Writing team – "W" by MIAW POLIMI

Section W

MIAW 2014 School of Architecture and Society Politecnico di Milano

MIAW 2014 Milano Architecture International Workshops re-forming Milan September, 29th October, 11th 2014 School of Architecture and Society Politecnico di Milano

MIAW 2014 commission

Section W

Scientific commitee

Students

Editors

Ilaria Valente

Matteo Calati

Leonardo Gatti

Emilio Faroldi

Marina Curtaz

Claudia Scaravaggi

Marco Bovati

Lucrezia De Capitani

Antonella Contin

Leonardo Gatti

Giancarlo Floridi

Giulia Lavagnoli

Antonio Longo

Margherita Napolitani

Andrea Gritti

Clarissa Orsini

Corinna Morandi

Saeed Rezaei

Ingrid Paoletti

Claudia Scaravaggi

Gennaro Postiglione

Yafim Simanovsky

Alessandro Rocca

Laura Solarino

Alessandro Rogora

Elizaveta SudrĂ vskaya

Vittorio Pizzigoni (OAPPC Milano)

Sun Zhi Xing

Director

Tutors

Gennaro Postiglione

Alessandro Rocca Giovanni La Varra

Coordinators Andrea Gritti (General coordination and

Guest

OAPPC Milano)

SĂŠbastien Marot

Gian Carlo Floridi (MIAW Workshops) Alessandro Rocca (MIAW Weeks)

1 2 3 4 index

Introduction

Workshops

Contributions

Network

Section A

Section B

Section C

Section D

Section E

DSW02

DSW03

Gunther Vogt and Sebastiano Brandolini 67 Héctor Fernàndez Elorza

Helena Coch Roura

Jon Schwarting

Jurjen Zeinstra

Nicolas Gilsoul

Renato d’Alençon Castrillòn

Roelof Verhage

103

Sébastien Marot

107

Blog

118

Youtube Channel

120

Facebook page

122

introduction

This book presents a display of the work made by the Miaw 2014 W (writing) Section, a team who followed in real time the design processes of the other parallel Miaw sections. Our work sprawled on three different media environments, that are too radically different spaces and specific domains. The first media is the printed page, where we basically produced two main publications more some minor and occasional production. The first one is“Miawspaper”, quite a daily sheet which constantly followed the everyday life of Miaw. The second product is this book, a real instantaneous volume, which collects documents on the many remarkable theorical and practical Miaw events. The second domain is the physical, architectural one, where we gained a certain consistency occupying the Cube, the white squared kiosk in the atrium of our school, a small temporary pavilion which was built in December 2013, in occasion of the laurea honoris causa given from our school to the great Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza. Since the workshop’s first day, we used the inner and outer walls of this Sizian spaceas a billboard where to communicate through texts and images. We also transformed its interior space in a workspace, a reading room where Miawers and other members of the large University populace can read our texts, and we also installed a light tv set, where we did some of the many interviews with Miaw teachers and students. The third domain is the internet, the virtual cloud where we found some cozy niches creating a blog and opening and filling a youtube channel with our videos, which refer to the interviews but also to all the open lectures given by our foreign and Italian guests. The fourth domain, the fourth space, is a big table that we installed at the end of the workshops, which become the place where the work made in the other domains, or dimensions, gathers and leaves a temporary but clearly readable footprint. We find here the exposition of some copies of this books; the Miawspapers, the daily info sheet of Miaw, migrated from the not so far white cube and landed on the big table. And so did the internet, presented on the table’s large surface with a proliferation of QR codes which invite the visitors to catch the links and to get connected with our virtual pages.

