dans le sous-sol.

La complexité du développement des branches et des feuilles est la meilleure

réponse possible à la nécessité pour l’arbre de fixer la photosynthèse.

Rien d’étonnant que cet arbre cherche à s’échapper de la sphère idéale voulue par l’homme.

Principales plantes du jardin: graminées hautes et natives de grande taille, Centrantus ruber, Papaver Rhoeas, Centaurea Cyanus, Valeriane Sylvestris, Stipa calamagrostis, Briza media, Erigeron Karvinskianus, Foeniculum vulgaris, Aster ericoïdes

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A challenging proposal and an amused experimentation about the topical and the compatibility with the ecological interests â&#x20AC;˘ transmitted by the new age trends â&#x20AC;˘ of the restoration of ancient oriental geomantic practices (Feng Shui).

A real life prototype of house with a garden realized in occasion of the Fiera di Vicenza, in February 1999

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A house without doors, without divisions between the environments,

where even the blowing of the wind and the sound of water are welcome.

Correspondences, interferences and contaminations between the two systems were examined: on one side the Feng Shui of Chinese origins, and on the other hand the complex of the modern scientific acquisitions of western origins, between these last ones, in particular, the psychoanalytical theories, but also the most updated experiences in the field of the environmental psychology and, on the scientific level, of the biocompatible architecture and of the research of non toxic and non polluting materials.

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The result of the elaboration, that involved designers of the Istituto Quasar specialized in architecture, furnishing, art of gardens, illumination, science of materials and psychology, was the realization of a place that sets itself as ideal for a harmonious living.

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Materials, surfaces, natural colors for a physical and spiritual wellness

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THE HARMONIOUS HOUSE The ideal place, sweet and comfortable, a place of reconciliation between man and nature, a coexistence of different qualities, sensitively and spiritually satisfying (dues nobis haec otia fecit) but not romantic nor regressive, that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to renounce on the opportunities given by the most advanced ambient-assisted living technologies, thanks to which it his connected with the rest of the universe; a place where real and virtual join in a kind of telematic Eden that gets the better of technological innovation avoiding its byproducts and poisons.

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The Harmonious House wants to solve some of the contradictions that afflict us: by a phase of apparent egoistical concentration on the details, it expresses the hope that the realization of a new tranquility would help the establishment of more healthy relationships of interest and of respect towards others, if they are partners or friends, or of a stranger correspondent from another hemisphere met on the web, or rather birds living in an aviary in the garden or music spread by hidden sources.

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The second phase of the research that reaches the realization of a housing prototype recreated on a full scale at the Fiera di Roma March 2000.

With a selection of biocompatible materials and technologies of common availability, presented in a informative gallery with a selection of technologies shown real life and documented in the presentations: a full kit for the monitoring of the house illustrated in the constructive parts, with an exhibition of samples of materials and mounting techniques.

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After examining the theme of the threshold and its presence in the urban environment, the research of the Istituto deals with the theme of the last threshold. A theme generally removed from the common unconscious, that examines the possible architectural expression of the place to host farewell rituals at the end of life, in alternative to places of confessional cults.

In an evolved and mature culture, that respects a person as of the community, the possibility has to be given to people, to choose and express their personal way to distance themselves, to get the farewell of the community in which he lived. In the secular tradition of the western culture the place where this takes place is the Church (Domus Ecclesiae). The church that in fact has manipulated the entire range of rituality connected to the passage conditions, to the transition rituals: from birth to wedding, to death. With the beginning of the multicultural society, with the more and more relevant presence of new and organized cultures, customs and exigencies, with the establishment of the laic mentality on one side and of different confessional inputs, the need to have a specific place for funeral rituals that wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t characterized by a precise ideology or by a particular religion appeared in all the advanced societies. As an answer to this need, in many western Countries, mostly in suburban areas of the city, were created funerary homes that allowed family and friends to reunite around the relative in a calm and domestic atmosphere as so would take place in a private home, but with the comfort of services and areas suitable for the circumstances. In every Country this new institution searched for an image, its own identity, getting it from the customs and main values of its social context. The dimension

of these buildings is variable, depending on the specific programs of the promoter, and can go from a minimum of three hundred square meters to a maximum (realized until now) of more than five thousand square meters. Even in Italy the proposal for a funerary home, presented in Modena, in view of the introduction of this service and as contribution of Italian design to the qualification of a social (and architectural) matter that is inevitably establishing itself, but at the same time it asks to reach a definition of its own identity; it was born as an answer to the demand of domesticity not without solemnity, of a dedicated environment but flexible and available to get personalized depending on the various cultures and to different religions. A large staff of Italian and foreign multidisciplinary specialists: psychologists, sociologists, architects and designers, in contact and in collaboration continues with experts working in the field, conceived the project and created a sample model aimed to build, other than at the first Italian experience of this kind, the answer, on a functional and aesthetic-environmental level, to the foreign models that, conceived for other socio-cultural conditions, couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be proposed in the Italian reality. In the general conception of the project a big importance was given to the definition of a correct atmosphere of contemplation and calm. We so took care to keep out the urban reality usually intrusive, noisy, not good for the occasion nor pleasant. We reached this through a particular strategy of a natural light supply by an internal patio, skylights and opening that face on a small surrounding green spaces (on the model of the ancient hortus conclusus).

LAIC

TEMPLE A funerary house of passage rituals

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In this way the space for the ritual can stay autonomous and independent, with a variable and occasional character of its urban setting. The interior spaces, for the welcome of relatives, the hall for ceremonies, the mortuary and the waiting and refreshment areas, are organized in a calm and geometrically simple spaces, almost minimal. absolutely immune to formalistic neurosis, but made comfortable by the careful design of the surfaces and of details.

About the tactile and perceptive values we preferred to use natural materials. We wanted to give to the place for the celebration of the relative a natural and frank character, with attention also to the simplest management of the promoter. In every case the project provides the possibility that, in daily management of the laic temple, the staff can intervene according to their wishes, to obtain forms of particular personalization of the interior spaces, respecting the different ideas, religions, cultures and wishes. Particular precautions are, in fact, adopted to obtain modifications of the interior asset of spaces, with less time and staff. The setting of spaces allows different groups of relatives to be hosted without interferences and without meeting, respecting in this way the privacy and to avoid unpleasant commingling. Attention is also reserved for the accessibility for old people or anyway for people with reduced mobility.

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Roma design + In 2005 and in 2006 , in occasion of the third and fourth edition of the Roma d+ initiative, an organized container of events, expositions and congresses, promoted by â&#x20AC;&#x153;La Sapienzaâ&#x20AC;? University and by the Amministrazione Provinciale di Roma, the Istituto participates with two installations.

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In line with the central theme, HYBRID, in 2006 was realized with an installation/event in which design and street art interact contaminating each other through the emblematic presence of an anonymous user, represented by a street mime/statue, and of an unique object of big innovation and creativity, represented by the suitcase/push scooter, and where the object transports the subject.

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MADE IN ITALY MADE IN LAZIO MADE IN DESIGN The culture of the product shows itself up

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[…] at least until the end of the nineteenth-century, the objects of use generally kept a diffused comprehensibility and a total familiarity with the public of users that could so easily decide how and when to use them. With the arrival of mass production means the productive techniques (and purposes) became unknown and not understandable, the distance between the average man and the universe of objects that surround him increased out of proportion with the risk to alienate each other. […] […] Here the actual role of design is set: helping the reconciliation between the public of users and the productive system making the perception of the mutual necessity smarter and clearer and creating the ways of its satisfaction. […] […] Design, as neutral between production and consumption, can efficiently observe and study the features of these two universes and find the most favorable contact points. […] […] But the challenge of the global market will bring more and more companies in front of a selective mechanism of a Darwinian brand, exposing them to the big planetary flows of uncontrollable variations. The Industrial design could be, for many companies, the same as the development of mind was for our species: the winning card. by: Benedetto Todaro, MADE IN ITALY DESIGN: UN MOTORE PER L’ECONOMIA INDUSTRIALE presentation text of the conference held by the Istituto Quasar

Exposition promoted in the field of the institutional, economical and cultural collaboration between Lazio and Lithuania

Vilnius

November 10/13 2005 Exposed, among others, projects made by students of the Istituto Quasar, author of the installation

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8 VIDEO PER 8 POESIE:

OMAGGIO A PASOLINI (8 VIDEOS FOR 8 POEMS: A TRIBUTE TO PASOLINI) In the context of the scientific and cultural initiatives proposed and realized by the Istituto Quasar, 8 Video per 8 poesie: omaggio a Pasolini is set inside of a research about those contemporary artistic expressions and production that tend to a contamination of different genres and cultures, inspired to expressive forms and strongly hybrid languages. In this meaning and in this direction the work made on the literary work of Pasolini experimented through an artistic, cultural and technical approach, the staged poetical reality suspending between abstraction and charm, imagination and realism; is experimented, basically, the possibility to set up that deep and unintelligible reality, to catch the meaning and measure of a “world” wisely built inside of a circuit of words.

The eight videos are suspended between literature and cinema, exactly as the entire work of Pasolini, they declare the aim to discover new requests of representation of a reality that is expressed and built by and inside the thought of the same reality. The distance between the thought of a reality and its real definition – or representation – is the distance that we want to catch between poetry and cinema; it is the distance that we want to enclose to build the vision of the absolute truth.

It is a tribute and at the same time a gratitude for the teachings that Pasolini gave us, transmitted by his productions and its words. It is a tribute to the foresight of his artistic ideas, to his ability to see (and anticipate) the invisible and the hidden, to his ability “to live always at the level and at the heart of reality”.

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summary of the video In the half-light, a man deals with his feelings and thinks about the time he lived and about what he sees projected in front of him. His thoughts and his questions intertwine like the smoke of a cigarette that puckers his face and his image reflected in a mirror. He recognizes his past and his passions in the objects that surround him.

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summary of the video A parallel reality develops in a reality made by the elements of daily nature, created by manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lived emotions. Moods, questions and expectancies help to create a built and complex reality, that develops in thecyclyc of life.

The need of alienation, the necessity of an illusion and the cry of existence echo between the visible forms of nature.

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summary of the video The naked eyes search for a hope, for another possibility. They search for a tangible signal in the darkness and in the solitude of life. In the following of changes the conflict clash between destiny and the wish to change it comes after an acknowledgment that something has already happened. Present is already â&#x20AC;&#x153;pastâ&#x20AC;? and future eclipses the vision of a different and better existence.

An existence by now filtrated and conditioned by the inutility of hope and totally subjected to its destiny.

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summary of the video In a “theatrical” dimension, five tin toys stage the spectacular representation of human life. In the continuous passages on the scene is revealed the “boredom” of man: the static repetition of the cyclic of life but also the estrangement of their reality in which the hope of passing in another time, in another place, beyond doors succeeds to survive…

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summary of the video The encounter-clash between two entities: one dedicated to the writing of a hypothetical text, the other that sets up as a “double” of the artist and stays to assist the work of this one; from here a silent relationship of reciprocity between the two, that will end with a “going back to the starting point”, that is the condition proper of man and that for many sides is completely visible in the figure of the artist: solitude.

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LA COMMEDIA DIVINA A work conceived in two acts, the first inspired to the Earth dimension and the second one to the afterlife one, that wants to research, define and trace the path of a new making, of a new interpretation of spaces and real , abstract and fantastic dimensions, through new genres made by hybridizations necessary as strongly and genetically organized.

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HELL Hell, heaven and purgatory don’t have space, nor place or time, and it’s maybe because of this that their temporal and spatial “visualization” warps an “absent space” and informs of an nonexistent time.

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To make visible the non time, the absence and the absolute emptiness in this case is the only possibility translated in a tale at the limits of incoherence between contents and shape, between language and expression, between exposition and narration.

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PURGATORY

HEAVEN

Every vision, reading and thought are transformed in a spatial-temporal symphony, in a path that puts in contact and identifies at the same time each fragment of the active thought about life and death, about good and bad, about black and white.

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One Day Expo Design Micca Club Alumni al

The Micca club, leader in entertainment, and the Istituto Quasar, leader in education, together for an event/expo of big interest and up to date. In occasion of the O.D.E. One Day Expo & Temporary Store â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Design: the new talents initiative, the Micca Club hosts, as protagonists for an entire day dedicated to expositions, successful designers trained by the Istituto Quasar, that show their products and projects.

The alumni that expose are: Daniele Barbiero, Domenico Calabrese, Valerio Calamari, Devil Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Angelo, Designtrasparente (Emiliano Brinci), DiciannoveDieciDesign (Flavio Scalzo), DolceQ (Massimiliano Panzironi), Armando Ficini, Grado Sei (Chiara Pellicano, Edoardo Giammarioli, Fabrizio Mistretta Gisone, Renzo Carriero, Stefano Romano), Simona Sacchi, Stefano Sciullo.

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Six meetings

in which developed the first edition of the QOS/ Quasar Outer Space saw the alternation in conferences and demonstrative performances of some of the most interesting and deserving creative talents today present in Italy, all that have in common the wish to enlarge the boundaries of their professional â&#x20AC;&#x153;fieldâ&#x20AC;?. An invitation to opening and listening that maybe is the most significant bequest of this fascinating didactic experience.

written by Carlo Prati

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New painting. New stone.

Psychological power and perceptive power joined together. Extended horizon and not explored, without frame, without background.

Surrounding of a screen that no longer holds.

Fluid surrounding.

Network society.

Out of the web it is everywhere in the world, the planet-eye is a galactic transmitter of images and sounds, aesthetic overlap and overexposure of society and its elements.

Fine dust of beta waves flashing in the darkness of immense sidereal spaces.

The field in which modernity is played it is mental and psychological. Access to future â&#x20AC;&#x201C; already present and working â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it is a choice that refers to the individual.

First of all it requests a ratio 1.

At best it is transformed in a ratio 0 tending to the absolute multiple.

To accept an evolutionary process means to offer ourselves to the un-conditioning power that today is in the IT (information technology).

A laic transmutation.

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DIDACTIC

WORKS

EXEMPLA

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Exercises and projects made during the institutional didactic in the various attendances of the Istituto.

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Libere

imitazioni First publication of the collection

Quaderni Didattici of

the Istituto Quasar edited by

Orazio Carpenzano

Rome 1997 A proof of the didactic method The Basic design of the development of a guided creativity Essential training at the basis of the shape.

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Istituto Quasar scuola superiore di progettazione The Istituto was born in Rome in 1987 as a research, formation, and communication facility that works in the fields of environmental culture and project, of which it promotes the study and spreads knowledge through expositions, congresses, workshops, publications, classes and other initiatives.

Quaderni Didattici Collection directed by BENEDETTO TODARO Book edited by ORAZIO CARPENZANO Redaction office & Press office EVA BENEDETTI Organization and general coordination SILVIA BENEDETTI DE COUSANDIER Quasar Progetto Viale Regina Margherita, 192 00198 Rome 06/8557078 – 85301487 – 8547311 Internet: http://www.uni.net/quasar e-mail: quasar@uni.net On the cover: Bas relief in chalk created in the Basic Design workshop, 1996 (stud – PIACENZA, SCALERA, MUSSOLIN, SANTAMARIA) 1997 All rights reserved to the Fratelli Palombi s.r.l.

Via dei gracchi, 183 00192 Rome Graphic and editing assistance conducted by the Casa Editrice ISBN 88-7621-210-8 The printing was completed on December 1997

The Quaderni Didattici of the Istituto Quasar collect and organize in a communicative way the results of some experiences made inside the classes of the Istituto.

The main purpose of the collection is the exchange and confrontation of ideas and methods for the intervention on the built environment and for the formation of future designers.

As documented proof of the work that is lived and produced in the design workshop of our institute we also believe that it could build a vademecum , we hope that it will be efficient for the aspiring designer.

Orazio Carpenzano He was born in Modica in 1958 and he graduated in Architecture in Venice with Raffaele Panella in 1982. He works in Rome. He teaches Basic Design and Critique at the Quasar since 1991. He is a researcher of the Dipartimento Architettura e Analisi della Città at the Faculty of Architecture at the “la Sapienza” University in Rome where he teaches Urban Composition and design. His projects and writings are published in national and international specialized magazines. He is the editor of the “Capitolium” magazine and of the GROMA del DAAC collections and author (among other publications) of Idea Immagine Architettura, Tecniche di invenzione architettonica e composizione, Gangemi, Rome 1993.

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Introduction Intersection of lines Benedetto Todaro Our world is design: meaning that it is extended and understandable, of foreshadowing and preparation of environments, spaces and objects equipped with the best quality as possible for manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not by chance that this first Quaderno of the didactic collection of the Istituto Quasar collects works in which the line, the wise intersection of lines, an organized and interesting compositional practice about the line and about its many metamorphosis, it signs the beginning of the design training carried out in our school. In fact design always had a destiny intersected with the line, both in the strict sense and in the metaphorical one: the line seems to be the epitome of the project, the most significant sensible proof of its own being.

Lines are traced on paper (or virtually on a monitor) to set up, compare and give shape to ideas; the lines are those that we follow in the adoption of expressive choices; furthermore lines divide the various domains, the different areas of design. In the end lines are those through which ,traditionally, plastic values of the physical world are described and recorded in the bi-dimensional surface and so it is the ending result of every project: realization.

In the end, we talk about lines to draw the figurative universe recalled in each building, by objects, generally by products of creativity and even regarding the recurring and recognizable ways with which authors express it.

Considering the nature of the collection that starts with this Quaderno Didattico, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not inappropriate a short reference to the followed lines, and to the ones to follow, in the conception and conduction of our educational writing, in the definition of the didactic line where the school is based on. At the basis of the cultural project of

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the Istituto Quasar there is the interest and determination to practice an intellectual and creative control on the entire cycle that, starting from the genesis of the idea, reaches the definition and realization of the result. The attempt is to not concede fields that, subject to the power of the project, often are excluded from it in the practice, sometimes living discrete commercial and public fortunes, but without any possibility of quality.

This aspiration should be for everyone who gets close to the project, independently from the theme they deal with. The method to use, respecting the communicative necessities, is the one that follows the most simple line.

As first practice for this last one, we observe that the practice of the project is born from a theory, from a simple

idea, obvious: the theory of maximum economy. In fact, it’s surely more convenient to trace lines on a relatively economical surface as paper, in a small and controllable dimension, to then maybe cancel them, erase them, move them a bit or start them over, rather than to directly realize the work, hardly, extravagantly and after to destroy, demolish, do again, because of the inevitable mistakes or second thoughts.

Since society delegated to some specialists the task to realize buildings and objects of use, the project, with its equipment of instruments and techniques, became the way to try and correct without excessive waste, to solve in advance, simply simulating, the problems of the building phase. The consolidation since the beginning of this simulation practice brought, other than its heritage of knowledge, techniques of design culture that we admire and that we want to use, also other consequences traditionally tied to the beginning value of knowledge, for the corporative defense of secrets, for the strict control of the apprenticeship and for the transmission of the trade.

This obscure side of the practice (that we want to free ourselves from) reveals the double character of the project and of its epiphany through the complex of lines that we call drawings. If the ability of tracing lines following the laws of art, already in historical ages, draws the features at the corporation of designers, if this is exactly the most tangible sign of the difference, of the distance of the expert compared to the many not yet experts, still today, in surely more laic times, the expressive tools used in the project keep a similitude of many healing substances, benefic properties joined with some toxic features. Our purpose is to benefit from the first ones avoiding these last ones.