Alessandro Rocca

section a

Lost & Found Section A By Yafim Simanovsky, Elizaveta Sudràvskaya guest Jurjen Zeinstra host Gennaro Postiglione, Enrico Forestieri

These guys are the real on-site workers! They have spent both Monday and Tuesday visiting the project site which is located in Corso XXII Marzo, just next to Piazza Santa Maria del Suffragio. The project area is a social housing block. The common spaces are in bad condition so the students’ goal is to re-activate them and create the social interaction between the residents. Jurjen Zeinstra chose the residential building according to his idea that this kind and scale of architecture can be considered a microcosm. The students have only two weeks of workshop. Therefore instead of analyzing the whole city of Milan, Jurjen has proposed to take its scaled model. The students’ groups are working on different aspects of the analysis. Matteo is studying the history of the Modern Movement in Italy and British brutalism. Giovanni and Nina are dealing with the urban context. Bilyana is studying plans and sections by architect Celada and his team. The room is full of documents and pictures pinned-up on the walls. During the site visit,they have talked to the inhabitants to figure out the weak and the strong points of this area. On Wednesday professor Pierini visited the section. She talked to students about her experience. Orsina Simona Pierini has spent many years studying the social housing in Milan area. In 70’s and 80’s the social conditions in Italy have changed so the old blocks became unadapt to the new reality. The Milano City Council has decided to break them and build the new ones. Architect Celado and his team have proposed to keep the old classical facade of the building but change all the content inspired by British brutalism. The result is a surrealistic atmosphere that you fell entering the lot.

The five story building has a lot of corridors and terraces. Some of these spaces are already occupied by inhabitants while the others stay unused. And here is the students’ turn to change the things. As the first week ends and the second one begings, we could see how the project was documenting and presenting this unknown huge social housing project. The students have been looking at opportunities of intervention inside this block throughout the second week as well, and they have encountered a lot of interesting spaces like the big volume enclosed by the façade. One project underground in an abandoned parking, another project is about the treatment of the ground and transition between public space and collective space, yet another one is about the treatment of the interior facades, and the last one is about finding opportunities for scenography spaces. The students have create a large 1:100 cardboard model of the building, and have worked on many sketches, sections and diagrams analyzing the context and the situation of this special building and offering solutions for the social context.

Jurjen Zienstra – The Workshop Wednesday, 01 October 2014 Q – What about today’s workshop? I’m not doing this alone, they say I’m the teacher but actually it’s cooperation with Enrico Forestieri and also with Gennaro Postiglione, so what we decided was to take the area of Corso XXII Marzo, there we did an amazing discovery of a housing block, and the housing block has a kind of traditional late 19th century facades, but when you go in it’s completely new. This

was for us a very interesting thing, because in a workshop it’s a very difficult thing to work on the scale of the city and to try to avoid just making a formal, diagrammatic scheme, where you can say “ya, I work with this axis, and this block”, of course you can do it, you can make schemes in a very short time, you can make a beautiful urban scheme in two weeks, it’s not a problem, but you have to think what is the relevance of this? Of course I can make something beautiful on an urban scale which has towers and slabs, but will it ever be done like this? What is the context that you are working in? So we said, let’s use this block as a kind of microcosm of the city. You could say there is a strange thing happening, some parts are very ugly, some parts are maybe even beautiful, some parts are occupied by the people that who live there, there is this strange thing of a combination of historic facades, and new elements, this block is not a piece of very known architects, many people in Milan don’t even know it. We used it like a found object, something that you discover, and we will concentrate just on this one block. Q – Do you have any nice sketches ready to show? Well I asked the students this morning to put everything on the wall, because I want to have a kind of atmosphere a little bit like what you find if you look at detective series on the television, you see the team is coming and they say “here are the photos of the crime scene, here is the picture of the victim with the bullet through his head, and here these are the victims” and they draw lines and they have these meetings and update each other, and they go away and work on the laptop and come together for the meeting. It’s very important that it’s not only digital, like dropbox and sharing information, but also really see the information. When I walked in the room this morning I said “No, it’s an empty room, it’s not a space to work in”. It has to be visible. We divided the students in sub-groups so all the sub-groups are working on different small parts of this project. Some are doing interviews with inhabitants,

some are doing interviews with the architect, and they discovered who the architect is. Some are doing a little bit of historic research about the background of social housing in Italy, so everyone is doing a small fragment. But it’s very important to also get the larger picture and therefore you need this kind of pinup thing and this idea of a police station working on a crime scene.”