In this meaning, to remember the instrumental origin of the structure on which design is based on doesn’t reduce

the dignity, but, on the contrary, it can develop its power.

The by now ultra-decennial experience carried out by our Istituto in some specialized fields of design, in particular the furnishing ones, of garden design, of design on scale of detail, fields set on the borderline with the so said applied arts, traditionally marginal compared to the main trends of the critique and just since less time starting to be reemerged, pushes to some conclusions about the limits of the graphic-instrumental supply usually used in design. Limits to be intended partially as insufficiency, in part as overabundance or excess, however always as not perfect technical and expressive correspondence. The insufficiency is summarized in the inborn incapability of design to consider features that go beyond the description of the stereometric qualities of the examined object.

The architectural origin of design is still now taking the culture of design for granted, aiming it to privilege the description of the wise and magnificent game of volumes under the sun light, choosing in this way definitively the first one of the two terms. We are not saying that we got to design – for example, an interior – with the use of graphics as Toulouse Lautrec did, but stays the fact that the most important choices to be made in the design of an interior space, staying in the proposed example, mostly slip away to a graphic definition worked with the traditional tools of the project and even to the most racy devices of virtual reality. When what is designed is not a monument but the daily environment observed in close sight, when the first place of sight is damaged by other senses that claim their rights, it’s here that design shows the rope, here de designer sits at the table and from his chair uses less abstract and more vital tools and tests, it’s here that, owner of his tools, he transcends them without fear.

On this level our Istituto carries out, since a long time,

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experiments aimed to revaluate, inside the project, the totality of tests, from the adoption of tridimensional models, to the reconstruction, with composite techniques, of the wanted atmosphere values, from the intersection of traditional graphics with the collage and the direct sample taking of substances, until the retracing of gestures of the craftsman dexterity typical of the building phase: to touch, fell the smell, the temperature and the superficial qualities of materials, products and environmental situations.

In these things just described are the practices with which we try to transcend the limits of the bi-dimensional representation and to guarantee the result of their representativeness, on the other side we reshape the autonomy of design, we deny its autonomous value.

The long tradition and mutual association between design interests and representation techniques made to reach, these last ones, a high level of sophistication, that sometimes tends to set itself as a value itself.

This inclination of the designer to live also independently from his representative, gives big proof of himself in occasion of expositions and in publications, but at the same time risks to have prevailed a habit of relationship with the works mainly purevisible. It seems important to us, in the training of a designer, to distinguish the purposes of the project, always aimed to the realization of the work, from the graphic ones that can be the most varied. This book documents the design experience carried out during the first year of the three-year course, an experience aimed on the basic training lead by Orazio Carpenzano who, with big sensibility and critic clearness, knew how to introduce young apprentices in the difficult expressive art in a constant equilibrium between instinct and reason, between the development of an individual creativity and the use of the heritage of collective knowledge.

In fact, for who designs, the sea that divides the saying

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and the doing is reduced to a line, to a thin string with which to keep the plot of the design idea: in equilibrium of theory and practice, in the intersection of the logos with the action, it is the secret of art, two are consequently the opposite mistakes from which a tutor has to warn who is getting close to this trade: the first is born from impatience, from doubt in the potentialities of the abstract thought, joined with a good dose of genetic determinism (you are born an artist).

This first mistake induces the doing without the thinking, the automatic operate before the logos has correctly defined the rules to follow in the expressive game. the second one, opposite to the first one, it is the getting satisfied of the game of the logos, of the intellectual construction, maybe also brilliant and brilliantly expressed with magnificent games of lines, forgetting that the project is a passage, a virtual phase of a procedure that aims to be ended in the reality.

I thank friends and collaborators that gave life and identity to the didactic project of the Istituto Quasar and students that during these years of common growth that interpreted the rough draft that we were proposing with enthusiasm and enterprising power.

From the familiarity with them we got a rich experience as the one collected by them. Many of them have worked a long time with honor in the activities for which they were trained in out Istituto.

They are proof of the honesty of our hypothesis and of the value of our vision.

The courses that we manage try to develop design as an intellectual and sensible experience where nothing is suddenly imposed.

During these courses are expressed and examined the modern and advanced design principles, we try to demonstrate new formal and technical thoughts, through the use of important works. We know that students can’t yet judge what they see because they don’t know the terms of judgment ex tempore, out of the “styles”, out of the culture of “commonplaces”, but they can follow the shapes of that “architecture”, trace backwards those actions of formalization. They don’t know yet that the necessary judgments for the design thought transcend the age and its materials and that the terms of the thought that analyzes and understands architecture are analogical and comparative: the abstraction and the perception are the two main instruments of this design intelligence. We really patiently and constantly try to make them understand there is nothing more stupid than an assumed and anticipated creative value (as a category or a method); there is nothing more banal than a pre-supposed technique: we need to try to set the design learning in the senses and in the mind. To learn from theorists but also from craftsmen; to learn from handmade models; to learn the happiness of composing with less variations of usual thing within a creative level that is entrusted to “free imitations and to contained inventions”, to diligence, to the effort of recognizing the expressive value that almost always, as it happens!, are free from clamorous mistakes of taste and that help to explore the boundaries of design discretion. In this book is described a didactic project that wants to make its first steps of composing, to give them awareness; a project able to understand by the effects of its own experimentation and so in continuous auto-correction.

O.C.

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from the text of Orazio Carpenzano:

Basic Design: Basics of environmental design

[…]

The observation of the inanimate and of natural creatures will have to identify models that will be carefully described […] but never before break them into different parts and jealously kept in our memory […]. In these ways the teaching succeeds, with much patience, to make the miracle of discipline the thought through logical and rational paths and, at the same time, to free it to the emotions of the empirical description […]

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Fragments of general theory tied to the disciplinary features of design

[…]

Inside of a frame full of theoretical references, the research of design started in the class of Basic Design move from different points of view, brought to privilege the typological-linguistic, constructive or geometricalabstract component, depending on the different cases. […]

Theories of shape and setting

[…]

We design to identify, to help the students observe, in defining hierarchies between parts, trace the multiple relationships between settings, surroundings and internal structures, and in the end re-describe, rethink, recreate, to make productive on a creative level a “scientific” observation overlapped to an empirical observation. From a geometrical shape to a natural shape; from a natural shape to a geometrical shape: - The design and formal reconstruction

of Alhambra and of La Mezquita designed in 1936 interest Escher for the double use possibilities of surroundings in a regular repetition of basic geometrical shapes that could continue to infinity. of sanitary devices of Giò Ponti for ideal Standards of 1953.

- The lessons about freehand foliage, on the bases of the equilateral triangle, of Albertolli.

- M. C. Escher, Structural sensation in the shape. The copies of mosaics

Observation of the combinatorial possibilities between shapes following different principles of assembly, by overlapping and overturning shapes, by iterative juxtaposition, following a symmetry order of following a privileged orientation […].

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Theories and techniques of pre-figuration

[…]

From the designs of teachers to the representation of the project. From the ideation to realization […]. the formal plan of a project.

Geometrical recreations.

The choice of a “type”, the stand, by its very nature almost out of the functional thought, it helps to bring to attention on the grammar of the architectural organism.

The stand as an object with a strong anti-typological vocation forces the student to think, without a pre-set frame of mind, about the problems of dimension, of measures, of connections between the parts […].

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Lessons of composition The content of these lessons is basically about simple and irreducible elements of the construction associated with a program of presentation to students of some small works chosen because of their emblematic and evident character […]. Some of these works represent actual forced passages for a working interpretation of the project, to examine its aesthetical qualities, the spatial character of interiors, the distributive features, furniture, materials, structure, relationships with the place. There is a group of works that can’t be and can’t be forgotten, no generation of designers can not know them […].

The elements of the architectural project and the basic architectural elements.

The wall, pillar, column, door, window, roof. The order of hierarchies between big and small, between container figure and contained figure, the adding and removing, the full and empty, set and parts […]. They acquire meaning just if they are in relation with each other. They have recognizable and describable design and quality, so they define multiple spatial values depending on the way in which they are composed: they so define different shapes, volumetric models of incomparable shape and structure […].

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BASIC DESIGN

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DRAWING

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HABITAT

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LANDSCAPE

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DESIGN

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Metal objects bloom in the garden An ironic theatre where nature and artifact put into play a design skirmish of contrasts and assonance from which tools are born of a surreal garden â&#x20AC;˘ an iron chaise longue upholstered with grass â&#x20AC;˘ a vase that waters itself â&#x20AC;˘ a desk of roses To water an armchair, to fertilize a wheelbarrow or to have a banquet on a field-tablecloth of a metal table the objects are not different from the context, but with it are born and raised, as this they need to be taken care of and lived in

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GRAPHICS 194

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HYPERGRAPHICS

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VIRTUAL ARCHITECTURE

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MULTIMEDIA WEB & INTERACTION

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SOCIAL

INTEREST

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Studies and projects made by teachers and students in collaboration with public administrations, public and private authorities, operators and companies.

Projects of social use, for promotions of ethical information, for the requalification of public areas and for the development of innovative projects for companies.

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Project and manual skills 1991

about the seat

Event promoted by the Regione Lazio as a creative support to the production of craftsmen companies of the region March 2-10 1991 Fiera di Roma

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PROJECT OF ANDREA ROSSI AND VALERIO PELLEGRINI DUNE MODULAR SEAT FOR COLLECTIVE SPACES An exposition of results of the didactic research applied to the development of the theme: “the seat”, with prototypes realized by furnishing companies.

A research about the variations induced in the shape of objects starting from a given function that, for the occasion, is the one of sitting, in its various declinations depending on the used material.

The projects expect, for every object, just the use of available materials and technologies by the single involved craftsmen.

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Project and manual skills 1992

unified stone base

Event promoted by the Regione Lazio as a creative support to the production of handicraft companies of the region March 21-29 1992 Fiera di Roma

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An exposition of results of a didactic research dedicated to the development of a family of household objects conceived starting from a same unified support, with prototypes realized by the participating companies.

A research aimed to reduce the distance that divides the various workshops and the masters of different techniques.

Among the roles of the project there is also the one of putting into contact and synergy resources and techniques apparently unrelated and not compatible.

The family of household totems, vaguely anthropomorphic, is presented in a shy but frank multifunctional declination.

They are built on a base the same for all (a kind of elementary stand), the parts are exposed aware of being unique examples, waiting for a commercial version of the natural selection to reinforce their race, to change them in something of new and different or to start them to their end.

On a same given base: a flower box, a CD holder, a bar cabinet, an inclined dresser, a marble lamp, a pirouetting shelf.

TRAVERTINE, BAR AND GLASS TABLE The experimental prototype uses frames worked and assembled through prestressing. The system allows stone supporting sections, of measured thickness and of variable length and settings.

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Giovane Design Italiano per IKEA (Young Italian Design f o r I K E A)

IKEA contest 1996

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“culla estensibile 0-6” (“extendible crib 0-6”) student Valeria Murzilli Selected at the Contest of 1996 and Compasso d’Oro ADI 1998 ABC – Incontri sul progetto “culla in betulla”(“birch crib”) student Marco Spaziani special mention at the International contest

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Squaring the circle The SIARCO company, , specialized in metal works: light structures, lamps, galvanized sheets of conditioning implants and other technological devices.

A theme: the reemployment of wastes of work (mostly galvanized sheet disks of various dimensions).

Some proposals created by students and developed in prototypes

with

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Siarco

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The results of guided didactic practices, selected and given to the Associazione Nazionale Famiglie Italiane Martiri Caduti per la LibertĂ della Patria nelle Fosse Ardeatine di Roma; adopted by the ANFIM and still now used

Coordinative image and web site 218

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UNICEF Stop alla pedofilia (stop pedophilia) • A campaign of graphic communication against pedophilia created, with the support of UNICEF, by students of the Graphic Design class of the Istituto and officially presented in the Sala del Cenacolo of the Camera dei Deputati in September 2002.

During the meeting, that saw the participation of authorities and professionals, we talked about the “national plan of fight against pedophilia”, we focused on the law safeguard means that minors can use and we talked about initiatives taken by the telefono Azzurro to fight the pedophilia plague.

• The realization, commissioned by Unicef, of graphic projects of two covers of brochures with the text of the Convention of United Nations on the rights of childhood, effectively published, in 2003.

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EASY RIDER TROLLEY by the student Irene Zingarelli APME (ASSOCIATION OF PLASTICS IN EUROPE) CONTEST YEAR 2002

“plastic frees the body, mind, soul” 1° NATIONAL AWARD AND 3° INTERNATIONAL AWARD

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RESEARCHES ON NOMAD DESIGN

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Other prototypes realized inside the research about nomad Design, from students of the istituto:

BABY BAG: trolley passeggino (trolley stroller)

MALPENSA CHAIR: valigia seggiolino d’emergenza (emergency suitcase-folding chair)

special mention of the critique at the International contest of design “Ernesto Caiazza – Idee per la progettazione di una sedia europea”, of 2001

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MALPENSA CHAIR

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Graphic projects created by students and given to the association, for the awareness campaign for fundraising.

Among the created works, the subject chosen in the selection made by a charity represents a black and white hand that holds in the palm a yellow origami with the shape of a swan.

A set of big photographical impact in which the paper work recalls the idea of construction, to demonstrate how from a simple piece of paper we could create a concrete and positive work by a small action.

All the presented visuals recall, in a more or less explicit way, the concept of mutual support, collaboration, construction, optimism and solidarity, in line with the associationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vocation.

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TRENTA ORE PER LA VITA

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HOMLESS

> A LIVING

BOX

In collaboration with the APH (Association Habitat Designers) Design workshop: February 2004, Istituto Quasar, Headquarters Presentation of the created projects: July 2004, L’isola del Cinema, Isola Tiberina, Rome. in this occasion some “living box”, created by a primary factory that produces cardboard, are given to Caritas and Comunità S. Egidio Voluntary Associations, that will take care of the distribution to the interested parties.

Workshop between the Istituto Quasar and the International Design Academy of Okinawa for a special project: the metropolitan cabin for all those who, following wishes or frenzies, daily reinvent the ways of being in places where they don’t belong.

In the awareness of the impossibility of solving serious problems that afflict homeless people and of the complexity of the dealt matter, projects wanted to give a simple and effective contribution in an uncomfortable and wide social phenomenon, reinterpreting in this way the role of design, more sensible and respectful to the necessities of the “invisible people” and less conditioned by a commercial request.

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Japanese people teach us the aesthetic of imperfection, of the Wabi-Sabi, the temporary and the unfinished, a chosen place for homeless to stay for a day, for a night, for a few weeks, it is a space that is lived in, time lived through primary actions, where wandering in a multitude of loneliness is a risk, suffering, emptiness, detachment.

Nomadism, wandering, freedom, need of protection are the guide lines followed by young designers aimed to the creation of some solutions of a space of life for the homeless of all the cities in the world, of a “living” reversible and most of all transportable to not avoid the primary principle of liberty of users of the public

space of clochards, for who “to sleep” is one of the worse moments of daily life, one of the most dangerous ones (for health and safety) and together one of the most difficult ones to conquer.

Technical features were particularly taken care of: impermeability, resistance to the use and simple and fast transformability of the enclosure.

The support of a particular sun light receiver can offer to users of the living box some hours of light inside of them, without the use of candles.

Some benches were “upholstered” other than for the homeless also for old people.

“FOLDING ITINERANT HOMES”

for the homeless, as a system of minimal residence

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METROPOLITAN LOCATIONS Researches on the requalification of urban spaces

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R I A B I L I TAT I O N F O U R B A N S U B WAY S

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Reclamation of piazza San Cosimato in Roma Reconversion of meeting places and organization of free areas.

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“For a new Rotary of Ostia”

May 2005. Ostia. Rome.

Project of the XXIII Municipio created by students of the Habitat Design course for the requalification of the entrance Rotary in Ostia “Bocca del mare”, presented on July 7 2005 at the XIII city hall of Rome.

July 2005. Ostia. Rome Quasar d’amare

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Redesign of areas open to the public of the

TEATRO QUIRINO IN ROME

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TWO STATIONS IN THE TEVERE OF THE PUBLIC-RIVER TRANSPORTING LINE Stefano Stefani

The urban crossing of a river with its nature, the various settings, the available spaces, the floodplains and the surrounding areas, offer the occasion to reorganize and redesign wide scraps of the surrounding city.

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Various factors, not last the engineering ones directly connected to water (hydro-power, protection against floods, guarantee of public hygiene), brought, during time, to neglect the RIVER/CITY relationship. […]

The changed attitude of the last years allowed the State to finance, through the Legge per Roma Capitale, a project of navigability of the river Tevere. It considers the river as an element to appraise for a global reassert of the territory.. […]

The project created by the competent Administrations is developed […] according to the hypothesis of navigability for a touristic/recreational use, and also, getting integrated in the urban transportation, for daily use of citizens. […]

Despite having many qualities, this project suffers an essentially engineering setting that leaves unsolved various problems such as the architectural elaboration of the fluvial stations related to the river and their harmonious integration in the city landscape. The Istituto Quasar, through the Design course and in collaboration with the Ufficio Speciale per il Tevere e il Litorale del Comune di Roma, considered useful to contribute to the debate that was developing about these matters creating design hypothesis for fluvial stations. […]

It was chosen to bypass low water docks (unusable in situations of even minimal floods) and to connect the stations of Lungoteveri and the floating docking with innovative architectural and technological solutions, easy to use, and with a recognizable shape in the city landscape and so easy to identify. There were identified two kinds responding to the features that, basically, we meet during the urban distance of the river. One

is suitable for distances where the river is closed between “massive walls”, the other where the river is more wide.

The first is to be set where the river crosses the “Historical City”, it is made by a steel reticular truss suspended at 4,50 meters of height on the Lungotevere and anchored to the ground by tie-rods of sidewalks.

It is cantilever extended towards the river for around 15 meters, the structure is needed to hold the glide system, made of an elevator that slides along three guiding ropes, and for a boardwalk that allows to access the elevator from the Lungotevere. […]

The floating structure, of measured dimensions (10x30), is anchored to the low water dock by telescopic tubes anchoring that allow, even if staying in the same position, to vertically follow the stroke of the following levels to the flooding events.

Other than to be a station, it is equipped with waiting, refreshment and entertainment areas,, setting itself also as an element of requalification of the river. the second project is thought for those distances of the river where primary banks are built with clay and the river is really wide, around 200 meters.

It is focused on the use of a cableway system for the connection of ground stations with boarding bridges.

On the Lungotevere will be set the two stations of the cableway, including the technological cableway system and the areas for the ticket office, toilet facilities, waiting, boarding and disembarkation of passengers. […]

The boarding bridge, of measured dimensions, is set at the center of the river because this position is functional for the cableway moving (couldn’t be otherwise) and because it allows the docking of boats on both sides, helping and simplifying the boarding and disembarking operations depending on descending and climbing up traffic flows of the river.

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BloodBox

itinerant interactive blood bank van It is a project for the creation of a new conception of blood bank van born from the collaboration between the Associazione Donatori e Volontari Personale Polizia di Stato (ADVPS) Onlus and the Istituto Quasar Design University of Rome.

It is a new conception of blood bank van that , thanks to digital technologies, it is thought as an interactive architecture that moves, communicates with the city, with people, with the citizen, but most of all with youths.

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The Bloodbox has amazing night visibility standards: it appears as a heart beat that answers to the environmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stimulus. Long red strings around the external body of the blood bank van are lightened by the bloodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sense of movement and they work as an attraction for the public to a so important matter as the one of blood donation. But itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not just an itinerating space with a big visual impact: it has also a really comfortable and technological interior environment, with interactive digital screens.

Thanks to these features it wants to make the blood donation to be more informed and pleasant.

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With the support of the Camera dei Depitati, Polizia di Stato, Ministero dellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;UniversitĂ e della Ricerca, Comune di Roma and Presidenza della Regione Lazio, the project was officially presented in July 2007 at the Sala Conferenze of Palazzo Marini, headquarters of the Camera dei Deputati.

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Blood now A social campaign realized by students of the Graphic Design course, promoted by the Istituto quasar and given to the ADVPS, with the purpose to popularize it among youths to make them aware about blood donation. The aim of the project is to give hints able to directly penetrate in the conscience of youths, educating them towards that action of altruism and love. The ADVPS used it to print calendars, posters, portable calendars, key chains, and other gadgets for youths.

It was officially presented, together with the BloodBox, in July 2007, at Palazzo Marini.

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My best friend was a mutt

Abandoned Love

Reason makes us different.

Feeling makes us all alike.

Every year millions of dogs die because of abandon.

Man’s carelessness and ignorance make a continuous and silent massacre.

The abandon of Dogs is like a sure ending.

Don’t even you allow this massacre.

Don’t be his enemy.

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SIAMO ANIMALI ( WE ARE ANIMALS ) CAMPAIGN FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANIMALS AND ENVIRONMENT SIAMO ANIMALI is an animalist and environmentalist campaign, proposed and realized by the Istituto Quasar, aimed to make the civic society aware about matters that were followed since forever, but rarely dealt with a proactive behavior and with cultural and scientific contributions, such as the ones of the matter. The aim of this work is the one of offering a clear answer, the result of an exchange of young and passionate ideas.

All in our hands many animal species in extinction survive thanks to the effort of a few people. Just we can make them survive. forever.

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Development of graphic projects for an awareness campaign about matters of the climate change and for a fundraising, created by students of the Istituto, for Greenpeace, one of the most important environmentalist associations of the world.

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Projects for a new visual identity of Villa Torlonia.

The proposals offered an image connected to all the representative elements of the museum.

From the trade mark to formats, from the internal signals to promotional products and to the institutional publicity.

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Before the project, an historical, cultural and artistic research and the related investigations on the place were carried out. After, a first elaboration of the sign, the valuation of the typographic choices, the research of colors and the identification of images were made.

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Therefore the development of the executive project was determined trough: project of the making and logotype; composition of the manual of visual identity; standard formats; external, internal and directional signals; gadgets of bookshops; portable pamphlets and flyers; advertising communication by posters, fliers, expositive banners; press announcements.

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Mamiani:

the Quasar goes to School

The entrance garden of the historical building of Mamiani, a work realized in 1924 by the architect Vincenzo Fasolo, is animated by colored mega spheres, suspended in different heights, in a fluctuating installation created by the Istituto Quasar. Inside the roman lyceum is a more immaterial exposition made of multimedia projections.

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GNAM

Planned and Kinetic Art From Munari to Biasi to Colombo andâ&#x20AC;Ś

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The Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Roma gave to the Istituto Quasar the project of installations and coordinated graphic image of the “Arte Programmata e Cinetica. da Munari a Biasi a Colombo e…” exposition, held from March 22 to March 27 2012. This task fits in the project of protocol of agreement that, since more than twenty-five years, the Istituto keeps with most important institutional realities of all Italy.

This important and stimulating project involved students and teachers of the interested fields, representing a real occasion of growth. In fact, youths participated to all the steps of the design, from the initial one, of inspection of the intervention area, until the installation and verification of the project’s assembly. Lead by teachers, they learned to manage problems of the professional world.

Following the steps of a professional approach, the administrator of the exposition set the students of the Istituto Quasar in a real briefing, to allow them to rightly develop the projects of installation and of graphic image of the exposition and to explain to them the features of this artistic trend, to which design owes a lot. This was a precious occasion for students, to enrich their specific knowledge about arts, installations and generally creative and design work.

The collaboration between the Istituto Quasar and the national Galleria was a really important experimentation that involved in the realization of the event all the students and teachers that were working to define and experiment methods to apply “in the field”. So it gave the opportunity to practically show the validity of what was theoretically done in the classrooms of the Istituto Quasar.

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ALUMNI’S PRACTICE

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Marco Spaziani

Luca Di FIlippo

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Emiliano Brinci

Valerio Calamari

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Dolce Q

Francesca Fini

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Gradosei

Flavio Scalzo 280

Alessandro Polia

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Armando Ficini

Stefano Sciullo

Javier Tola

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Studio ID4

Corrado Celeste

Francesco Torricelli

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PRESS REVIEW 288

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QUASAR INSTITUTE IN BRIEF

GENERAL DIRECTION academic year academic year academic year academic year

1987/88 – 1997/98 Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier 1998/99 – 2000/01 Marco Cassiano 2001/02 – 2008/09 Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier 2009/10 – 2011/12 Luna Todaro

DIDACTIC DIRECTION academic year 1987/88 – 2001/02 Benedetto Todaro academic year 2002/03 – 2006/07 Orazio Carpenzano academic year 2007/08 – 2011/12 Luca Leonori

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SPECIAL GUEST TEACHERS & FRIENDS Elena Giulia Abbiatici, Ferdinando Adornato, Sabrina Adriani, Anna Maria Affanni, Eleonora Albano, Gabriele Alciati, Elisa Aldini, Maurizio Alecci, Sabina Alessi, Elena Alleva, Gaetano Amato, Maurizio Amato, Paolo Amendola, Teresa Amendolagine Gagliano, Elisa Angelici, Franca Angelici, Angela Annibali, Cecilia Anselmi, Bruno Apostoli, Daniela Aquila, Tommaso Arcangioli, Marco Arciero, Ilenia Argentin, Tecla Arigliani, Marinapia Arredi, Rosario Assunto, Francesco Saverio Aymonino, Enrica Bagnolini, Stefano Baldassarre, Pio Baldi, Federico Balmas, Giancarlo Bandini, Giovanna Bandini, Maresa Barbagallo, Daniele Barbiero, Marianella Bargilli, Davide Barletti, Nicola Barnaba, Lorenza Bartolazzi, Aldo Bartolomeo, Francesca Bartolone, Luisa Barucci, Gianfranco Baruchello, Giorgio Bassani, Stefano Bastianetto, Birgitt Becker, Dario Bellezza, Virginia Belli, Paolo Emilio Bellisario, Alfredo Benedetti, Calogero Benedetti, Eva Benedetti, Roberto Benedetti, Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier, Raniero Benedetto, Angelo Bengardino, Davide Bennato, Barbara Beretta, Sergio Bergami, Lidia Berlinguer, Paolo Bernacca, Carmen Bernardini, Raffaele Bernardo, Gianluigi Bersani, Paola Bertolazzi, Maura Bertoldi, Simona Biancalana, Roberto Bianchi, Federico Bilò, Valerio Bindi, Danilo Bitetti, Alessandro Blasucci, Francoise Bliek, Laura Boldrini, Gianfranco Bombaci, Go”redo Bonanni, Maurizio Bonciani, Maura Bonelli, Achille Bonito Oliva, Gabriele Bonolis, Fabio Bonvicini, Silvia Bordini, Davide Bordoni, Gabriele Borghini, Andrea Borzelli, Barbara Botti, Franco Bovo, Stefano Bozza, Fabio Brasili, Emiliano Brinci, Carlo Bruschi, Simona Bryant, Susanna Bucci, Daniele Bufalini, Roberto Buffetti, Raffaella Buonopane, Maria Burani Procaccini, Stefano Buscaglia, Giancarlo Busiri Vici, Silvia Busiri Vici, Laura Bussi, Giuseppe Cacopardi, Antonio Federico Cajola, Umberto Calabrese, Mario Calamita, Maria Emma Calandra, Gianfranco Caldarelli, Lanfranco Caminiti, Alessandro Camiz, Manlio Cammarata, Vito Campanelli, Benvenuto Campanini, Massimo Campari, Francesco Campione, Alberta Campitelli, Anna Maria Campone,

Alessandro Cangelosi, Adelaide Caniggia Regazzoni, Nuccio Canino, Livia Cannella, Stefano Canto, Stanislao Cantono Di Ceva, Gualtiero Capolei, Rosanna Capone, Roberta Capotondi, Sandro Cappelletto, Francesco Cappiello, Raffaella Cappiello, Giorgio Cappozzo, Alessandra Capuano, Manuela Carastro, Renzo Carella, Marcello Caresta, Robert Carl, Maria Carla, Fabrizio Carli, Marco Carloni, Aldo Caron, Orazio Carpenzano, Aurelio Carraffa, Mario Carulli, Tancredi Carunchio, Edith Casadei, Francesca Maria Casale, Isabella Casali di Monticelli, Francesca Casalino, Maria Letizia Casanova, Marco Cassiano, Valerio Cassiano, Elisabetta Cattaruzza, Alfio Cavallaro, Giovanni Ceccarelli, Carlo Ceccotti, Renato Cecilia, Mara Celani, Gianni Celestini, Stefano Ceppi, Bruno Ceravolo, Daniele Cerioni, Bruno Cesari, Cristina Chiappini, Maria Rosaria Chiarolanza, Mimmo Chiriamo, Gianluca Ciampi, Maria Grazia Cianci, Laura Ciccardini, Ernesto Cimbalo, Franco Cipriani, Giovanni Cipriani, Vania Cirese, Franco Cirioni, Antonio Citterio, Enrico Cocco, Stelvio Coggiatti, Enrico Cogno, Jules Coke, Giovanna Colacevich, Daniela Colafranceschi, Giampaolo Consoli, Lorenzo Conte, Cinzia Conti, Fabio Contini, Ignazio Contu, Stefano Converso, Bernardo Corrado, Daniela Corrente, Dario Cosentino, Antonietta Cospito, Alessia Costa, Giacomo Costa, Maurizio Costa, Sabina Costadoni, Gaetano Costantini, Giacomo Costantini, Andreina Costanzi Cobau, Cristiana Costanzo, Roberto Creton, Carlotta Criacci, Dario Criacci, Marcello Crimaldi, Davide Crippa, Lorella Cuccarini, Massimo Curatella, Paolo Curina, Emanuele Custo, Teodoro Cutolo, Francesco D’Amato, Giovanni D’Ambrosio, Margherita D’Amico, Alessandra D’Elia, Alberto D’Onofrio, Francesca D’Aloja, Valeria D’Angelo, Francesco D’Annunzio, Wendy D’Olive, Fabrizio Da Col, Mario Dal Mas, Lorenzo Dall’Olio, Domitilla Dardi, Antonella Daroda Sartogo, Roberto De Angelis, Riccardo De Antonis, Andrea De Bellis, Marco De Bernardis, Carolina De Camillis, Flavio De Carolis, Fabrizio De Cesaris, Rosaria De Cicco, Walter De Dominicis, Alessandro De Falco, Giorgio De Finis, Valeria de Folly d’Auris, Emanuela De Leo, Antonio De Lorenzo, Francesco De Lorenzo, Giuseppe De Luca, Mauro De Luca, Tommaso

De Luca, Stella De Lucia, Federico De Matteis, Linda De Sanctis, Roberto De Sanctis, Adriana De Simone, Massimo de Vico Fallani, Elena de’ Grimani, Fabio de’ Navasques, Luigi de’ Navasques, Gerardo Del Greco, Marco Delogu, Marco Deseriis, Silvia Dettori, Valerio Di Bussolo, Fabio Di Carlo, Leone Di Castro, Patrizia Di Costanzo, Giuseppe Di Falco, Beata Di Gaddo, Alessandra Di Giacomo, Franco Di Giacomo, Mirella Di Giovine, Loredana Di Lucchio, Lea Di Muzio, Paolo Di Pasquale, Andrea Di Persio, Stefano Di Pietro, don Guerino Di Tora, Maurizio Diana, Stefano Diana, Nunziastella Dileo, Alessandro Dolfi, Angela Donatelli, Gian Piero Donin, Andrea Dori, Silvia Dori, Giuseppe Dormio, Daniela Dotto, Alberto Duo, Giovanni Duranti, Marco Egizi, Lisa El Ghaoui, Michela Elia, Renzo Elia, Paola Ermini, Leonardo Fabbri, Francesco Fabbrovich, Carlos Fabriani, Stefan Falcon, Giovanni Falcone, Massimo Falvo, Stefano Fanfulli, Cristiano Farese, Giulio Faretra, Antonello Fatello, Virgilio Fazioli, Puccio Fede, Marta Fegiz, Andrea Ferreri, Francesco Ferretti, Renzo Ferri, Antonio Ferro, Giulio Ferroni, Armando Ficini, Gianluca Ficorilli, Dino Figuera, Gabriele Filippelli, Costanza Filippucci, Francesca Fini, Daniela Fonti, Massimiliano Forlani, Fabrizio Forniti, Giorgia Forte, Simona Fossi, Biancamaria Frabotta, Simona Franci, Rosamaria Francucci, Valerio Franzone, Fulvio Fraticelli, Andrea Gaboardi, Luca Gaboardi, Giacomo Gajano, Adriana Galano, Giulio Cesare Gallenzi, Massimo Galletta, Anna Gallo, Fabio Gallo, Riccardo Gangemi Rufino, Mario Garbuglia, Felipe Garcìa Goycoolea, Emilio Garroni, Giovanni Garroni, Enrico Gasbarra, Valeria Gasparrini, Mauro Gastreghini, Alessia Gatta, Giulia Gatti, Ludovico Gatto, Lucia Geraci, Andrea Germoleo, Francesco Ghio, Silvia Giachini, Edoardo Giammarioli, Teresa Giammetta, Alfonso Giancotti, Giovanni Giannasca, Alessandro Giannini, Veronica Giannini, Emanuela Giannuzzi Savelli, Isabella Giansanti, Gianluca Giardi, Luca Giarrettino, Emanuela Ginesi, Giorgio Ginori, Daniele Giorgi, Mariella Giorgieri, Francesco Giovanetti, Giulia Giovannelli, Massimo Giovannetti, Daniela Giovannoni, Salvatore Gisonna, Giuseppe Gisotti, Antonino Giuffrè, Carla Giuliani, Vittorio Giusepponi, Geppy Gleijeses, Katarzyna Głowicka,

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Franco Gnessi, Giovanni Granzotto, Angelo Grasso, Elisabetta Greci, Gerardo Greco, Manfredi Greco, Susanna Greco, Romeo Guaricci, Cosimo Guarino, Andrea Guerra, Laura Guglielmi, Hogre, Chiara Horn, Cristiano Iacoangeli, Annalisa Iannuzzi, Lorenzo Imbesi, Giuseppe Indovina, Valentina Infante, Americo Innocenti, Veronica Innominati, Jolanda Insana, Barbara Invernizzi, Marco Iori, Goska Isphording, Niklas Jacob, Gian Piero Jacobelli, Yalcin Kaya, Goetz Kemnitz, Karin Kempf, Katherine Krizek, Marco La Montagna, Filippo La Porta, Orazio La Rocca, Ane Lan, Bruno Landi, Carlo Lannutti, Paola Lanzara, Alberto Lari, Gianluigi Lasco, Lucia Latour, Marco Lattanzi, Paolo Lattanzio, Andrea Leganza, Fabio Lenci, Luca Leonori, Gian Claudio Liberati, Simonetta Licastro Scardino, Lorella Limoncelli, Gabriele Linari, Markus Lindhe Jens, Francesco Lipari, Claudio Locuratolo, Horst Lohse, Daniele Lombardi, Gianmarco Longano, Elda Longo, Tullia Lori, Giuseppe Losco, Giorgio Lovecchio, Gianfranco Luberti, Lucamaleonte, Giovanni Lucatello, Daniela Lucchetti, Enzo Lucchetti, Massimo Luciani, Domenico Lugini, Alessandra Lupi, Francesca Maffucci, Diego Maggi, Carlo Maggini, Marina Magi, Umberto Magni, Valerio Magrelli, Nicola Maiellaro, Federico Malusardi, Andrea Mancini, Franco Mancini, Andrea Manconi, Marco Manetti, Giuseppe Mangiamele, Giuseppe Mannino, Gianpiero Mannocchi, Vittoria Manolio, Emanuele Mantrici, Gian Paolo Manzella, Massimo Manzi, Dacia Maraini, Margherita Marchioni, Paolo Marconi, Mario Marenco, Mario Margheriti, Luca Margiotta, Mariastella Margozzi, Flavia Mariani, Maurizio Mariani, Cesare Marilungo, Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli, Davide Marino, Rosario Marrocco, Alessandro Marrone, Vittorio Marrucco, Marianna Martelli, Ruggero Martines, Marco Martini, Carlo Martino, Zoe Martoni, Paolo Martore, Barbara Martusciello, Alessandro Masi, Silvia Masotti, Sandro Massa, Ippolito Massari, Cristiana Massaruti, Giovanna Massorbio, Silvia Massotti, Francesco Mastrofini, Antonia Matarrese, Ornella Matassoli, Maurizio Maturi, Alessandro Mazza, Antonio Mazza, Luca Mazzacurati, Maria Cristina Mazzantini, Antonio Mazzocchi, Andrea Mazzoli, Sergio Mazzoli, Sonia Mazzoli, Maurizio