SECTION titleB

MODEL your idea Section B By Giulia Lavagnoli, Laura Solarino guest Héctor Fernández Elorza host Giancarlo Floridi, Matteo Aimini

Section B, hosted by Giancarlo Floridi and Matteo Aimini with the help of Hector Fernandez Elorza, has been working on the area of Corso XXII Marzo, part of the program “Re-Forming Milan” to re-project decayed areas of the city. During the week each group was asked to project a part of the area: they divided the students into groups composed by four people; each group had to deal with a specific building or part of the area. They started with brainstorming and presenting some early ideas and they also built a 1:100 maquette of the area made with recycled materials. After developing some concepts, they tried to express their project in tridimensional form, without drawing precise plans or sections, just giving form to the ideas. For the first middle exhibition each group presented the 1:100 maquette they prepared during the week and two A3 presenting their project through drawings and references to show their idea and their general concepts. Each model prepared by the students where placed into the Corso XXII Marzo’s model, to show the relationship between the new buildings and the pre-existing. Students planned to create new models for the final exhibition and they choose an unusual material for this size models: concrete. In the specific a group of the class worked on a sport center built completely underground except a small part emerging from the ground, recalling the idea of the iceberg. They studied a way to let the light enter in the underground and they thought that the best solution was to leave the borders of the square empty so the light can go in. Students’ opinions on how the workshop was organized were very positive: they loved how their section was a mixture of nationalities and stated that the exchange of opinions

from different countries and cultures was extremely helpful for the final result. Hector Fernandez Elorza was the guest of this section, unfortunately yesterday he had to leave, but students said that working with him was a great experience and he gave them great ideas for their works. “He’s an awesome person, polite and very nice and he gave us motivation to work” and also “He was really open minded and he stimulated us to work; his teaching approach is very different than how we usually work” stated students from section B.

SECTION C

Strategy's up Section C By Laura Solarino, Giulia Lavagnoli guest Helena Coch Roura host Alessandro Rogora, Claudia Poggi

Section C was directed by Alessandro Rogora and Claudia Poggi and had Helena Coch Roura as a guest. The section worked on the Area of the Ex-Macello, part of the program “Re-Forming Milan” to re-invent decayed areas of the city. The goal of the section was to generate more cultivated spaces in a way to produce considerable quantity of vegetables, fruits, poultry, fish, etc. in order to stimulate the agricultural sector to keep developing and feeding the city. The section was organized into 4 groups composed by 5 members: on the first days groups analyzed the site they were working on and came up with some ideas for the project. Each group has worked on a presentation where they exposed the issues of the area and what could be the solution. The class also played a very interesting game where they were supposed to stick some post it on the board, each containing some key words that could increase interaction, discussion and stimulate ideas exchange. When each group started to have some early and immature ideas, not yet actualized into any form or drawing, the professor was going to exchange the projects: group one worked on group two’s idea and so on. This approach was useful for students, explained Alessandro Rogora, to learn how to be critic with other projects and not to grow fond into their own ideas and opinions, to be able to work on different ideas. We asked some students to talk about the initial phases of their project: “They asked to find a concept for the area, to have some general ideas and to find a final goal we have to reach at the end of the week. We are now working on the presentation, where we have to show some reference, some images that represent our idea. We’re still

far from knowing what the concept is going to be, observing the area and coming up with some early ideas. Considering this area as an historical site of Milan, students decided to “save the buildings” redesigning the interiors in order to preserve the image of the quarter but in the same time innovating the function: they projected co-working spaces, a learning center, a gallery etc.. Results of section C’s work were visible during the first MIAW exhibition which took place in the exhibition’s room of Politecnico of Milano: they prepared a table with a general plant of the area and the possible ideas to make it usable. They also presented en exposition of papers divided in days in which they explained what they did each day of workshop. We were also curious to know students’ opinions about the lecture by Sebastien Marot, which took place on on Monday 29th of september: “It was a strange lecture: people who are interested in architecture and in literature in the same time often sound crazy, but with their craziness they have very interesting and stimulating points of view. I don’t know how they make it happen, but I guess that’s how art happens”.

SECTION D

reading the space Section D By Marina Curtaz, Lucrezia De Capitani guest Renato D’Alençon Castrillón host Andrea Gritti, Franco Tagliabue, Marco Bovati

Board, field and gallery are three keywords identified by the workshop for the safety of the former slaughterhouse. The workshop has decided to propose a reading of several characteristics that could improve the area and enhance the public space by eliminating degradation, focusing on strengthening the social, physical and economic aspects.