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Mazzoneschi, Erminia Mazzoni, Elisabetta Melandri, Lilia Mèlissa, Monica Mendozza, Filiberto Menna, Carlo Mercuri, Anna Mercurio, Annalisa Metta, Antonio Michetti, Andrea Miconi, Agostino Milanese, Raffaela Milano, Franco Milito, Enrico Milone, Maria Beatrice Mirri, Riccardo Misesti, Fabrizio Mistretta Gisone, Giovanni Modonesi, Mamoru Mohri, Marco Monaci, Daniela Monitillo, Michela Monte, Riccardo Montenegro, Mario Morcellini, Corrado Moretti, Luigi Moretti, Federica Morgia, Diego Mormorio, Marco Morosini, Nicola Moruzzi, Giorgio Muratore, Fabio Mussi, Massimo My, Simonetta Nardecchia, Gianluca Nava, Valerio Neri, Marco Nese, Silvia Niccolai, Chiara Nicodemi, Daniele Niero, Maria Carla Notarstefano, Maria Pia Nugari, Carlo Odorisio, Kjartan Ă&#x201C;lafsson, Antonio Pietro Ortolan, Federico Paci, Carlo Pacini, Massimiliano Pagano, Rodolfo Pagano, Nicola Pagliara, Piernicola Pagliara, Piero Pagnotta, Rosa Palazzi, Mariella Palazzolo, Tommaso Pallaria, Maria Angela Pallisco, Elisabetta Pallottino, Marco Pallottino, Paolo Pallucco, Simone Palma, John Palmer, Luigi Palmieri, Francesco Palombi, Aldo Palombini, Roberto Palumbo, Riccardo Panci, Raffaele Panella, Tiziana Maria Panizza, Marcello Panni, Franco Panzini, Massimiliano Panzironi, Franco Paolinelli, Margherita Paolini, Roberta Papa, Giovanni Papi, Roberto Pardini, Anna Parisi, Danilo Parisio, Federico Parrella, Vanni Pasca, Michela Pasquarelli, Maria Chiara Passa, Roberto Passarelli, Federico Passi, Barbara Pastorini, Manuela Pattarini, Eliana Pavoncello, Elio Pecora, Francesco Pecoraro, Anna Maria Pedrocchi, Chiara Pellicano, Lucia Peretti, Marco Perugini, Italo Pesce Delfino, Giuseppe Petti, Franco Pettrone, Paolo Peverini, Marco Pietrosante, Luca Pifero, Andrea Pinchera, Enzo Pinci, Cristiano Pinto, Alfredo Pirri, Marco Pistoia, Ugo Pitozzi, Flaviano Pizzardi, Ippolito Pizzetti, Carlo Platone, Vincenzo Poerio, Fabio Polese, Alessandro Polia, Bruna Pollio, Fabrizio Polon, Antonio Pompa, Aristide Pompei, Massimiliano Pontani, Sebastiano Porretta, Paolo Portoghesi, Carlo Prati, Lorenzo Prato, Claudio Presta, Giandomenico Presti, Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, Paolo Procesi, Enrico Puccini, Roberto Pucello, Luca Pugliese, Imma Puzio, Angela Quattrocchi, Andrew Quinn,

Gianni Quinto, Giovanna Ralli, Thomas Green Rankin, Antonio Rava, Luca Reale, Gianfranco Redavid, Alessandra Reggiani, Fabiana Reho, Luca Repola, Isabella Rességuier de Miremont, Alfredo Riccardi, Andrea Riccardi, Francesco Ricci, Sandra Ricci, Liliana Ricciardi, Adriano Rinaldi, Angelo Rinaldi, Giovanni Rinaldi, Stefano Rissone, Tonino Risuleo, Cristina Riva, Giuseppe Rivadossi, Mireille Rivier, Magdi Isabelle Rizk, Claudia Rocchi, Stefano Rolli, Stefano Romano, Valerio Romito, Alessio Rosati, Corrado Rosati, Guido Rosati, Leonardo Rosati, Giandomenico Rosi, Alessia Rossi, Maria Azzurra Rossi, Paola Rossi, Ilaria Rossi Doria, Patrizia Rosso, Francesca Rotondo, Luciano Rubino, Bruno Ruffilli, Pietro Ruffo, Marina Rufini, Michele Ruocco, Claudio Russo, Massimiliano Sagrati, Rita Salci Tedesco, Giuseppe Salerno, Emanuele Salvucci, Federico Sambo, Sverre Samdal, Renata Samperi, Cecilia Santarelli, Sonia Santella, Maurizio Santoro, Umberto Santucci, Nicola Saraceno, Cristiana Sarapo, Susanna Sarmati, Antonella Sartogo, Alessandro Sartor, Antonella Sava, Maurizio Savini, Francesco Saviotti, Francesco Scalzitti, Flavio Scalzo, Claudia Scandale, Giorgio Scarchilli, Donatella Scatena, Mario Scavroni, Susanne Schaller, Paolo Schettini, Amedeo Schiattarella, Paola Schiattarella, Toti Scialoja, Stefano Sciullo, Roberto Scognamillo, Renato Scordamaglia, Grazia Scribano, Domenico Scudero, Stefano Sdringola, Domenico Senese, Marco Seri, Elisa Serra, Giulia Serventi Longhi, Gianfranco Sigismondi, Virginia Simoncelli, Raffaele Simoncini, Sante Simone, Gabriele Simongini, Piero Somogy, Lidia Soprani, Barbara Spanò, Sasà Spasiano, Valerio Sperati, Luigi Spezzaferro, Alfonso Spina, Giovanni Spinicchia, Claudio Spuri, Gianluca Staffa, Alessandra Stasi, Stefania Stecchi, Sirio Stefanelli, Stefano Stefani, Salvatore Stefano, Giancarlo Stella, Andrea Stopponi, Stefano Storelli, Giuseppe Strappa, Danilo Stravato, Roberto Strippoli, Luca Sturni, Francesco Subioli, Cristiano Surina, Alessandro Tagliolini, Giovanna Talocci, Emanuele Tarducci, Donata Tchou, Gianni Terenzi, Luigi Tessitore, Pierluigi Testa, Roberto Testaverde, Gerdis Thiede, Anna Tiberla, Alessandro Tiveron, Benedetto Todaro, Francesco Saverio Todaro, Luna Todaro, Vanessa Todaro,

Benedetto Todini, Stefano Tonazzi, Fabrizio Toppetti, Danilo Torre, Romeo Travesa, Ewa Trebacz, Daniele Trebbi, Flavio Trinca, Danilo Trontelj Bitetti, Gianni Trozzi, Carlos Turon Arroyo, Francesco Ugolini, Paolo Uliana, Paolo Umani Ronchi, Carlo Urbinati, Maddalena Vagnetti, Valentina Valentini, Umberto Valentino, Fabio Valenza, Franca Valeri, Giorgio Vallini, Carlo Valorani, Maddalena Vannetti, Dario Vano, Sofia Varoli Piazza, Umberto Vattani, Emilio Vendittelli, Bruno Venditti, Gianni Ventresca, Cristina Ventura, Andrea Verde, Gian Maria Verdone, Luca Veresani, Fabrizio Vescovo, Barbara Vicentini, Cecilia Vigevano, Cira Viggiano, Eduardo Vittoria, Piero Vivarelli, Luca Volontè, Emanuele Von Normann, Wojciech Widłak, Filippo Zaffini, Franco Zagari, Leo Zampa, Giorgio Zannelli, Gionata Zarantonello, Valentino Zeichen, Lorenzo Zichichi, François Zille, Paolo Zilli, Francesca Zuccari, Alberto Zuliani.

PARTNERS for cultural and scientific activities Abitare il Tempo, Accademia Filarmonica Romana, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, ACEA, ADI, ADVPS, Altroteatro, AMA, ANFIM, APH (Associazione Progettisti dell’Habitat), Associazione Franca Valeri, Bioparco di Roma, Book-a-Bar, Camera dei Deputati, Caritas Diocesiana di Roma, Casa del Cinema, Casa dell’Architettura, CIES, City Vision Mag, Complesso monumentale San Michele a Ripa, Comune di Bracciano, Comune di Ladispoli, Comune di Orvieto, Comune di Roma, Comune di Trevignano, Comunità di Sant’Egidio, Conservatoire international des parcs et jardins et du paysage, CSDVA, Enel Direzione Generale, Facoltà di Architettura “Ludovico Quaroni”, Facoltà di Architettura “Valle Giulia”, Fiera di Modena, Fiera di Vicenza, Fondazione Handicap Dopo di Noi, Fondazione Telethon, Forum P. A., Giardini della Landriana, GNAM Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna e contemporanea, Goethe Institut, Greenpeace, IKEA, International Design Academy di Okinawa, L. I. S. Lavorazione Italiana Sughero, La Repubblica, Magic TV, MIDES, Mifav Interfacce,

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Moacasa, Municipio di Ostia, Musica Experimento, Nastro Azzurro, Ordine degli Architetti di Roma e provincia, Palazzo delle Esposizioni Roma, Palombini Caffè, Peroni ,Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, Promosedia, Prospettive Editore, Provincia di Roma, Regione Calabria, Regione Lazio, Regione Sardegna, Roma Uno TV, Rosa Garden, Rotary Club, Salone del Mobile Milano, Save the Children, Siarco, SIP, Slamp, Soprintendenza Beni Architettonici e Paesaggistici del Lazio, Sviluppo Lazio, Trenta Ore per la Vita, Unicef, Unione Nazionale Mutilati per Servizio, Università Roma Tre, “Sapienza” Università di Roma, Università Tor Vergata, Vallati Innocenti, Vivai Mari, Vivai Torsanlorenzo for stages and placement of students 2AV Studio, 30 Giorni Edizioni, 3D Design, A D & P, A.T. Advanced Tecnologies, Accenture Media Agency, ACEA, AcquaB, ACTL Sportello Stage, Acus, AD Architettura d’Interni, Adobe, Aereonautica Militare, Aeroporto Centocelle, Agape, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, Agm Comunicazione, ALCEA, lco Costruzioni, All In One, Alm Consulting, Altair Multimedia 4, Anafi, Anselmi Associati, Apple, Aquilio, Aracne Editrice, Arch-O, Archin 811, Arco di Druso, Area, Arma dei Carabinieri, Arredamenti Aventino, Arredamento Contemporaneo, Arredare By Fattorini, Ars Media Group, Arseretia Srl, Artelier, ASL 2 Lucca, ATAC, ATR Systems, Autodesk, Automazione Sud, Azimut, Barilla, Beauty Pointm Bigilegno, Binacci Arredamenti, Bluo Studio, Bonamici racing, Borrello Centro Servizi, Bose, Brico Io, Coop Lombardia, Brio Buffetti, C.A.F. Centro Arredamenti Forniture, Cahos Group, Capolei, Cappiello Design, Cassa depositi e prestiti, Catellani & Smith, CCF, Ceam, Cedim Mexico, Centro Musicale, Ciccotti Arredamenti, CLAI Imballaggi Industriali, CNR – IASI, CO.RI.P., Cofathec Servizi, Colori di Sicilia, Commerz Bank, Confcommercio (Gruppo Giovani Imprenditori), Conor, CP Architectural Designers, CSA, CTS, Cuipo, Culti, Curina Advertising, Cybernet, DA DRIADE Ad’, Daliform, Damiana AD, Darko, Derivative, Dat@ System, DianaDigital Gra!ca, Digitrace, Dimark, Dipartimento di Fisica Roma 2, Designer

304

Studio di Architettura, Ditta Barbato, Ditta Giovanni Croppo, Ditta Luzi, Dolmen Italia, Durante editur, Edi.tur, Effedieffe Informatica, Effepi, EFX Studio, Eidos Communication, Einstein, Multimedia Group, Elex, Emme-I, Emporio Cucina, Emporium Naturae, Enea, Enel Sole, Enzimi Zone AttiveErika C.F.P., Errepi Servizi, Escogito, ESI Euro Service Italia, Esse Animazione, Estel, Euroscena, Excite Italia, Exedra, F. T. Figurative & Tecnique, Fada, Faram, Faronet, Fedele 82, Ferrarelle, Ferrovie dello Stato, Fiaba Channel, Florovivaistica del Lazio, Fonderie Multimediali, Formedia Servizi, Fotolandia, Frattali Arredamenti, G.E.A.P., General Projects, Geoprogram, Gesco, Giammetta & Giammetta, Giornalismo e Comunicazione, Global Industry (Pickwick), GraffioGroup, Grande Mela, Grandi Stazioni, Graphicomputer, Gruppo Abele, Gruppo Bolici, Gruppo Buffetti, Gruppo Inò, Gruppo Intersystem, Guida Monaci, H. Lenz A G, Hekos, Horia, Hybrid, IAL Veneto, Iapicca Costruzioni, Ica, Ice Pan, ICM immagine integrata, Idea Congress, Ideal Comunicazioni, ID4, IKONOS, Ikos, Imago Edizioni, Immobidick, Impresa Immobiliare DAFNE, Impronte Digitali, INA Assicurazioni, Inetellecto, Inext Progetti Consulenze e Studi, Info.net, Infocity Network, Infoteam Intec, Integrated Engineering Management, International Design Academy di Okinawa, International, Multimedia University, Interservice, Interwork, Iris Lazio Edizioni, IRPS, ISDI, Isodomus, ISS (Istituto Superiore di Sanità), Istituto Diplomatico, Istituto Mides, Isvema, ITAG, Italix, Jucci Elettroilluminotecnica, Kaleidos, Kalimantan, Kloeber, Knauf, Kuwait Petroleum, L.I.S. Lavorazione Italiana Sughero, La Bottega del Restauro, La Repubblica, Lafarge Roofing, LAV, Lenci Marine, Linea Punto Linea, Lineamobili, Linet, Logos, Lost & Found, M.I.B., M.I.M., Magic TV, Manieri e Ceccarelli Arredamenti, Marino mobili, Matters Multimedia, Maxitalia, MB Progetti, Mediacamere, Medialogics, Mediamed interactive, Medianet, Mel Mobili, Merck Sharp & Dohme, Miki Travel Agency Italia, Ministero dell’Interno, Moacasa, Mobili Pagliardini, Municipio di Ostia, Musei di Villa Torlonia, Musica Experimento, Narvalo Productions, Native, Neoon, Neopharmed, Net.com, Nissan Italia, Noio Design, Nolo Stand, Obiettivo Lavoro Odorisio, Officine Multimedia-

li, Olimpic Garden, Outline Expo, Palombini Caffè, Paoletti Mobili, Peroni, Piermarini Arredamenti, Poligra!co dello Stato, Printer Center, Prodest, Promo Siarco, Promo.it, Proposta 6, Provincia di Roma, Pucciplast, R.ED. Studio, R.G. Designs Gaetani&Ruspoli, Raimondo Editori (Blu Magazine), Regione Calabria, Regione Lazio, Regione Sardegna, Res Fictae, RHS Italia, riccispaini studio di architettura, Rifiniture d’Interni Ludic, Riva Viva, RM buildings LUGANO, Roberto Bistol! Interiors, Roma Uno TV, Ronchetti & Company, Rosa Garden, Rotary Club, S C A Packaging Italia, S.T.A., S.V.A. Group, Saatchi & Saatchi Roma, SAEM, Sail Project, Salone del Mobile, Segni di Segni, Sema Group, Sering, Sfera ENEL, Sheenel Ink., Siarco, Sinfotec, SIP, Slamp, Smit Solo Mobili Italiani, Snips, Società Cooperativa Edile Stradale, Solution Group, Soluzione, Spazio, Spaghetti Valley, Spazio3, Stampa Europea, Stemax Immobiliare, Stuarr, Studio Artea, Studio Bolici, Studio Borin, Studio d’Architettura Franco Bovo, Studio d’Architettura Carlo Martino, Studio d’Architettura Isabella Rességuier de Miremont, Studio d’Architettura Rutelli, Studio Batoni, Studio Daniellom, Studio Elmi, Studio Farina, Studio Guidi & Santori, Studio ID4, Studio Illumina, Studio Luchetti, Studio Ruggero, Studio Staff r.u., Studio Tecnico Claudio Fortin, Studio Tre B, Studio Valle, Superluce, System Service, Targetti Sankey, Taromini Stefano, TeA, Team 83, Team Iwakiri, Techno Copy System, Technokolla, Techsen Consulting, Tecnide, Tecnogest, Teleuniverso, Temporary, The Charming Hotels, The Marketing Machine, The Media Company, The Scenographer, Tiber Costruzioni, Tipogra!a Latina, Tofu Studio, Tonelli, Touch, Trenta Ore per la Vita, Trigoria Design, Unicef, Union Contact, Unione Nazionale Mutilati per Servizio, Università Roma Tre, Università Sapienza, Università Tor Vergata, V. B. Graphics, Vallati Innocenti, Verduci Editore, Vernisco, Victor Linea H & Co, Videoproduzioni Gravina Marco, Village HTC, Villani & Villani, Vitrociset, Vivai Mari, Vivere Naturale, Wama Arredamenti, Web Color, Webitaly, World’s Image, X media, Yoda 2000, Ytong.

QUASAR NUMBERS 25 years of cultural, didactic and research activity 15 Countries involved in cultural projects 15 official certificates 45 sponsorships 450 and more partnerships with companies and institutions 750 and more teachers and special guests 200 and more formative projects created 500 and more courses carried out 3000 and more official qualifications released 8500 and more students educated 6000 and more media advisories 40000 and more participants to events and activities 156000 and more hours of given education

NB: sometimes companies and/or authorities are not written in an extended form, but just their brand or headquarter with which they work.

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CHRONOLOGY OF THE ACTIVITIES

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00 PRODROMES OF THE FOUNDATION OF THE ISTITUTO QUASAR Studio Quasar 1972-1989

Architects: Giuseppe De Luca, Norbert Kamenichy, Carlo Pacini, Benedetto Todaro – Headquarters at via di Porta Pinciana - Rome Mentioned in: Ottagono n. 33, 1974; Interns n. 379, 1988

Pages 76 - 81 Press

FOUNDATION OF THE ISITUTO QUASAR OCTOBER 1987 Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier with Benedetto Todaro

At the headquarters of the Studio Quasar, via di Porta Pinciana, 10 First meeting nucleus of teachers, professionals and students.

01 THE PRACTICE OF DESIGN BETWEEN HANDICRAFT AND INDUSTRY: THE CASE OF THE ROMAN ENVIRONMENT Palazzo Balestra, December 4 1987 – Rome

Editor: Benedetto Todaro A workshop that sees the participation of the most known designers, craftsmen, industrialists and university teachers about the relationship between design, handicraft and industry of the roman environment.

Among the participants: Mauro De Luca, Fabio Lenci, Andrea Mazzoli, Giorgio Muratore, Paolo Pallucco, Giovanna Talocci, Alessandro Tiveron, Benedetto Todaro, Eduardo Vittoria.

Pages 82 - 89 Press

02 CULTURE AND PROJECT OF THE ROMAN ENVIRONMENT Sala della Protomoteca in Campidoglio, March 1 1988 – Rome

Editor: Benedetto Todaro Congress – debate between designers, politicians, administrators and academics organized in three sessions: 1) restoration and renovation of historical buildings; 2) reemergence of interiors and of historical furniture; 3) Vegetation as the main character of the urban scenario.

Participants: Gabriele Alciati (Councilor for the environment), Tancredi Carunchio (Università di Roma), Ludovico Gatto (Councilor for the culture), Francesco Giovannetti (Special Projects Office for the Historical Center of the city of Rome), Leonardo Rosati (responsabile for the artistic office of the Istituto Enciclopedia Italiana), Benedetto Todaro, Bruno Venditti (President UPLA Confartigianato).

Press

03 LESSICO CITTADINO: SOGLIE

Elements of architecture acknowledged through the photographic eye and the poetical vision June 16 – July 16 1988 - Museo di Roma, Palazzo Braschi, Rome Editor: Benedetto Todaro Exposition: original critical work about roman architecture, aimed to analyze the theme of the threshold through the interpretation of poets, photographers, architects, philosophers, art critics, communicators, with pictures, poetical readings, performances, events in Rome, workshops: 1) Photographic Itineraries: from instrument to language, from language to code; 2) Factors that influence the common appreciation of the environmental reality; 3) The poetical expression as a recognition and appropriation of the environment; in collaboration with the Istituto Superiore di Fotografia and with the sponsorship of the Ministero dei Beni Culturali e Ambientali and of the city of Rome.

Participants to the workshop: Ferdinando Adornato, Gabriele Alciati (Councilor for the environment), Dario Bellezza, Mauro De Luca, Biancamaria Frabotta, Ludovico Gatto (Councilor for the culture), Valerio Magrelli, Dacia Maraini, Filiberto Menna, Giorgio Muratore, Sebastiano Porretta, Toti Scialoja, Benedetto Todaro, Valentino Zeichen.

Publication edited by Benedeto Todaro: Lessico Cittadino: elements of architecture recognized through the photographic eye and the poetical vision, Officina Edizioni, 1988, Rome.

Authors: Biancamaria Frabotta, Emilio Garroni, Filiberto Menna, Sebastiano Porretta, Benedetto Todaro and the Poets: Dario Bellezza, Biancamaria Frabotta, Jolanda Insana, Valerio Magrelli, Dacia Maraini, Elio Pecora, Toti Scialoja, Valentino Zeichen

Pages 90 - 101 Press

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04 HISTORICAL ENVIRONMENT AND FUTURE PROJECT: BETWEEN INNOVATION AND CONSERVATION Sala della Protomoteca in Campidoglio, February 1989 – Rome

Editor: Benedetto Todaro Congress organized with the sponsorship of the Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, la Regione Lazio, la Provincia di Roma, l’UPLA Confartigianato and the city of Rome, with the participation of many roman exponents of political, cultural and operative world in four sessions: 1) Continuity and quality in the reuse of historical enclosures through the technological innovation; 2) courtyards, gardens parks: rediscovered qualities and urban intervals; 3) Industrial Design: taste workshop or factory of wishes? Proposals for the Center and South; 4) Projects for the future: problems and orientations of the formation.

Spokesmen: Gabriele Alciati, Rosario Assunto, Pio Baldi, Raniero Benedetto, Giuseppe Cacopardi, Benvenuto Campanini, On.le Renzo Carella, Renato Cecilia, Bernardo Corrado, Teodoro Cutolo, On.le Athos De Luca, Mauro De Luca, Maurizio Diana, On.le Giulio Cesare Gallenzi, Francesco Giovanetti, Bruno Landi, Fabio Lenci, On.le Antonio Mazzocchi, Enrico Milone, Luigi Moretti, Carlo Odorisio, Ippolito Pizzetti, Gianfranco Redavid, Gianfranco Sigismondi, Lidia Soprani, Benedetto Todaro, On.le Benedetto Todini, Maddalena Vagnetti, Bruno Venditti, Fabrizio Vescovo, Eduardo Vittoria, Franco Zagari, Giovanni Battista Zorzoli.

Press

05 ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN. Exposition of the projects for the academic year 1988/1989 in occasion of the inauguration of the second headquarters October 1989 – Headquarters, viale Regina Margherita 192, Rome Editor: Benedetto Todaro Participants (among others): Fabio Lenci, Giovanna Talocci, Carlo Urbinati.

06 ALBERATE A ROMA

Vegetable species in the definition of the urban quality April 20 – May 20 1990 – Museo di Roma – Palazzo Braschi – Rome Editor: Benedetto Todaro with Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier Photographic exposition, workshop and telematic performance – sponsored by the Ministero per I Beni Culturali and from the city of Rome – about the historical reconstruction of boulevards and streets with trees in the Capital, with a show of the 10 main trees present in the Exposition and reportage about their actual conditions in the city, that see the participation of architects, town planners, botanists and naturalists. At the same time with the exposition: the contest “Disegn l’albero in cittá” that took place in the high-schools of Lazio other than Tempo Reale, the first performance of telematic art “Filari futuri” created by the artists Giovanna Colacevich, Agostino Milanese and Giuseppe Salerno, of the cultural association of Calcata. 25,000 presences during the exposition.

Participants (among others): Antonio Federico Cajola (Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma), Umberto Santucci, Lidia Soprani, Federico Malusardi, Mario Margheriti, Monica Mendozza, Marco Nese, Liliana Ricciardi, Magdi Rizk, Stefania Stecchi, Benedetto Todaro, Maddalena Vagnetti, Sofia Varoli Piazza.

Publication: edited by Benedetto Todaro. Alberate a Roma.: The vegetal species in the definition of the urban quality. Lessico Cittadino II, Edizioni Tipografica dell’Orso, 1990, Rome Authors: Rosario Assunto, Antonio Federico Cajola, Massimo de Vico Fallani, Umberto Santucci, Lidia Soprani, Benedetto Todaro.

Pages 102-119 Press

07 PROJECT AND MANUAL SKILLS 1991

March 2 - 10 1991 - Casaidea, Fiera di Roma Editor: Luca Leonori and Benedetto Todaro Exposition of the prototypes designed by the students of the Habitat Design course, coordinated by Benedetto Todaro and created by craftsmen of Rome and Lazio, during the exposition “Progetto e Manualità”, promoted in the occasion of the Fiera Casaidea and made by the collaboration between small producers and young designers. The edition of 1991 sees researches and experiments about the theme of seats, created with different materials (stone, glass, lacquer, plywood, steel, plastic, perspex, textile and polyurethane).

Publication: edited by A. Mazzoli. Progetto e Manualitá, 1991, Rome

Pages 204-206

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08 INSTALLATIONS IN THE SPACE: ENVIRONMENT, COSCIENCE, KNOWLEDGE

Exposition in occasion of the inauguration of the third headquarters June 6 1991 - Headquarters, Viale Regina Margherita 192, Rome

Editor: Benedetto Todaro.

Temporary exposition of art and sculpture by Giovanni Papi, that took place in occasion of the inauguration of the third headquarters of the Istituto Quasar.

Press

09 CARTA DI TERRACINA

Meeting between the main characters about formative plans July 6 – 8 1991 – Terracina (LT) In 1991, at the Istituto Quasar a three-year course of design was active. To the didactic setting of this class was dedicated a research seminary that collected the contributions included in the “Carta di Terracina”, that was set as a referring point for the future cultural line of the Istituto.

Participants: Marinapia Arredi, Alfredo Benedetti, Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier, Franco Bovo, Stefano Bozza, Benvenuto Campanini, Orazio Carpenzano, Lorenzo Dall’Olio, Luca Leonori, Marina Magi, Umberto Magni, Magdi Rizk, Dario Vano, Giorgio Vallini, Benedetto Todaro.

10 PROGETTO E MANUALITA’ 1992

March 21 – 29 – Casaidea, Fiera di Roma Editors: Luca Leonori and Benedetto Todaro Exposition of the prototypes designed by the students of the Habitat Design course, coordinated by Benedetto Todaro and created by craftsmen from Rome and Lazio, during the exposition “Progetto e Manualità”, promoted in occasion of the Fiera Casaidea and made by the collaboration between small producers and young designers.

The1992 edition sees researches and ideas about the theme of creation of a family of objects starting from a stone base adopted by all designers.

Publication: edited by A, Mazzoli. <<<progetto e Manualità, Mides, 1992, Rome.

Pages 207-211

11 THE FUTURE OF DESIGN IN LAZIO BETWEEN EDUCATION AND PRODUCTION April 10 1992 – Headquarters, Rome

Editor: Benedetto Todaro A workshop that sees the participation of experts in education, culture and production; an exchange of ideas and experiences to carry out initiatives for the future of youths and for the requalification of some productive sectors. An exposition of some prototypes already shown in the exposition “Progetto e Manualità” (edition 1992) Participants: Fabio Lenci, Luca Leonori, Guido Rosati, On.le Potito Salatto (Councilor for handicraft, industry and professional education of Lazio), Giovanna Talocci, Carlo Urbinati, Bruno Venditti (President of the UPLA Confartigianato), the owners of the handicraft companies that realized prototypes and the designer students.

12 LANDING IN THE NEW WORLD

October 1994 – Guayaquil (Ecuador), Istituto Quasar, Rome Editor: Benedetto Todaro with Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier.

Didactic opening of cultural Exchange by the realization of a plan of studies ad hoc for Eurodiseño equipped with monothematic lessons and the realization of a course on the site aimed to the teachers of the Centro dell’Ecuador. After a year of lessons at the Istituto Quasar a diploma of international partnership was released to students.

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13 YOUNG ITALIAN DESIGN FOR IKEA

International contest of design – Exposition of selected objects and awarding April 18 – 22 1996 – Salone del Mobile – Palazzo del Senato, Milan

International contest of design sponsored by the cultural association “ABC – Incontri sul Progetto” and aimed to students enrolled to the last year of Design schools. On the thirty-six selected projects on a worldwide level, six were the ones that came out from the Industrial Design workshop coordinated

by Luca Leonori. Special mention for the “culla in betulla” by the student Marco Spazoani.

Jury: Paolo Deganello, Paolo Lomazzi, Ambrogio Rossari and Marcello Ziliani (for ABC) and Lennart Ekmark, Lars Engman, Niels Gammelgaard, Lars Petersson, Alessandro Testa (for IKEA).

Pages 212-213

14 A PROFESSION BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN Readings by Antonio Citterio may 31 1996 – Headquarters, Rome

Editor: Francesco Ghio.

Conference and debate with the students of the famous architect and designer Antonio Citterio. Follows the series of meetings aimed to put students in direct contact with the famous exponents of the national and international professional scenario.

15 FESTIVAL DES JARDINS 1996 – LA TECHNIQUE EST-ELLE POÉTIQUEMENT CORRECTE? International contest of the “Conservatoire de Parcs et Jardins de Paris” 1996 – Chaumont – sur – Loire, France

Editor: Maria Grazia Cianci.

Contest for the design of a garden in the park of the Castel of the Loira (France) that sees as an award a funding for its realization. The Istituto Quasar, the only Italian school that won, creates on the site the garden designed and sponsored by the Conservatoire with the students of the Art and Gardens course and the teachers hosted in the guest house of the castle during the direction and creation of works.

Publication: Jean-Paul Pigeat, Manuel des jardins de Chaumont-sur-Loire, Conservatoire International des Parcs et Jardins et du Paysage, 2004, Chaumont-sur-Loire.

Pages. 120-122

16 JOURNEY THROUGH SPACES : FROM PROJECT TO CREATION July – October 1996 – headquarters, Rome

Editor: Maria Grazia Cianci.

Exposition of images, scale models and prototypes of projects by students, among which there is the winner of the “Festival del Jardins 1996” contest, the finalist of the “Giovane Design per IKEA” contest and the table exposed at Casaidea in a naturalistic expositive setting.

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17 SQUARING THE CIRCLE

Exposition: l’Officina delle Arti Seconda Rassegna dei Nuovi Percorsi dell’Artigianato – March 1-9 1997 – Casaidea, Fiera di Roma Editor: Luca Leonori.

Exposition of projects of the Industrial Design workshop. Prototypes of objects of common use, created by recycling waste material coming from the industrial works of steel casings of air conditioners produced by the Siarco company (Pomezia). The creation of new objects created by waste circles, of various diameters, sees the use of machine tools already present in the industry, to fit in the productive cycle satisfying three conditions: of the company, ecological, and of creative and innovative design.

Publication: l’Officina delle Arti – 2° rassegna dei Nuovi Percorsi dell’Artigianato, Mides, 1997, Rome.

Pages 214-216

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18 ESAEDRO

International contest of design - Second edition 1997 - Fiera Interzoom, Cologne, Germany Contest aimed to University students, Education Facilities and High schools of design in all of Europe.

Among the projects created by the students of the Habitat Design course of the Istituto Quaasar coordinated by Luca Leonori two were awarded: “Flipper” by Roberto Aiello and “Pin” by Andrea Usai. Awarding and exposition of real life prototypes.

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19 FORUM P.A. 97

Eighth Exposition-Congress of services to citizens and to companies May 6 - 10 1997 - Fiera di Roma Editor: Luca Leonori Ambiente Pubblico 97 - First exposition for the design and furnishing of urban areas promoted by the Associazione Sviluppo Economico e Attivitá Produttive della Regione Lazio. Projects and prototypes of urban furnishing and green points realized by students of the Habitat course of the Istituto Quasar coordinated by Luca Leonori and Benedetto Todaro.

Publication: Ambiente Pubblico 97 - First exposition for the design and furnishing of urban areas.

Press 20 LIBERE IMITAZIONI (FREE INITATIONS)

First issue of the collection Quaderni Didattici 1997 - Rome Editor: Orazio Carpenzano Publication that collects the results of some experiences carried out inside the courses of the Istituto Quasar. The aim of the “Quaderni Didattici” collection directed by Benedetto Todaro and that this volume belongs to, is the exchange and confrontation of ideas and methods for the intervention on the built environment and for the education of future designers.

Publication: Carpenzano O., Libere Imitazioni, Istituto Quasar Scuola Superiore di Progettazione - Quaderni didattici - collection directed by Benedetto Todaro, Fratelli Palombi Editori, 1997, Rome.

Pages 162-173

21 VERDEPERROMA 1997 -Rome

Promoters: Benedetto Todaro, Marta Fegiz, Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier Creation of VERDEperROMA: center for the development of urban vegetation, that wants to give areas of low quality but with high potentiality to public users, with the purpose to relieve the public administration from the financial and organizational responsibilities after the eventual adaption.

Ideation of the graphic project for the promotion of the Center.

22 ABITARE IL TEMPO (TO LIVE TIME) International design contest 1997 - Fiera di Verona, Verona

Exposition of Design with the theme “Abitare il tempo”, project selected: carrello Garçon, created by the student Filippo Pellegrini, during the Industrial Design Workshop coordinated by Luca Leonori.

23 COMPASSO D’ORO ADI

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23 COMPASSO D’ ORO ADI

International design contest - XVIII edition 1998 - Milan Founded in 1954, the Compasso d’ Oro ADI Award is the most ancient and respected design award of the world. The first prize of the “Giovane” edition was given to the project “Culla estensibile 0-6” by the student Valeria Murzilli, a design already selected at the IKEA Contest of 1996.

Page 212

24 CULTURAL MANAGEMENT FOR GREECE Course for the Research Center of Teachers and Masters of Thessaloniki (Greece) aimed to teachers of every level of school with the purpose to give to participants techniques and abilities for the development and organization of cultural plans for their students, promoting and spreading local traditions, developing the ecological conscience, introducing the use of internet in schools.

Spokesmen: Benedetto Todaro, Umberto Santucci, Giovanna Lucatello, Antonio De Lorenzo.

Coordination: Eva Benedetti, Dimitris Stefanidis and Elena Policranidu Didactic programs edited by Benedetto Todaro

25 PROBABLE PROJECT, ART-TECHNIQUE-ENVIRONMENT: FUTURE SCENARIOS Inauguration of the fourth headquarters October 10 1998 – Headquarters, via Nizza 152, Rome

Editor: Benedetto Todaro Exposition of projects and prototypes by the students of the Istituto aimed to the reuse of waste from industrial works, conferences, multimedia performance by Antonio De Lorenzo, live music “frammenti dalla fine del tempo” by Enrico Cocco and workshop with Achille Bonito Oliva.

Participants, among others: Lidia De Sanctis, Filippo La Porta, Mario Marenco, Raffaele Pannella, Benedetto Todaro.

26 THE NEW AGE HOUSE

February 13 – 21 1999 – Spazio Casa, Fiera di Vicenza

Editor: Benedetto Todaro First real life prototype of a New Age house: the project of an ideal place for a harmonious living, following standards and models of the Feng Shui thought and of modern scientific acquisitions of western origin (psychoanalytical theories, environmental psychology, bio-architecture, research of non polluting materials).

Project: Alfredo Benedetti, Giovanni D’Ambrosio, Marta Fegiz, Luca Leonori, Alessandra Reggiani, Benedetto Todaro and the students of the Istituto Quasar.

Virtual model and multimedia communication: Antonio De Lorenzo. “New Age” Musics: M° Enrico Cocco.

Pages 126-131

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27 MAGIC OF THE GARDEN: LANDSCAPE AS A THEATRE March 1999 – Casaidea, Spazio Verde, Rome

Project and creation of a poetic garden in the context of the Casaidea exposition, edited by the Art of Gardens course , coordinated by Maria Grazia Cianci. A room turned upside down introduces a magic box that reminds us of the allusive and enchanted representations by E. Luzzati and of the tradition of green theaters.

Publication: Casaidea 1999, 25° Mostra dell’abitare, Istituto Mides, 2003, Rome.

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28 TRANSPARENCIES, REFLECTIONS

April 13 – 18 1999 – Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan | May 28 1999 – Headquarters, Rome

Editor: Luca Leonori Exposition of projects and prototypes of glass furniture designed by students of the Habitat Design course, coordinated by Luca Leonori and Giovanni D’Ambrosi, created by the Tonelli company of Pesaro, presented at the Salone del Mobile di Milano of 1999. The guided imagination of young enthusiastic designers , busy with an out of time subject, ancient and modern, hard and fragile.

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29 ECO-CITY PLANNING FOR THE THIRD MILLENNIUM Readings by Goetz Kemnits July 9 1999 – Headquarters, Rome

A conference aimed to designers and teachers, that took place in occasion of the first Eco Architecture master. Exeptional spokesman Goets Kemnitz, director of the City Planing and Building Development Department of the city of Freiburg, Germany.

30 PROMOSEDIA 1999

Design International contest Ernesto Caiazza – Ideas for the design of a European seat September 11 – 14 1999 – Fiera di Udine First prize to the Break seat, designed by the students Cristiana Cruciani and Marco Zangrillo in the Industrial Design workshop and of the Habitat Design course coordinated by Giovanni D’Ambrosio and Luca Leonori. Project created and commercialized at an international level by the Emme-I company of Udine.

31 THE HARMONIOUS HOUSE

A journey in the house of tomorrow that is already today March 4 – 12 2000 – Casaidea, Fiera di Roma Coordinatino: Benedetto Todaro Real life prototype of the ideal houseof thethird millennium, designed and created by the Istituto Quasar in collaboration with many companies of ecological materials and equipped with a didactic path about the same materials. Simplicity, elegance, discretion, simple and calm pleasures: this is what the Harmonious House communicates.

Didactic path: edited by: Brigitt Becker.

Graphics of the didactic path: Elda Longo, Susanne Schaller.

Project: Birgitt Becker, Alfredo Benedetti, Carolina De Camillis, Carlo Martino, Bruna Pollio.

Multimedia project and home cinema: Andrea Felice.

Photorealistic simulations: Antonio De Lorenzo. Music: M° Enrico Cocco.

Pages 132-136 Press

32 DONATE A CORK

May 24 – 28 2000 – Vitasana, Fiera di Roma Initiative for the reuse of corks in the context of the awareness-raising activities and about the eco-architecture themes, in collaboration with the L.I.S. – Lavorazione Italiana Sughero and with the coordination of the Eco-Designer Brigitt Becker, a teacher at the Istituto Quasar. For many years corks arrived at the Istituto Quasar, collected by students of primary, middle and high schools of Rome and of Lazio and transformed in ecological pencils.

33 ANFIM

January 2001 – Rome A donatoin of project for the website and the image coordinated for the Associazione Nazionale Famiglie Italiane Martiti Caduti per la Libertà della Patria nelle Fosse Ardeatine di Roma. The projects were adopted by the ANFIM and they are still now used. Projects were created by students of the Multimedia Design course, coordinated by Giuseppe Dormio and Veronica Giannini.