The workshop run by professors Andrea Gritti, Marco Bovati, Franco Tagliabue and with the collaboration of the Spanish architect Renato d’Alencon Castrillion is working in the former slaughterhouse in Milan, located in viale Molise, south of the railway passing through Porta Vittoria. The area of the former Slaughterhouse has developed during the early Novecento, following the route of the existing rail. The intervention will not be a recovery in the usual sense, and is not intended to develop a formulation of the final project, but rather wants to be the occasion for the safety of the area through experimentation with different modes according to a timeline. Currently, the area looks like a degraded place, in which the city of Milan has to use funds for control of the area, without using the potential of the place itself. Following the failure of the slaughterhouse, the state of neglect of this area in turn generates a deterioration in the neighborhood, that degradation does not occur only from the physical point of view but also social and economic one. The goal of the workshop is therefore to work on the concept of “intermediate state” to develop and test viable solutions from the both points of view, economically and socially, to ensure safety. The students were divided into

three main groups, and in turn, each divided into two. Three keywords have been identified since the first week and have been brought forward as the hub of the possibility of intervention. The three concepts are: board, field, and gallery. The workshop was developed using a methodical procedure through a survey in which they were first identified the three keywords, according to an analysis of the attitudes of the students that take into account a historical reading of the existing situation, finally, the third phase called “Scenario” allowed to make educated guesses of the temporal development of the proposed solutions. For example, the macro group who worked on the concept of border has experienced two different solutions for the opposite concept and internal synergies: on one hand they worked developing the concept of border closure as it became a force that, starting from the outside would improve the degradation to get to the heart of the area. On the other hand, the opposite concept, that start from the center to expand and develop a border that would grow up to touch the outermost boundaries of the area.

SECTION E

Architetti o urbanisti? Section E By Margherita Napolitani, Clarissa Ursini guest Roelof Verhage host Corinna Morandi, Lina Scavuzzo

La ricerca di questo laboratorio si concentra nello sviluppo e nella rigenerazione urbana ponendo particolare attenzione ai temi relativi allo spazio, agli usi differenti, alle modalità di recupero. Molto importanti anche il rapporto tra pubblico e privato, tra campi agricoli e infrastrutture, tra edifici esistenti ed edifici di nuova costruzione quindi tra tradizione e innovazione. La parola chiave per questo laboratorio è strategia, non si può pensare di realizzare un progetto esecutivo su un’area così grande in sole due settimane e non si può neanche pensare di suddividere l’area in tante piccole parti per avere uno spazio più limitato in cui progettare, quello che però si può fare è analizzare l’area in tutti i suoi aspetti oggettivi, sintetizzare i concetti e arrivare a poter tracciare delle linee guida, una strategia di progetto che potrà poi essere utile a un qualunque ente pubblico o privato che volesse veramente riqualificare quest’area. Questo è stato l principio guida attraverso il quale è stato sviluppato questo laboratorio, un punto d’incontro tra urbanisti e architetti, tra una pianta al 100 e un masterplan al 10000. Gli studenti sono stati suddivisi tre piccoli gruppi da 5 persone e gli è stato chiesto di immaginare e tracciare tre proposte che seguissero principi diversi: -chi si è concentrato sulla buona connessione infrastrutturale con l’università sviluppando quindi un campus per studenti con l’aggiunta di un mercato per rendere il progetto economicamente realizzabile. -chi ha scelto come punto di partenza l’expo che ci sarà nel 2015 e la sua vicinanza con l’area di progetto rendendo quindi l’ex macello un’area connessa alle attività

di expo ma gratuita (un fuori salone del salone del mobile); consolidando il progetto con il pensiero di una realizzazione scaglionata negli anni, partendo da ora e arrivando fino al 2030. -chi, analizzando l’area si è reso conto della grande quantità dei diversi usi già presenti in questo spazio e ha deciso di aprire spazio alla città utilizzando molto l’incremento delle zone verdi e delle connessione.

intervista a Corinna Morandi D:Perché è stata fatta questa sezione? R:Abbiamo pensato fosse utile avere una sezione orientata al planning e all’urban design non intendendo la progettazione solo alla scala architettonica ma anche a quella del disegno urbano, molto importante per una scuola di architettura che ha al suo interno un corso di laurea in planning. Capire che l’architettura ha un contesto, importante da un lato per gli architetti per imparare a collocare le proposte fisiche in un’area di trasformazione, dall’altro per i planner per prendere coscienza di quale forma fisica possono assumere le ipotesi di carattere strategico. E’ fondamentale rafforzare questa componente della ricerca e del rapporto tra progetto e contesto soprattutto in una scuola dove ci sono tutte le competenze necessarie per avere un approccio di questo genere, approccio che è distingue in positivo la nostra scuola. Anche nel campo della ricerca urbanistica il confronto col progetto è comunque un modo di fare ricerca, di verificare alcune ipotesi relative alle politiche e alle strategie anche da un punto di vista di configurazione fisica elemento che trasmette credibilità a qualunque tipo di ricerca.

E’ soddisfatta dei risultati ottenuti nella prima settimana di lavoro?

Sono molto soddisfatta del risultato. Essendo orientati al planning il nostro obbiettivo non era di fare un progetto in tre giorni perché non avrebbe avuto nessun senso, era quello di lavorare sul possibile processo che sta tra le scelte di carattere strategico, orientativo, concettuale e la possibile traduzione in una configurazione fisica quindi cercando di simulare quello che secondo noi dovrebbe essere il modo di affrontare un’area di questa dimensione come quella dell’ex macello. I disegni sono fuori scala, l’obbiettivo era sviluppare delle linee guida, delle strategie di progetto cercando di far sorgere delle alternative. Sono divisi in tre gruppi ognuno dei quali ha sviluppato un’ipotesi, domani durante la mostra le ipotesi verranno sottoposte agli studenti e ai professori per simulare un processo di progettazione partecipata, dove verrà appunto chiesto di sviluppare dei giudizi e delle considerazioni sulle alternative che vedono per mettere a confronto i tre scenari diversi; da li nella seconda settimana vorremmo ricavare delle linee guida per sviluppare poi delle ipotesi più concrete, fino alla fine ci saranno i tre scenari ricavati anche dai suggerimenti ricevuti durante la presentazione. Gli studenti hanno capito fin da subito qual era la modalità di lavoro di questa settimana, hanno disegnato molto a mano libera per avere un rapporto più diretto con il pensiero con l’idea, con l’esperienza dell’area e con lo spazio. È stato molto positivo il lavoro con il professor Verhage, un urbanplanner di Lione, subito ci ha mostrato un progetto sulla Lione confluance (lo stesso che è stato mostrato alla conferenza) nella sua fase istruttoria per far capire agli studenti come erano stati fissati i principi di trasformazione e come questi poi si siano tradotti in azioni di progetto che si sono trasformate per diventate un pezzetto di città nuova. Mi sono trovata davvero molto bene con il mio “guest” e credo che anche i ragazzi abbiano molto apprezzato questo contributo e questo approccio.

Dopo la mostra in triennale e questo workshop si andrà avanti a lavorare sul tema “rigenerare Milano”? Adesso, con l’inizio dell’anno accademico, partirà la seconda fase di riformare Milano che si chiamerà “riformare Milano 2015” dove saranno prese in considerazione le aree ovest; noi siamo partiti dalla mappatura, che è stata fatta dall’amministrazione, delle aree di abbandono e di degrado (non consumare atro suolo ma partire dalle risorse sottoutilizzate o degradate) lo scorso anno era pronta la mappatura della zona est e per quest’anno si sta terminando quella della zona ovest. Sarà anche interessante lavorare su queste aree proprio nell’anno di Expo perché tra le due cose c’è una grande prossimità fisica e tematica.