Pages 218-219

34 IRON-HIC HORTUS

May 9 – June 8 2001 – Casaidea, Fiera di Roma Editors: Luca Leonori, Benedetto Todaro Exposition of design that had as main character the “iron-hic hortus”; nature and artifact join and give shape to a provocation design that is also a scientific research. provocations, innovative ideas, use, reuse and free reworked versions of objects of our gardens, created by the Siarco company.

Projects: ex students of the Istituto Quasar coordinated by Luca Leonori and Benedetto Todaro.

Pages 192-193

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35 PROMOSEDIA 1999

Design International contest Ernesto Caiazza – Ideas for the design of a European seat September 8 – 11 2001 – Fiera di Udine First prize to the Extendable Seat “One or Two” and special mention of the critique to the Suitcase-Seat Malpensa Chair. The projects were created by students of the Istituto Quasar in the Industrial Design workshop of the Habitat Design course coordinated by Luca Leonori.

36 LAIC TEMPLE FOR PASSAGE RITUALS The funerary house

Coordination: Benedetto Todaro First real life prototype of a funerary house as a place and time of farewell. The project is adaptable to different architectural and urban contexts and it was elaborated by the Habitat Design course of the Istituto Quasar, in the briefing of the known psychothanatologist Francesco Campione.

Project: Alfredo Benedetti, Barbara Beretta, Fabio Di Carlo, Luca Leonori, Alessandra Ligi, Silvia Tuzi.

Coordinated image: Marco Cassiano

Pages 136-139 Press

37 CERACCHI CONTEST

Design contest promoted by the Ceracchi company – Echoes of light –The light in contemporary art 2002 – Rome First prize to the Narciso lamp, conceived and created by the student Nabila Di Pilla in the Industrial Design workshop of the habitat Design course coordinated by Luca Leonori. The lamp is presented as a flower vase, extractable as you wish, that turn on with the simple contact when they are moved in areas of the vase that have the other electric side.

38 STOP PEDOPHILIA

September 24 2002 – Sala del Cenacolo, Camera dei Deputati, Rome Exposition of social advertising works, sponsored by Unicef, created by students of the graphic Design course, that dealt with the burning and sadly current theme of sexual abuse on minors.

Present: On. Maria Burani Procaccini (President of the Commission for both chambers for child care), Orazio Carpenzano, Vania Cirese (Criminal Attorney), On. Simonetta Licastro Scardino, Vittoria Manolio (Telefono Azzurro), On. Erminia Mazzoni, Grazia Scribano (Telefono Azzurro), On. Luca Volontè (Leader of the UDC party at the Camera), On.le Pier Ferdinando Casini, President of the Camera, who complimented the youths for the emotional and communicative efficiency of the exposed images.

Page 220 Press

39 APME ASSOCIATION OF PLASTICS IN EUROPE ASSOPLAST Design international contest – Plastic free body, mind, soul

First Italian prize and third international to the trolley-push scooter Easy Rider, created by Irene Zingarelli in the Industrial Design workshop coordinated

by Luca Leonori: the trolley-push scooter that transports the person instead of the person transporting it.

Model created by the Studio Lenci. prototype created by the Darton Group company of Andrè Choiraqui, Hong Kong

Pages 222-223

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40 MIFAV

Second exposition of interfaces by the Museo dell’immagine fotografiche e delle arti visive of the University of Tor Vergata October 10 – 11 2002 – University of Tor vergata, Rome Event focused on the concept of the “interface”, the real tangle of communication since it’s the place of interaction between author and user.

First prize to the “Kafka Praga” project of the student Sara Pettinella of the Multimedia & Web Design course.

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41 GRAPHIC PROJECTS FOR UNICEF

Cover of the ONU convention about childhood rights 2003 - Rome Creation, commissioned by Unicef, about graphic projects of two brochure covers with the text of the Convention of United Nations about childhood rights, effectively published.

Publication: Unicef, Convention about childhood rights - A step in front on the path of rights, Rome, 2003.

Pages 220-221

42 TRENTA ORE PER LA VITA

Graphic projects given to the Association 2003 - Headquarters Official presentation and donation of graphic projects created by students of the Graphics course for the Association Trenta Ore Per La Vita for the fundraising awareness campaign. The charity finances moral entities that make assistance, prevention and cures for the most serious illnesses, it fights against social unrest, poverty and marginalization.

Pages 226-227

43 CREATIVELY MODIFIED REALITIES

June 23 - July 14 2003 - Sala Fontana of the Complesso Monumentale “San Michele a Ripa Grande”, Rome Editors: Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier and Orazio Carpenzano Exposition-event and meetings with the sponsorship of the Ordine degli Architetti, Pianificatori, Paesaggisti e Conservatori of Rome and province, about the different aspects of contemporary design in all its fields: architecture, design, art, new media, music and dance. Every single ex cell of San Michele was set up following one of the themes dealt by students of various courses; in the central nave are continuous projections with sound in the background. Events that took place during the exposition: Author: Mario Garbuglia, unpublished work “Scenografie degli Oceani”: projection with autographed reproductions for Unicef and for the Trenta Ore Per La Vita Association. Projection of the cult movie “Barbarella”.

Author: Giacomo Costantini: “Arte di strada”: circus performance.

Author: Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, “Mangiare Architettura”: “architectural” food contest consumed at the place.

Author: Lucia Latour with Altroteatro, “Corpi reversibili”: contemporary dance performance.

Author: Antonio De Lorenzo with Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, “Luce”: 3D projection.

Author: Enrico Cocco with MusicaTeatroEnsemble, “Teatro immaginario Suono”.

Open day meeting between “teachers and students”.

Participants (among others): Franca Angelici, Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier, Orazio Carpenzano, Lorella Cuccarini, Mario Garbuglia, Lucia Latour, Mario Monicelli, Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, Amedeo Schiattarella, Benedetto Todaro.

44 UNDERWORLD

Contest of tales and images promoted by the Columbia TriStar Films Italia October 2003 - Rome Second prize to the project “Donna in bianco e nero” by the student Francesco Paniccia of the Graphic Design course, coordinated by Edith Casadei.

Publication: catalog of works that won the contest, Milan, 2005.

Press 45 HOMELESS - A LIVING BOX

International workshop February 3 2004 - Headquarters, Rome

Students of the Habitat Design course, coordinated by Orazio Carpenzano and Luca Leoniri, and the students of the International Academy of Okinawa (Japan) work together to conceive and realize a project for the homeless in all of the world.

Pages 228-237

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46 PROJECTS REALIZED FOR THE ACADEMIA BARILLA 2004 - Headquarters, Rome

Students of the Habitat Design course coordinated by Luca Leonori (with the collaboration of Andrea Borzelli) are involved in a study center for the creation of projects for the Academia Barilla, with the purpose of developing ideas and projects for Pasta Corner and for the Italian restaurant business abroad.

Page 190

47 FESTIVAL DES JARDINS 2004

International contest of the “Conservatoire de Parcs at Jardins de Paris” 2004 - Chaumont-sur-Loire Editor: Maria Grazia Cianci Contest for the design of a garden in the park of the Castle of the Lora (France), that has as an award the financing for the realization of the project on the site. The Istituto Quasar with its Art of Gardens course coordinated be Maria Grazia Cianci, the only Italian school that won, it is hosted in the guest house of the castle during the direction and creation of the works on the designed garden. The steel globe of the Métaphore installation is adopted as new logo of the Conservatoire International des Parcs et Jardins et du Paysage and it’s permanently set up inside the park.

Publication: Jean-Paul Pigeat, Vive le Chaos! Ordre er désordre au jardin, Conservatoire Internacional del Parcs et Jardins et du Paysage, 2004

Pages 123-125 Press

48 HOMELESS - A LIVING BOX: MEETING BETWEEN CITY AND CREATIVITY July 7 2004 - Isola Tiberina, Rome

Editor: Luca Leonori In the context of the “l’Isola del Cinema” event of the roman summer, an exposition of projects and prototypes for nomad living result of the international workshop of the Istituto Quasar and of the International Design Academy of Okinawa, with the sponsorship of Caritas, Comunitá S. Egidio, Trenta Ore Per La Vita, Comune di Roma, Provincia di Roma, Regione Lazio, Ordine degli Architetti, Pianificatori, Paesaggisti e Conservatori di Roma e provincia, Facoltà di Architettura “Valle Giulia” of the Università di Roma “La Sapienza”. The project and related prototype are given to the Director of the Caritas of Rome and to the Director of the Comunità di S. Egidio of Rome by the founder and general director of the School, Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier.

Present: Orazio Carpenzano, Enrico Cocco, Lorenzo Imbesi, Luca Leonori.

Pages 228-237 Press

49 METROPOLITAN LOCATION: REQUALIFICATION OF URBAN AREAS February 2005 - Headquarters, Rome

Projects of the Habitat Design course, coordinated by Andrea Borzelli, Orazio Carpenzano, Luca Leonori and Tommaso Pallaria donated to the city of Rome. Ideas for the transformation of urban places unskilled in meeting places for culture. Everything, with the effect to bring them back to a new interior exterior, inside-outside, up-under relationship. From an empty and dark tube they become more pleasant, useful, safe: in one word, better.

Pages 238-249

50 DESIGN MEETS SENSES AND SUBSTANCE March 2 2005 - Casaidea, Fiera di Roma

In occasion to the edition Casaidea 2005, a design workshop with youths of the Rotary Club International about the use in contemporary design of more and more innovative materials, to discover sensibility in objects of domestic use.

Present: Orazio Carpenzano, Daniela Corrente, Alessandra Di Giacomo, Luca Leonori, Emanuele Mantrici.

51 DOPODINOI

March 2005 - Headquarters, Rome Task by the city of Rome for the creation of graphic proposals for the coordinated image, donated to the town foundation “Handicap: Dopo Di Noi” - Onlus.

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52 GOOD LIVING HOUSE

April 16 - 25 2005 - Fiera di Roma Supervisor: Michela Pasquarelli. Real life prototype of an advanced sustainable house, complete of refinishing materials, implants and furniture, with the purpose to demonstrate the possible combination of modern eco-compatible technologies and an aesthetically elegant and functional environment.

Project: Studio Miraz Project (Architecture and Bio-building Studio), in collaboration with Benedetto Todaro.

53 A GLASS FOR FERRARELLE 2005 – Rome

contest for the design of a glass for Ferrarelle. First prize to the project “Water Fluté”, developed in the Industrial Design workshop of the Habitat Design course, coordinated by Luca Leonori.

54 OSTIA’S ROTARY

2005 – Sala Consiliare “Massimo Di Somma”, Ostia Projects of urban furnishing for the requalification of the rotary of Ostia Bocca del mare, developed in the Industrial Design workshop of the Habitat Design course for the XIII municipio of Rome.

Present: Maurizio Amato (Rosa Garden srl), On. Davide Bordoni (Presidenza e Unità Organizzativa Ambiente e Litorale del Municipio Roma XIII), Orazio Carpenzano.

Pages 243-244 Press

55 RE-GENERATION OF THE DAYLI NEWSPAPER LA REPUBBLICA Meeting-debate about the creative workshop July 11 2005 – Sala del Carroccio in Campidoglio, Rome

Presentation to the public about the graphic re-elaboration of the famous daily newspaper, to give an original stereotype of informative “day life” to the new millennium.

Present: Orazio Carpenzano, On. Giuseppe Mannino (Head of the City Council), Massimo Manzi (Responsible of info-graphics of La Repubblica), On. Maurizio Mariani (Head of the I Budget Committee) Corrado Moretti (Responsible of Desk-Graphics of La Repubblica), Angelo Rinaldi (Art Director of La Repubblica), Benedetto Todaro.

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56 ROMAD+ 5 INTERNATIONAL EXPO DESIGN

3° International Expo Design: Design for Senses – Objects for the Wellness of Senses September 15 – 27 2005 - Città Universitaria, Installation “Il Bruco”, Rome Presentation of projects and motels by the students of the Istituto, in occasion to the third edition of the Romad+, organized with events, expositions, congresses promoted by the University “La Sapienza” of Rome and by the Amministrazione Provinciale of Rome.

Pages 140-141

57 PUBLIC DESIGN: VISUALS

October 3 – 13 2005 – Casa dell’Architettura, Rome Event organized by the Associazione CopyWright, with the supporto of the Assessorato al Turismo and the Commissione al Bilancio of the city of Rome and the sponsorship of the ordine degli Architetti, Pianificatori, Paesaggisti e Conservatori di Roma e provincia, of the Casa dell’Architettura and of ADI center, in collaboration with the Istituto Quasar and other design schools. Exposition of projects about the themes of research, innovation and of the really high technical qualities that characterize the design made in Italy.

Pages 243-244

58 THE ITALIAN DESIGN GOES TO LITHUANIA

Exposition Made in Italy, Made in Lazio, Made in Design – The culture of the product shows up November 10 – 13 2005 – Lithuanian museum of theatre, music and cinema, Vilnius

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Participation to the exposition and organization by two workshops. “The journey of design. from the Mediterranen to the Baltic between creativity and innovation” and “Industrial Design. the immaterial as an added value”.

Present at Vilnius: Luca Leonori, Benedetto Todaro Publication: MADEINITALY MADEINLAZIO MADEINDESIGN. the culture of product shows up, Gaminio Kultura Ekspozicijoje.

Pages ~ 142-143

59 -2 EX-EXPERIMENT EXHIBITION

November 16 2005 - Auditorium Goethe Institut, Rome Multimedia audio-visual performance edited by Musica Experimento and by the istituto Quasar in colaboration with the Ciclo Scandinavo per Artisti e Scienziati. Experimental workshops and collective creations and multimendia works for a digital support, for music and for images.

Present: Gianfranco Baruchello, Jon Ward Bauman, Gabriele Bonolis, Fabio Brasili, Enrico Cocco, Chiara Horn, Ane Lan, Daniele Lombardi, Andrea Manconi, Nicola Moruzzi, Maria Carla Notarstefano, Federico Paci, John Palmer, Marcello Panni, Ugo Pitozzi.

60 ETHIC PROCESS

Thoughts about the conceptual and ethic structure of an artistic procedure Devember 2 2005 – Headquarters, Rome Meeting with the architect Pietro Ruffo, international artist of the Fondazione Cerere about the theme of color theories with a particular refer to the parallelism between art and architecture.

Editor: Emanuele Mantrici

61 PROJECTS FOR NASTRO AZZURRO 2006 - Headquarters, Rome

Editor: Luca Leonori Projects by students of the Habitat Design course coordinated by Luca Leonori, commissioned by Promosaico, of expositors for the beer producer company Nastro Azzurro, with the aim to increase the visibility of the brand pointing on the sinuosity of shapes and on the sobriety of colors and materials. The projects created by students have functionality and originality as a connection line.

62 ROMAD+_INTERNATIONAL EXPO DESIGN

4° International Expo Design: Hybrid May 25 - June 8 2006 - Ex Magazzini Generali, Rome Editor: Orazio Carpenzano in collaboration with Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier.

In occasion of the fourth edition of the Romad+, organized with events, expositions and conventions promoted by the University “La Sapienza” of Rome and by the Amministrazione Provinciale of Rome, set up-event where design and street art interact, contaminating each other through the presence of an anonymous user (street mime/statue) and of a really innovative and creative object (the suitcase-push scooter Easy Rider).

Pages140-141

63 OTTO VIDEO 9ER OTTO POESIE. 8VX8P

Poetry for image, image of a poem June 26 2006 - Sala del Carroccio in Campidoglio, Rome “Poetry for image, image for a poem” wants to be a tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini. Advanced presentation of the “8VX8P Otto video per otto poesie”, a cycle of video installations, created by students of the workshop of the Multimedia Design course, that translates literary works in audiovisual ones.

Present: Orazio Carpenzano, Enrico Cocco, Alessandra D’Elia (narrantor), Lisa El Ghaoui, Teacher of the University of Grenoble (France), Filippo La Porta, Rosario Marrocco, Amedeo Schiattarella, Benedetto Todaro.

Pages 144-149

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64 DESIGN FOR FERRARELLE Design in bubbles 2006 - Headquarters, Rome

Workshop for the creation of design objects for Ferrarelle, with the purpose to set up a scenario that sees the company as a “brand leader” in Italy and in the world.

Project developed in three months in the context of the didactic activity with students of the Habitat Design course coordinated by Luca Leonori.

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65 LES MAINS ROUGES

New interpreters of the Polish musical field: harpsichord and multimedia November 21 2006 - Auditorium Goethe-Institut, Rome Editor: Enrico Cocco.

Works for music and/or images with new interpreters of the polish multimedia field in a harpsichord and multimedia concert. With Goska Isphording (harpsichord) e Katarzyna Głowicka (electronic media).

Present: Daniele Lombardi, Ewa Trebacz, Wojciech Widłak, Jacob ter Veldhuis.

66 CONTAMIN_AZIONI TESTO DIGITALI (TEXT DIGITAL CONTAMIN_ACTIONS) When literature becomes videoart December 20 2006 - Casa del Cinema, Rome

Innauguration of “CONTAMIN_AZIONI TESTODIGITALI”, with “Otto video per otto poesie”, a tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini”, first work of the cycle of videoinstallations that translate literature of all times in audiovisual works. When literature becomes video-art.

Pages 144-149

67 ICELAND/ITALY: CALCULATED MUSIC - Lectures of Kjartan Ólafsson February 5 2007 - Headquarters, Rome

Editor: Enrico Cocco.

First meeting, in collaboration with the Embassy of Iceland in Italy and the Associazione Musica Experimento and in the context of the “Policentro - Arte nella Polis”: lecture-conference and the listening of electronic music with the Finnish composer Kjartan Ólafsson, teacher, academic and expert of compositional systems tied to the information calculation with the CALMUS system, conceived by him for the viewed composition.

68 THE MUSIC OF ROBERT CARL - Readings March 5 2007 - Headquarters, Rome

Editor: M° Enrico Cocco.

Second meeting in collaboration with the Istituto Polacco and the Associazione Musica Experimento, in the context of the “Policentro - Arte nella Polis”: readings and a multimedia concert with the American composer Robert Carl, whose artistic work, wide and eclectic, is characterized by an interest for the instrumental and vocal music for different organs (from orchestra to the use of multimedia digital technologies).

69 MOA CASA 2007

May 5 - 13 2007 - Nuova fiera di Roma Young graduates of the Istituto apply their educational experience offering to visitors living solutions, through extemporaneous projects, in occasion of the spring edition of MOACASA, based on principles of freedom, lightness and creativity.

Present: Danilo Bitetti, Franco Bovo, Fabio Contini, Emanuele Mantrici.

70 GUM ART - Readings of Maurizio Savini May 11 2007 - Headquarters, Rome Lecture-conference of Maurizio Savini, artist that experiments the expressive abilities of an inert and unusual material as chewing-gum, using it as a pigment for his paintings and as a substance for his sculptures.

71 ONE VISUAL FOR

Social campaign for the city: children’city,_global city,_all walking,_adamo vs eva May 23 2007 - Headquarters, Rome Presentation and donation to the Assessorato alle Politiche Sociali of the city of Rome of the social campaign about moral, civic and educational themes, with the purpose to promote a correct social communication and stimulate the civic conscience to act for common good, created by students of the Graphics course, with the sponsorship of the city of Rome.