Intervista a LIna Scavuzzo Sono usciti temi nuovi e diversi rispetto a quelli che possono uscire durante un corso di sei mesi dove è tutto più diluito? Credo che quella del workshop sia una formula veramente interessante: l’avere poco tempo per fare qualcosa che solitamente sei abituato a diluire. Nel mondo del lavoro hai pochissimo tempo per fare le cose, il fatto che la didattica abbia sempre questi tempi lunghi fa si che gli studenti si perdano, che non abbiano quella “spinta”, il workshop ha la capacità di farti produrre, sintetizzare e farti tirar fuori tanto, anche ragazzi che magari sono solo del secondo anno in una settimana sono riusciti a sintetizzare dei concetti e produrre del materiale . Molto stimolante avere questi ospiti esterni per gli studenti sono, hanno una persona che per una settimana segue il progetto insieme a loro. Io quello che proporrei è che gli ospiti abbiano più spazio che quasi il workshop sia loro, che gli studenti non abbiano un contatto diretto solo con l’ospite della loro sezione ma che ci siano magari delle revisioni incrociate, delle occasioni di scambio anche con gli altri guest.

dsw 02

from the border tothe center DSW 02 By Elizaveta Sudràvskaya guest Sebastiano Brandolini, Nicolas Gilsoul, Gunter Vogt host Antonio Longo, Alessandro Rocca,Talita Medina

What does Lambro River mean to Milan? It used to be a border of the city and now it is a part of Milanese outskirt – “an unknown and dangerous river”, as Antonio Longo said. The Lambro River is an important part of the city and has all the possibilities to become a new center of attraction.

The professors of DSW 02 are looking for an artistic sensitive approach in their work. This section’s goal is to create the future scenarios for the Lambro River area, transforming it from the marginal space to an important part of the city. The students deal with the categories such as visual perception, noises, vegetation and smells. They have spent two days visiting, feeling, watching and smelling the site and making the sketches. Students were free to choose the key points to work with because two weeks were not enough to analyze the whole river, as they want to get into detail in their project. The professors did not ask to produce the precise plans and sections but the sketches like Humphry Repton did in his “Red Books”. The course is an exercise for the imagination. During the site visiting students have designed the place how it is nowadays and in the course of the workshop they were supposed to produce new images showing how the place could become. Antonio Longo, Sebastiano Brandolini and Alessandro Rocca have already made such experience in their books “Dorsale Verde Nord”, “Milano, a piedi nella metropoli” and “Parchi e fiumi di Lombardia”. During MIAW they were teaching the students how to tell their ideas through the images. The projects can be even utopian but it is very important to free the imagination and to go back to the origins of thinking and making the architec-

ture. One girl designed her project according to the different noises. The students’ proposals are such ones as to create sport activities, agricultural areas, bicycle roads and water reclamation. The urban context plays fundamental role in Lambroscape. The landscape is an urgent topic for Milan as there is no real green path inside the city. Lambro River is supposed to become the green spine bone (Dorsale Verde) of the east part of the city and to create a network with the other green systems. Thereby, the new green Milan centers will appear.

dsw 03

Which scale is architecture? DSW 03 By Elizaveta Sudràvskaya guest JonSchwarting, Giovanni Santamaria host Antonella Contin

What isthe first thing you imagine talking about architecture? A primitive shelter, Greece temple, Florence cathedral or 30st Mary Axe. We are used to think the architecture as a building. However, is it possible to re-form Milan using the single interventions? Professor AntonellaContin propose to transform Milan instead of reforming it. She thinks the architecture in a metropolitan way.

The DSW 03 section was working on Rubattino area for these two weeks. The choice of a site is based on its position and scale. Rubattino barracks are located in the east outskirt of Milan close to Lambrate train station and LambroPark. Highway and railway bound the district on all four sides forming an abandoned and unsafe island. The military barracksare hidden by a high wall, which makes them a sort of Forbidden City. The Rubattino area is a rectangular of 800 square meters.It is a huge urban space but the real scale of the project is not the barracks or an island in between the railways; it is the whole city of Milan. Professors Contin, Schwarting and Santamaria push the students to work on the metropolitan scale, which meansto consider the whole network.Professors want students to consider Rubattino not as a single intervention but as one of many key points, which are going to create a new image of the city. As the purpose is not an easy one, the students have spent a couple of days studying the transport system, green corridors, urban morphology, context and points of interest. In the middle of Forbidden Island of Rubattino, there are the barracks. All the groups have decided to leave the steel structure as a symbol of the past. Some groups filled the structure with the new buildings

and functions while the others have made the inversion leaving the structure empty inside and working with the border. There are also the groups who have decided to “break” the existent axe and to create a new direction of architectural movement. The functional proposals are the following: university campus, urban park, agricultural activities or a war museum. There is the strong will of students to bring the nature inside the project and inside the city: water, trees, meadows and even a jungle or a zoo. The students from NY Institute of Tecnology who came to participate in MIAW with Jon Schwarting told about their experience: nobody of them have ever been to Milan and the city was completely new to them, which presented certain difficulties. On the other hand being foreigners permit them to see the city for a first time and notice the things with a clear eye. NYIT students are used to work with an urban scale, but the morphology of Milan is totally different from New York’s one. Milan is a centralized city made of rings while New York has its famous grid. In fact, some guys told that they were not able to move in Milan without a map. This small detail shows very clearly the difference between two cities and cultures (?) Wherever designing or living we are immersed in the city context. What scale is the architecturenowadays? It is no more a single buildingbut a city system.

Gunther Vogt . Sebastiano Brandolini

landscape on the both sides Interview with Gunther Vogt and Sebastiano Brandolini By Elizaveta SudrĂ vskaya

Q: Could you tell about your studying experience? Why did you choose the landscape architecture? S.B: I have studied architecture in Architecture Association in London from 1977 until 1982. Then I came back to Italy where I have worked as an editor of Casabella and opened my small architectural practice where we mostly do private residential works. My interesting in landscape is derived from my interesting in cities. We cannot divide the architectural questions from the urban questions. Last five years I am teaching at Politecnical University in Zurich together with Gunther Vogt where we do a workshop about the relationship between cities and the landscape. We study the social implication of the landscape on the quality of the cities. G.V: I have studied landscape architecture in Zurich where after I have started my studio practice in landscape as well. Now we also have offices in London and Berlin. The studio is a platform for my teaching at Politecnical University in Zurich. We have a landscape degree in the university, which means we are more interested in the territory and in a large scale design. We explain the students how to deal with this discipline. The term â&#x20AC;&#x153;landscapeâ&#x20AC;? is very artificial. It was born in Germany to describe the territory in political sense. In London, they relate to the landscape even the super dense situations. They do not have the Mediterranean culture like in Italy. If we are talking about the landscape it has to be a lawn, otherwise they will never accept it. Q: In your lecture, you were talking about the alpine region. Do you think there is a big difference between working in Switzerland and in Italy in the meaning of landscape?

G.V: The cities are completely different. In Swiss Alps, we always had tourism, agriculture and military zones. Then agriculture and militaries has disappeared and now we have the tourism. On the Italian side, there always were the industries and the people were coming from the valleys to work in the big factories like FIAT. Nowadays many of these factories are closed so you have an abandoned landscape left. S.B: I think that in Switzerland the Alps are really belong to the identity of the country. They are inevitable. The country is routed in the mountains also with the isolation and the difficulties of communication in the mountain landscape. For northern Italy, the Alps are not the identity. There are the mountains but they are not fundamental for what people feel they are. People from Milan know the Alps but they can ignore them. In Switzerland, it is not possible to ignore the mountains. Q: What kind of approach do you usually use working with the students? G.V: We usually take a big territory where we make a small intervention. The drawings are very important for students because they approach directly with their impressions. S.B: The teaching method, which we have adopted in Zurich, has always left the student in the situation of having to make an important decision. We are tending not to specify the program because the program shall be the result of analysis that a student makes. We try also not to specify with exactness the site. Usually the site is too big for a student, which means that the student needs to make an argument and choose his own position inside a large

site. It is more complicated than designing a building because there is no program or site. In the big projects, student needs to decide what should be built first and what can be built in the end so you need to imagine the progress over time.