Presents: Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier, Orazio Carpenzano, Marco Delogu, Rosario Marrocco, Mario Morcellini, Benedetto Todaro.

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72 LA COMMEDIA DIVINA

June 20 2007 - Casa del cinema, Rome

Audiovisual work in two acts, with graphic comment, freely inspired by the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. The areas where Dante goes through are transposed in a metaphysical dimension, recalling the writing through pieces and fragments of video-graphic and audiovisual spatiality. A project created by students of the Graphic Design and Multimedia Design courses coordinated by Rosario Marrocco.

Present (among others): Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier, Orazio Carpenzano, Enrico Cocco, Lorena e Luca Leonori, Rosario Marrocco, Alessandro Masi (Secretary Generalo f the Company Dante Alighieri), Benedetto Todaro.

Pages 150-153 Press

73 BLOODBOX

July 4 2007 - Palazzo Marini, Sala delle Colonne, Rome Coordinator: Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier.

Presentation of the project of an itinerant interactive blood bank van for the awareness about blood donation. A functional space for the collection of blood and a place for communication and information through a complex multimedia system with electronic interface. The first transversal project born by an initiative of Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier in collaboration with Luca Repola (Head of the ADVPS Associazione Donatori Volontari della Polizia di Stato), with the sponsorship of: Presidenza della Camera dei Deputati, Ministero degli Interni, Dipartimento Pubblica Sicurezza, Ministero della Ricerca Scientifica e dell’Università, Presidenza Regione Lazio, Comune di Roma, Assessorato alle Politiche sociali e della salute del Comune di Roma, that involved the Habitat Design course (for the design of the body and of interiors of the car-newspaper library), the graphic Design course for the drawings and the inside and outside littering, and the Multimedia Design course for all the interactive parts of the BloodBox, interior and exterior, for day and night, with the purpose to attract young people and make them aware about blood donation.

Present: On. Ilenia Argentin (Counselor for the Ufficio per l’handicap, la Salute Mentale e la Legge 626 del Comune di Roma), On. Fausto Bertinotti, Orazio Carpenzano, Giovanni De Gennaro, On. Enrico Gasbarra, Luca Leonori, On. Piero Marrazzo, Raffaella Milano, On. Fabio Mussi, Luca Repola, Benedetto Todaro.

Pages 250-257 Press

74 BLOOD NOW

July 4 2007 - Palazzo Marini, Sala delle Colonne, Rome Presentation of the social campaign, promoted by the Istituto Quasar and donated to the ADVPS - Associazione Donatori e Volontari della Polizia di Stato - with the purpose to spread it among youths to make them aware about blood donation. The aim of the project is to give hints able to directly penetrate in the conscience of youths, educating them towards that action of altruism and love. The ADVPS used it to print calendars, posters, portable calendars, key chains, and other gadgets for youths.

Pages 250-257 Press

75 BLOODBOX: NOTTE BIANCA

BloodBox: an interactive blood bank van for donation September 8 2007 - Laghetto dell’Eur, Rome Coordination: Eva Benedetti Creation and exposition of the blood bank van BloodBox and projection inside of it of the videos about the theme of blood donation, in occasion of the fifth edition of the Notte Bianca of Rome. The project was another occasion to experiment the interdisciplinarity of the education in the field.

Pages 250-257

76 GLOBAL JUNIOR CHALLENGE

International contest – IV edition – Final event – Expositional space of finalist projects October 3 – 4 2007 – IT IS Galileo Galilei, Rome Contest promoted by the city of Rome under the Alto Patronato of the President of the Republic, conceived and organized by the Fondazione Mondo Digitale, that awards the innovative use of modern technologies in the fields of education, formation solidarity and international cooperation. The videos “8VX8P Otto video per otto poesie”, were selected for the final, created by students of the Multimedia Design course.

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77 IL DESIGN FA BUON SANGE (DESIGN MAKES GOOD BLOOD) Video projection about the project and donation October 3 – 13 2007 – Headquarters, Rome

Coordination: Eva Benedetti Exposition of the full-scale model of the BloodBox project in the ADI-Scuole Aperte “Scoprire il Design” event, with projections of films about the project and donation. To the guest was offered a good red wine. Pages 250-257

78 BLOOD RUNNER: RUN TO… DONATE BLOOD VI edition of BloodRunner October 14 2007 – Villa Borghese, Rome

Editor: Luca Repola, for ADVPS and Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier for Istituto Quasar During the charity marathon: a run for blood, but also for life. From an initiative of the ADVPS, an exposition of the full-scale model of the BloodBox and projection, in its inside, of films about the blood donation theme.

Pages 250-257

79 HORST LOHSE POET OF SOUND IN ROME Readings by Horst Lohse November 5 2007 – Headquarters, Rome

Editor: M° Enrico Cocco Third meeting, in collaboration with the Embassy of Iceland in Italy and the Associazione Musica Experimento and in the context of the “Policentro – Arte nella Polis”: reading and listening of electronic-instrumental music with the poet of sound and of the sound image Horst Lohse, composer who set at the center of his musical research the relationship between word, sound and the contemporary world made of real or imaginary images.

80 BASE 2 – BIENNALE OF ART OF EUROPEAN STUDENTS

Second edition – Sign & Sesign: For a eco-responsible art from November 15 to November 22 2007 – Complesso Monumentale di San Michele a Ripa, Rome First stage of an international itinerant exposition of works created by European students of design and architecture about the sustainability and technological improvement to reduce impacts on the environment. In the exposition, for the Visual Design category, the video by students of the Istituto Quasar “Quando il tempo si spezza”.

81 BLOODBOX: WHEN BLOOD MAKES GOOD WINE… December 6 aand 7 2007 – Piazza del Viminale, Rome

Editor: Eva Benedetti, Luca Repola First stage of a journey through Italy of the full-scale model of the BloodBox Project. Two days to promote blood donation: fundraising for the creation of the interactive car-newspaper library BloodBox blood donation with a wine free gift to donators.

Guests of an initiative of the ADVPS. Pages 250-257

82 GLI STAMPELLATI

March 18 2008 – Linea Punto Linea, Rome Editor: Luca leonori Exposition-workshop about innovative projects of Industrial Design with a tight connected theme to daily life, to make to understand how design is born by the most simple necessities of people: design of a hanger. Projects realized, prototyped and set up by students of the Industrial Design Workshop coordinated by Luca Leonori ( with the collaboration of Paola Schiattarella).

83 BLOODBOX: BLOOD FLOWS BETWEEN ART AND DESIGN March 19 2008 – Teatro Comunale “Carlo Gesualdo”, Avellino

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Theater show and contemporary art bid: charity initiative of the ADVPS – Associazione Donatori e Volontari della Polizia di Stato. Art and design join with solidarity, for a fundraising event for the realization of the BloodBox project.

Present: Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier, the Mayor, il President of the Province, il Prefect and the Commissioner of Avellino, the Director of the Azienda Ospedaliera Moscati and the General Director of the ASLAV2.

Participants: Gaetano Amato, Gennaro Calabrese, Rosaria de Cicco, Salvatore Gisonna, Luca Pugliese, Sasà Spasiano, il Trio La Ricotta, UmbertoV alentino.

Pages 250-257

84 THE NEW GAME OF THE GOOSE

Graphic project for non-profit associations of orphans April 2008 – Headquarters, Rome Review of the classic Game of the Goose inspired from the “Giocare con l’Arte” method by Bruno Munari by young students of the graphic Design course, project dedicated to less fortuned kids.

85 TECHNOLOGY OF SENSES

Sensual use of wood in the work by Rivadossi Readings by Giuseppe Rivadossi May 19 2008 – Headquarters, Rome Meeting with the sculptor/designer Giuseppe Rivadossi. Analysis about the functionality and about aesthetic of wood of a contemporary and ancient taste, illustrated by words of an artist who, with this material, has always made a “satanic deal”. In collaboration with the Galleria AEDES of Cassino.

86 WE ARE ANIMALS

June 21 2008 – Sala Consiliare del Comune di Trevignano Romano (RM) presentation of the social campaign realized with the sponsorship of the LAV – Lega anti vivisezione . Sede territorial provincial di Roma, in collaboration with the city of Trevignano Romano and the Associazione Animalista Franca Valeri about different themes: environment – ANNIENTAMBIENTE? NO GRAZIE; the extinction of some species at risk – MAI ESTINTI PER SEMPRE; the abandon of domestic animals – ABBANDONO – NATI PER STRADA (given to the Mayor of Trevignano Romano and to Franca Valeri).

Present: Veronica Innominati (Responsible for stray animals LAV Roma), Massimo Luciani (Mayor of Trevignano Romano), Franca Valeri (Honorary President and Founder of the animalist association and Testimonial of the Campaign ‘Siamo Animali’), Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier.

Pages 258-259 Press

87 SHOPPER FOR BOOKABAR

November 2008 – Bookabar, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome Projects of creative shoppers. graphic elaborations and innovative packaging created by students of Habitat Design and Visual Communication courses and commercialized at the Bookàbar of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni of Rome and at the AD design showroom.

88 MATERIAMORFOSI – THE METAMORPHOSIS OF MATERIA Readings by Margherita Marchioni May 21 2009 – Headquarters, Rome

Editor: Emanuele Mantrici The creative evolution of material: reading-conference in the context of the theme of “Tecnologia dei Sensi” by the young roman artist Margherita Marchioni, interpreter of aware and bio-ethic design, by the reuse of waste materials.

89 ART ON TAGE AWARD PARTY

Art and photography contest . I edition May 28 2009 – Faenas Cafè, Rome Ending party of the contest – organized by the D-Mood and promoted by the cultural and artistic association “Pegaso” in collaboration with the Istituto Quasar and SalitinAria (music, show and culture webzine) that joined the world of photography, of painting and theatre. During the event, realized at the same time with the theatre show “Vecchi tempi”, installation of a collective exposition.

90 QUASAR CREATIVITY TOUR 2009 – 1ST STAGE First stage of the itinerary exposition 2009 of the Istituto Quasar: expo of design, video and music, in the context of the ending event of the season for The H-Independent Fashion Show, creative network that involves rising stylists, designers, musicians and artists. There were exposed projects realized for: ADVPS Associazione Donatori Volontari Personale Polizia di Stato, Barilla, Bialetti, ENPA-Ente Nazionale Protezione Animali, LAV-Lega Antivivisezione, Musei di Villa Torlonia e Palombini.

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91 BOTTICELLE ROMANE: A CRUELTY FOR HORSES June 16 2009 – Restaurant “Il Margutta”, Rome

Press Conference to illustrate the campaign promoted by: ENPA – Ente Nazionale Protezione Animali, LAV – Lega anti vivisezione Roma and Istituto Quasar, about the theme of the “roman carriages”, a cruel tradition (by now out of date), that doesn’t reflect the real image of Rome, and presentation of the new press subject and flyer aimed to tourists created by the Istituto Quasar and adopted by the LAV on an international level.

Present: Bruno Ceravolo (Province responsible LAV Roma), Margherita D’Amico, Luca Leonori, Claudio Locuratolo (President ENPA Roma), Claudia Rocchi (National President ENPA).

92 MEDITATION AND PHOTOGRAPHY June 18 2009 – Headquarters, Rome

Presentation of the Book by Diego Mormorio, essayist and historian of photography. The eye is at the center of man: the author starts from here,, to make people think about the possible and stimulating relationship between meditation and photography practice.

Present: Riccardo De Antonis, Marco Cassiano, Diego Mormorio.

93 – 7.7.7. COFFEE SHOCK – MIXTURE OF DESIGN

Quasar Creativity Tour 2009 – 2° Stage July 7 2009 – galleria d’Architettura “Come se”, Rome Editor: Luca Leonori In occasion of the event for the end of the academic year, the second stage of the itinerant exposition 2009 of the Istituto Quasar, with the presence of Niklas Jacob: expo, video, music and buffet with coffee and its accessories as main characters, reviewed and re-proposed in all the possible declinations allowed to design the following two themes: Espresso Coffee and Moka. In partnership with Palombini.

Press

94 – 10 YEARS OF 3D

Quasar Creativity Tour 2009 – 3° stage September 23 2009 – B>Gallery, Rome Third stage of the itinerant exposition 2009 of the Istituto Quasar: Virtual Architecture and Hyper-graphics, 10 years of 3D celebrated with an interactive exposition in Rome. The path and evolution of multimedia techniques until the amazing results of our days.

Press

95 THE ISTITUTO QUASAR LEAVES FOR JAPAN… ON A TROLLEY!

Exposition of Image: Zig-Zag, Tradition and Innovation: Italy that runs towards the future September 24 – October 17 2009 – Museum of Science and Innovation, Tokyo (Japan) Inter-regional project for the valorization of technological excellences of the mobility, motors and sub-contracting industry in Japan, organized in two phases: set up of the Exposition of Image; organization of a thematic seminary of presentation of territorial business of analysis for the research and development activities in the focus fields of the project.

Promoters: Regioni Lazio, Emilia Romagna, Lombardia, Piemonte, Puglia e ICE. Implementing bodies: Sviluppo Lazio Spa e ICE. Collaborators: the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI) and theAssociazione Nazionale Filiera Industria Automobilistica (ANFIA). Easy Rider, the first “trolleypush scooter” already winner of the APME ASSOPLAST contest (London, 2002), participates at the exposition that presents the excellence of the “Made in Italy” in various fields of the sustainable mobility.

Present: Federico Balmas (Director of the ICE Tokyo), Gian Piero Jacobelli, Mamoru Mohri (Executive Director of the Museum), Daniele Peschiaroli, S.E. Vincenzo Petrone (Ambassador of Italy in Tokyo), S. A. imperial pricess Takemado, Luna Todaro, Umberto Vattani (President of the ICE).

Pages 222-223

96 EDUCATION TO EDUCATORS

September 28 – 30 2009 – Headquarters, Rome Editor: Silvia Benedetti de Cousandier Full immersion three days course held by Umberto Santucci, an expert in coaching, problem solving, mental maps, visible management and creativity for the update and awareness of teachers of the Istituto Quasar, with the issue of a UNI EN ISO–9001:2000 certification.

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97 THE IMAGE OF MUSEI DI VILLA TORLONIA

October 27 – November 1st 2009 – Casina delle Civette, Villa Torlonia, Rome Fourth stage of the itinerant exposition of the Istituto Quasar: an exposition that retraces the work and the careful analysis of students of the Graphic and Visual Communication course, called to propose new graphic solutions to renovate the visual identity of the Musei di Villa Torlonia. An event promoted and realized by the Istituto Quasar thanks to: Comune di Roma, Musei in Comune, Musei di Villa Torlonia e Casina delle Civette.

In collaboration with: Banche tesoriere del Comune di Roma (BNL, Unicredit Banca di Roma, Monte dei Paschi di Siena), Lottomatica, Vodafone.

Museum Services: Zètema.

Pages 261-269

98 FROM VIRTUAL REALITY TO WORLD 2.0

Collabor-Active Ideas. The horizons of new professions from virtual reality to world 2.0 February 20 2010 – SNOB, Arezzo Meeting about the role of the designer in a world radically twisted in the principles of communication, in the organization of work and in the techniques of visualization. An interesting frame on the new professional figures and trends for a re-design of work.

99 GARDENS OF SWEDEN. WHERE THE GAME OF NATURE CREATES FUTURE. Exposition about the Urban Garden in Sweden June 15 – July 15 2010- Casina di Raffaello – Villa Borghese, Rome

Editor: Sonia Santella In the context of the project “Sweden in its natural heritage, suggestions for a social and sustainable equilibrium” are two parallel expositions. “Gardens of Sweden. Where the game of nature creates future” and the exposition “IKEA of Sweden. Where the respect of nature creates future”.

A project promoted by: Comune di Roma; Embassy of Sweden; Visit Sweden; IKEA; Fondo Ambiente Italia – Roma; Associazione Italiana di Architettura del Paesaggio.

With the sponsorship of: Department of Cultural and Communication Policies of the city of Rome and of the Delegation of Italy in the European Commission.

In collaboration with Biblioteche di Roma and Zètema Progetto Cultura.

Inside the exposition “Gardens of Sweden. Where the game of nature creates future”, an exposition of scale models of projects of gardens created by students of the Habitat Design course, with the purpose to represent the “virtuous colonization” of territory that developed in Sweden from the beginning of the XX Century.

Present at the inauguration: S.E. Anders Bjurner (Ambassador of Sweden in Italy), Luca Leonori, Sonia Santella, Jens Markus Lindhe.

100 CLIMATE CHANGE

Graphic project for Greenpeace July 2 2010 – Headquarters, Rome Asked by one of the most important environmentalist association of the world, the Istituto Quasar published an internal contest between students of the Graphics and Visual Communication course, for the design of a communication campaign about the climate change. Presentation of works and proclamation of the winners.

Present: Laura Ciccardini and Andrea Pinchera of the Greenpeace Association.

Page 260

101 – 7.7.7. EXHIBITION EXPERIENCE Quasar goes to school July 7 2010 – Liceo Mamiani, Rome

Editors: Luca Leonori, Luna Todaro Exposition of works by students of the Habitat Design, Graphics and Visual Communication, Web & Interaction course, in occasion of the event for the end of the academic year, of the Istituto Quasar. Lights, projections, innovative interactive games in the original “fluctuating” set up, that animates the historical Liceo Mamiani of Rome with colors and kinds of analog-digital entertainment.

Installation design: students of the Furnishing course, coordinated by Franco Bovo.

Multimedia projections and interactive games: students of the Web & Interaction course, coordinated by Emanuele Tarducci.

Pages 270-271

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102 OPEN SCHOOLS 2010

The exposition “Free your creativity – Quasar Orientates” September 21 – 30 2010 – Headquarters, Rome In the context of the second edition of the event promoted by the ADI Lazio, that wants to create a web between Design Institutes, Academies and Faculties of Lazio, an exposition of projects created by students during the course of the 2009/2010 academic year. With the participation, as a spokesman, by Luca Leonori at the congress “Production, research, education”, that took place at the headquarters of the Provincia di Roma – Palazzo Valentini – Sala Di Liegro – Wednesday Septemper 23 2010.

103 PROJECTS OF COOKIES CREATED FOR BARILLA October 26 2010 – Headquarters, Rome

Presentation of projects by students of the Habitat Design course, coordinated by Stefano Ceppi and Luca Leonori in the Food Design workshop realized for Barilla, that decided to use again the creativity marked “Istituto Quasar” for the ideation of new cookies. Students followed the entire design procedure, from the beginning concept until the final creation.

104 ISTITUTO QUASAR AND CITY VISION MAGAZINE January 2001 . Rome

City Vision Magazine is the first free magazine entirely focused on contemporary architecture and conceived by the City Vision studio. The magazine put in relation architecture with parallel disciplines such as music, cinema, philosophy, photography. The collaboration between the Istituto Quasar and City Vision Magazine fits in the opening toward multidisciplinary and plurality of interests and of artistic shows, by cultural events, international contests and contributions on the magazine.

105 YOUR IQ

Awarding ceremony January 26 2011 – headquarters, Rome Internal contest of ideas aimed to the ideation of IQ, the new mascot of the School, vital and ironical spokesperson of the Istituto Quasar.

Other than the winning project, a critic award was also set by the jury.

Jury: Antonio Menconi, Marcello Caresta, Cecilia Anselmi, Isabella Rességuier, Andrea Verde, Luca Leonori, Francesco de Lorenzo, Eva Benedetti, Luna Todaro.

106 QOS QUASAR OUTER SPACE

Parametric.architecture: to pass from the solipsistic parametric modeling to the “parametric being” Readings by Stefano Converso January 20 2011 – Headquarters, Rome Editors: Carlo Prati, Luna Todaro An event that inaugurates the first edition of the cycle of QOS cultural events, with the main characters of the artistic and contemporary frame.

Readings byf Stefano Converso, architect and web community manager, about the evolution of design and production methods.

Publication: Edited by Carlo Prati, QOS 2011 Quasar Outer Space Oltre Spazio Quasar - the space station files, Palombi Editori, 2011, Rome.

Pages 156-159

107 ADI DESIGN INDEX

Projects by students of the Istituto Quasar among the excellences of Italian design 2010 – Rome Projects created for Palombini by students of the Istituto Quasar were selected by the Osservatorio Territoriale ADI Lazio for the publication of ADI Design Index, the collection of the most qualified design works of Lazio region.

Publication: ADI Associazione per il Disegno Industriale, Editrice Compositori, Milan-Bologna, 2010.

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108 LEGAMBIENTE CHOOSES THE ISTITUTO QUASAR February 2011 – Legambiente Headquarters, Rome

Legambiente chooses the visual by Franco Mancini, student of the Graphics and Visual Communication course for the campaign “Find again your love – Legambiente for renovable: small gesture of love for the planet”, for removable energies and against energy waste.

109 QOS QUASAR OUTER SPACE

Video.art.body performer: between ancient tribality and cyborg imaginary.

Readings by Francesca Fini February 25 2011 – Headquarters, Rome Editor: Carlo Prati, Luna Todato Second appointment of the first edition of the cycle of the QOS cultural events, with the main characters of the artistic and contemporary frame. readings by Francesca Fini, video-artist, live media & body performer, about the contamination between performance art, video making and interaction design.

Publication: edited by Carlo Prati, QOS 2011 Quasar Outer Space, Oltre Spazio Quasar - the space station files, Palombi Editori, 2011, Roma.

Pages 156-159 Press

110 QOS QUASAR OUTER SPACE

Metropolis.digital.art, between painting and photography: the new possibilities to interpret and describe the world Readings by Giacomo Costa March 24 2011 – Headquarters, Rome Editor: Carlo Prati, luna Todaro Third appointment of the first edition of the cycle of the QOS cultural events, with the main characters of the artistic and contemporary frame.

Redings by the artist Giacomo Costa about photography and about new possibilities to interpret and describe the world.

Publication: edited by Carlo Prati, QOS 2011 Quasar Outer Space, Oltre Spazio Quasar - the space station files, Palombi Editori, 2011, Roma.

Pages 156-159 Press

111 QOS QUASAR OUTER SPACE

Net.art.media.activism, optic and tactile in the web: analysis of the perceptive modalities of contemporary.

Readings by Vito Campanettli April 21 2011 – Headquarters, Rome Editor: Carlo Prati, Luna Todaro Fourth appointment of the first edition of the cycle of the QOS cultural events, with the main characters of the artistic and contemporary frame. readings by Vito campanile, theorist of new media, about the tension between optical and tactile perception, therefore the fil rouge of the main artistic eras.

Publication: edited by Carlo Prati, QOS 2011 Quasar Outer Space, Oltre Spazio Quasar - the space station files, Palombi Editori, 2011, Roma.

Pages 156-159 Press

112 VIENNART

Graphics contest May 4 2011 – MACRO, Rome Live artistic and musical performance in occasion of Awarding the “Viennart” contest – the creative contest to invent the map of Vienna’s subway in a personal and artistic way – promoted by CTS – Centro Turistico e Giovanile, The Trip Magazine, Wientourismus and in partnership with the Istituto Quasar, #yniki.com, Bernabei, Roma Capitale, Museo MACRO. Two students of the Graphics and Visual Communication were awarded, coordinated by Gianmarco Longano: Andrea D’Auria and Claudia Leonori

113 ROMA – THE ROAD TO CONTEMPORARY ART 4th edition of the Fiera d’arte contemporanea May 6 – 8 2011 – MACRO Testaccio, Rome

Participation as partner of the online magazine art a part of cult(ure) art the fourth edition of “ROMA – The Road to Contemporary Art”, the fair that sets Rome at the center of the international artistic world making it to be the fulcrum of an extraordinary cultural ferment.

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114 QOS QUASAR OUTER SPACE

Street.art – lateral thought and disorder as an alternative system to order readings by Hogre May 19 2011 – Headquarters, Rome Editor: Carlo Prati, Luna Todaro Fifth appointment of the first edition of the cycle of the QOS cultural events, with the main characters of the artistic and contemporary frame.

Readings of the street artist Hogre about his works and about what inspires him most: the lateral thought and disorder, during the reading flash mob interventions and non conventional communication.

Publication: edited by Carlo Prati, QOS 2011 Quasar Outer Space, Oltre Spazio Quasar - the space station files, Palombi Editori, 2011, Roma.

Pages 156-159 Press

115 QOS QUASAR OUTER SPACE

Motion.praphics.comics.art – animations from Flash to After Flash. Evolution and experimentation: from comics, from web, to television Readings by Marco Perugini June 14 2011 – headquarters, Rome Editor: Carlo Prati, Luna Todaro Sixth appointment of the first edition of the cycle of the QOS cultural events, with the main characters of the artistic and contemporary frame.

Readings by the experimental artist Marco Perugini about the digital metamorphosis of the Roman underground comics.

Publication: edited by Carlo Prati, QOS 2011 Quasar Outer Space, Oltre Spazio Quasar - the space station files, Palombi Editori, 2011, Roma.

Pages 156-159 RS

116 – 7.7.7. EXHIBITION EXPERIENCE 2011

July 7 2011 – Auditorium Parco della Musica, Rome Editor: Luca Leonori, Luna Todaro Exposition of works by students, in occasion of the event for the end of the academic year of the Istituto Quasar. For the occasion, the “Spazion Risonanze” of the Auditorium is transformed by an innovative show of lights, landscape digital murals, multi-projective video walls, interactive games, digital buffet with all the works by students of different departments, live music: the concept helped the use of the most advanced video mapping technologies.

Design of digital installations: Emanuele Tarducci and Dario Criacci Production of digital contents: Andrea Baglieri and Emanuel Di Tanna Pages 156-159 Press

117 ONE DAY EXPO DESIGN: NEW TALENTS – PRODUCTS AND PROJECTS Alumni at the Micca Club December 11 2011 – Micca Club, Rome

Editor: Luca Leonori, Luna Todaro Micca Club, leader in entertainment and the Istituto Quasar, leader in education, together for an event/expo of big interest up to date. In exposition are the design talents educated during the past years by the Istituto Quasar.

Participants: Daniele Barbiero, Domenico Calabrese, Valerio Calamari, Devil D’Angelo, Designtrasparente (Emiliano Brinci), DiciannoveDieciDesign (Flavio Scalzo), DolceQ (Massimiliano Panzironi), Armando Ficini, Grado Sei (Chiara Pellicano, Edoardo Giammarioli, Fabrizio Mistretta Gisone, Renzo Carriero, Stefano Romano), Simona Sacchi, Stefano Sciullo.

Pages 154-155 Press

118 ROME CAMERA CLUB

Photographic exposition December 15 2011 – January 28 2012 – Headquarters, Rome Editor: Riccardo De Antonis A tribute to the master Stieglitz and to the historical “New York Camera Club” with the exposition of the best photographic works, created by students chosen for their originality, qualitative level and creativity.

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119 SENSE OF SIGN

Graphics contest December 2011 – Rome First prize to the course organized by “art a part of cult(ure)”: the graphic image “Pittogramma” by the student Szymon Kosieradzki of the Graphics and Visual Communication course, coordinated by Gianmarco Longano, will represent the magazine for all the 2012 about promo material and merchandising in production.

Jury: Paolo Di Pasquale, Emmanuele Pilia, Giampaola Marongiu, the readers of art a part of cult(ure).

120 QOS QUASAR OUTER SPACE

Interactive.digital.graphic readings by Andrew Quinn February 27 2012 – Headquarters, Rome Editor: Carlo Prati, Luna Todaro First appointment of the second edition of the cycle of the QOS cultural events, with the main characters of the artistic and contemporary frame. readings by Andrew Quinn, an Australian digital artist who collaborated to the realization of the movie Matrix, about the complex world of design and immersive universes and scenic design.

Pages 156-159 Press

121 TALENTS OF THE ISTITUTO QUASAR FOR GNAM

Designed and Kinetic Art. From Munati to Biasi, to Colombo and…

March 23 – May 27 2012 – Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome Editor of the exposition: Giovanni Granzotto and Mariastella Margozzi, with the collaboration of Paolo Martone Design of the architectural installation and of the coordinated graphic image of the exposition about designed and kinetic art created by students of the Habitat Design course coordinated by Luca Leonori, Isabella Rességuier de Miremont and Benedetto Todaro and of the Graphics and Visual Communication course coordinated by Gianmarco Loncano and Anna Mercurio, that took place at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna with the sponsorship of the Ministero per I Beni e le Attività Culturali. Students of the Istituto participated in all the phases of the design: from the survey until the final installation and assembling.

Publication: Granzotto G., Margozzi M. (2012) (edited by), Arte programmata e cinetica. Da Murari a Biasi a Colombo e..., Il Cigno GG Edizioni, 2012, Roma.

Pages 272-274 Press

122 QOS QUASAR OUTER SPACE

Sight.architecture.design Readings by Davide Crippa March 30 2012 – Libreria Assaggi, Rome Editor: Carlo Prati, Luna Todaro Second appointment of the new edition of the cycle of the QOS cultural events, with the main characters of the artistic and contemporary frame.

Readings by Davide Crippa, of the Ghigos Ideas studio, about Serendipity: a new way of thinking and seeing the world, getting in contact from another point of view.

Pages 156-159 Press

123 CONTEMPORARY INNER DECORATION

3rd Forum di Architettura Italia – Cina April 18 2012 – Sala del Carroccio in Campidoglio, Rome Participation to the meeting of the 3rd Forum di Architettura Italia - Cina dedicated to the inner decoration, sponsored by the Ordine degli Architetti, Pianificatori, Paesaggisti e Conservatori di Roma e provincia and by the city of Rome and organized in collaboration with the designer Devil C’Angelo – graduated at the Istituto Quasar. The event represents an important occasion of cultural and disciplinar exchange between Chinese and Italian professionals to talk about the possible future for the Interior Architecture.

Moderator: Benedetto Todaro Present: Giuseppe Bartolucci (Secretary – General of the TWB Sistema Italia), Liao Bowen, Stefano Ceppi, Roberto Diacetti (C.E.O. and General Director of Risorse per Roma Spa), Silvia Giachini, Zhang Hua Feng, Giancarlo Lanna (Vice President of the Associazione Italia - Cina), Luca Leonori, Li Qi, Rosella Sensi (Assessor for Communication and Citizens Rights), Zhao Xiao Ying, Miss Zhang.

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124 VISUAL PERCEPTION BETWEEN ART AND SCIENCE

Readings by Mariastella margozzi and Francesco Ferretti April 26 2012 – Libreria Assaggi, Rome Readings with the participation of the teacher in the philosophy of language, Francesco Ferretti and Mariastella margozzi, editor of the exposition that took place at the Galeria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna about Designed and Kinetic Art, at which the Istituto Quasar took care of the installations and the coordinated graphic image.

Pages 272-274

125 GARDENS OF JULY 2012

graphic project for the summer festival of the Accademia Filarmonica di Roma May 2012 – Headquarters, Rome Asked by the Accademia Filarmonica di Roma, the Istituto Quasar publishes an internal contest between the students of the Graphics and Visual Communication course, coordinated by Gianmarco Longano and Anna Mercurui for the design of the coordinated image of the summer musical season 2012 of the most ancient concert institution of the Capital. the winners of the contest are Giorgio Gianni, ottavia tracagni and Filippo Umena.

Present: Roberta Capotondi, Sandro Cappelletto (Artistic Director of the Accademia Filarmonica di Roma)

126 DESIGNED AND KINETIC ART. “BEHIND THE SCENES” To think, organize and set up an exposition May 15 2012 – GNAM, Rome

Conference organized by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Roma, to tell about the experience that involved teachers and students of the Istituto Quasar in the communication set up and design of the “Designed and Kinetic Art” exposition.

Pages 272-274 Press

127 QOS QUASAR OUTER SPACE

Stencil.poster.art Readings by Lucamaleonte May 21 2012 – Headquarters, Rome Editor: Carlo Prati, Luna Todaro Third appointment of the new edition of the cycle of the QOS cultural events, with the main characters of the artistic and contemporary frame. readings by Lucamaleonte, the most enigmatic and innovative Roman stencil/street artist of urban art on an international level.

Pages 156-159 Press

128 “MAKE IT HAPPEN”: YOUNG CREATIVE CHEVROLET CONTEST

IV edition of the international artistic contest – Visual Arts category June 2012 – Turin Double win on a national level for the “Young Creative Chevrolet 2012” contest that saw the participation of students of the Graphic and Visual Communication course coordinated by Gianmarco Longano: first prize to the project of Vittoria di Natale and Alessandra Ponzetta and third prize at the project of Ottavia Tracagni.

The visual winner of the national selections among the 23 participating Countries competes at the European selections of July 2012, with the awarding in the Fall.

Jury: Piero Bianco, Stefano Boni, Caterina Cannavà, Marta Cinti, Graziano Espen, Laura Maggi, Simone Mussat Sartor, Massimo Sirelli, Mauro Talamonti.

129 SOMEWHERE ELSE. INVISIBLE CITIES You just have to try, every city is possible June 3 2012 – Teatro Ambra Jovinelli, Rome

Creation of the digital scenic design by students of the Web & Interaction course, coordinated by Emanuele Tarducci and Dario Criacci for the theatre show, organized by the CIES Onlus, in collaboration with the Centro di Aggregazione Giovanile MaTeMù, part of the Progetto ACT Area Cantieri Teatrali “youths as actors of intercultural integration and communication”, co-financed by the FEI (European Fund of the integration of third-countries 2007 – 2013) and by the Ministero dell’Interno and sponsored by the Municipio Roma Centro Storico and by the UNHCR.

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130 QOS QUASARO OUTER SPACE

Anthropos.media.photo Readings by Giorgio de Finis June 11 2012 – Libreria Assaggi, Rome Editor: Carlo Prati, Luna Todaro Fourth appointment of the new edition of the cycle of the QOS cultural events, with the main characters of the artistic and contemporary frame.

Readings by Giorgio de Finis, anthropologist, journalist, film maker and photographer, among the most appreciated ones on the international scene, author of the public art project Space Metropoliz.

Pages 156-159 Press

131 SCENES BY PHOTOGRAPHY

June 16 – 22 2012 – Headquarters, Rome Exposition of the winning project realized for the international photographic contest “Scenes by a photography”, part of the exposition “Nuda Anima” by the “Dove Come Quando” theatre company, that took place at the teatro dell’orologio of Rome from May 21 to June 3 2012 and sponsored by the Istituto.

Jury: Laura Arlotti, Lorenzo Cascelli, Michela Czech, Riccardo De Antonis, Daniele Di Pietro, Laura Toro.

132 7.7.7. EXHIBITION EXPERIENCE 2012

De Rerum DeSign July 7 2012 – Giardini dell’Accademia Filarmonica, Rome Editor: Luca Leonori, Luna Todaro Exposition of the works by students and a graduation ceremony in occasion of the event for the end of the academic year and of the twenty-fifth birthday of the School. The gardens of the historical concert institution become the background for a performance that involves all the creative fields in a global synergy.

Installation design: Luca Leonori Interactive performances: Rirmi Sotterranei, edited by Elena Giulia Abbiatici Food design & gourmet: Open Baladin, Andrea de Bellis

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PREFACE

5

CREATIVITY: vital instinct 6 Luna Todaro

ESSAYS ON DESIGN ART EDUCATION AND PRACTICE

8

THE PROJECT OF THINGS 9 Benedetto Todaro

THE DIDACTIC OF CONNECTIONS 21 Orazio Carpenzano

DESIGN FOR A NEW HUMANISM 27 Massimo Locci

RESEARCH, FORMATION, PROJECT: a not linear relationship 1 33 Federico De Matteis

RESEARCH, FORMATION, PROJECT: a not linear relationship 2 38 Alfonso Giancotti

FOR AN INTERACTIVE DIDACTIC 41 Luca Leonori

AROUND THE IDEA OF INTERIOR 43 Franco Bovo, Emilio Vendittelli

LANDSCAPE: Reality follows the image. Image follows reality

49 Cristiana Costanzo

THE LANDSCAPE CALLS ITALY 51 Emanuela De Leo

THE DESIGNER OF VISUAL COMMUNICATION

53 Gianmarco Longano

WEB & INTERACTION 56 Emanuele Tarducci

INTANGIBLE CROSSOVER PROJECT: a really material art practice 59 Barbara Martusciello

ART ARCHITECTURE TERRITOTY: an anarchic point of view

63 Massimo Mazzone

AUTHORS 70

333

RESEARCHES AND PROJECTS

72

PUBLIC EVENTS 74

Prodromes of the foundation 76 The Practice of Design

82

City Lexicon

90

Trees in Rome

102

Festival des jardins

120

The New Age House 126 The Harmonious House 132 Laic Temple – Funerary House 136 Roma design+ 140 Made in Italy, Made in Lazio, Made in Design

142

8 Videos for 8 Poems: a tribute to Pasolini

144

The Divine Comedy 150 Alumni at the mica Club – one Day Expo Design

154

QOS Quasar Outer Space 156

DIDACTIC WORKS EXEMPLA 160 Free Imitations 162 Basic Design 174 Drawing 177 Habitat 179 Landscape 185 Design 188 Graphics 194 Hypergraphics 196 Virtual Architecture 198 Multimedia, Web & Interaction 201

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SOCIAL INTEREST 202

Project and manual skills 1991 204 Project and manual skills 1992 207 Young Italian Design for IKEA 212 Squaring the circle 214 ANFIM – Associazione Nazionale Famiglie Italiane Martiri Caduti per la Libertà della Patria

218

UNICEF 220 Researches on nomad Design (Trolley – baby bag – Malpensa chair)

222

Trenta ore per la vita 226 Homeless: a living box 228 Metropolitan Locations 238 Blood box 250 Blood now 254 We are Animals 258 Greenpeace 260 Museums of Villa Torlonia 261 Mamiani: the Quasar goes to School 270 GNAM – Planned and Kinetic Art. from Munari to Blasi, to Colombo and…

272

ALUMNI'S PRACTICE 275

PRESS REVIEW 288

QUASAR INSTITUTE IN BRIEF 300

TIME LINE 306

335

ISTITUTO QU AS AR. C OM

336