Q: What do you think about the role of writing in architecture? S.B: For me writing is a therapeutic and relaxing thing. This allows me to look at other peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work. You have to express the comment. Writing is a part of my identity. With the internet, it has become increasingly difficult to write intelligent things. There are a lot of writing but they tend to be very superficial. It is very important also for the students to write. If the sentence is right, you can express a complex concept with it but you have to be very concise, dry and precise in the way you write. Writing shall be beside of the tools like model making or taking photographs. To write is like to visit the city; you must know how to explore the places. Writing can be also a design tool. Moreover, the reading is equally important, it can produce many ideas. By seeing that others people say, you can get your own the ideas. G.V: When I have started my career, writing was very important. Nowadays I often ask myself why am I not interested to write. And it is obvious â&#x20AC;&#x201C; because nobody reads. The young generation does not read. Last days there was a student applying for a job in my office and we have figured out that he does not even read the texts about our projects. I do read a lot. For me reading a book is an adventure like going to Madagascar. If you do not read, you cannot write. It is also very important to speak. We have students who can read and probably write, but they cannot speak. The ability of communication is fundamental. An interview is a modern way of communication. I know that the students read my interviews to know me better. Sometimes even your friends hear new things about you from an interview. Therefore, this is very contemporary.

Hector Fernandez . Elorza

Feel your space Interview with Hector Fernandez-Helorza By Claudia Scaravaggi, Yafim Simanovsky

A professor from Madrid, Hector Elorza hosted the workshop group together with Giancarlo Floridi, who were together responsible for the prolific cardboard models of the urban context of their work. During their work in the 1st spoke with Hector to try and find out his view on architecture and design. The following is our conversation with him, touching upon subjects such as space and feeling of place, and the use of cheap materials in practical terms:

old building, so when they begin to develop a project the background of the history is not that intense. From this point of view Italy and Spain are very related.

Q: What about you background and your accademic experiences?

A: I think that architecture and cinema have a strong relationship because both are adressed to the soul of the people, so they both affect directly the people. Moreover architecture, as the cinema, is an art. Of course the methodology and the tecnique are different, but at the end is the same: is the personal understanding of this part of life. I am not an expert in film, actually I am not an expert neither in architecture. But I have a very clear idea: after a film, after feeling a space, you can feel good or feel bad. There are people that speak about architecture with very difficoult words. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to explain it in this way, even my projects, I try to explain it very easily, because architecture has to be something easy, not something terribly difficoult to understand. I try to understand the people that are enjoying the space, and while I am watching a movie I try to catch all the feeling that are beyond a picture. In the workshop we are dealing with an abandoned cinema actually. I decided with the other teachers to point out four small spaces, because otherwise in two weeks it was really difficoult, almost impossible, to catch the feelings of this places. We are working in Corso XXII Marzo in Milano, trying to develop a small area in a way I think is the most

A: When I finished the school of architecture, I received a scholarship for studying in Scandinavia. I bought a car and I was traveling for two years just for visiting architecture. I stayed in Stockolm for two years, and that was an amazing time. (â&#x20AC;Ś) Ten years later, in 2008, I came here in Rome to study architecture in the university and it was a wonderful experience. Of course even in Spain we study Italian history of architecture, but when you are directly here in Italy is different, when you are immerse in this country you really realise the background, and this is something to understand and to learn. Q: Can you compare the spanish methodology of education and the scandinavian method? A: I would compare it better with the italian one because we have a really huge background as well, we are really concern about tradition, history, and about the things that you find around site project. Instead in Denmark and in Sweden is really different because even though they have history, they traditionally build in wood so it is difficoult to find very

Q: In your projects there is a strong attention on light, material and especially on feelings. Actually is there are always so many elements that is like being in a kind of scenography or film set. What do you think about the relationship between your way of doing architecture and cinema?

important thing that the student will learn during this workshop. This scale in which we are working is for me the most confortable to work with because in my office, I have a very small office in Madrid, I usually work with this controlled spaces. Q: What kind of interventions are you planning to do? A: It was quite interesting because, as I did in my school or I do in my own office in Madrid, when we begin a project you have to decide the program, because sometimes you already have the program, but in this case we have to resolve the program of the area that we have to develop. Yesterday we did a brainstorming, and there was a huge amount of possibilities on the table, and we decide different, interesting and modern proposals. I think that this area is a rich district in which live lot of old people, it is a kind of boring, it needs an input from of an other generation, a new activation, so we are focusing on programs related with young people, children, in a place where otherwise in few years will be death. Our program want to attract young people to the area. The students are trying to deal with the problems in a very fresh way, because when you have to work with architecture you have really to have fun, it depends on the program that you are dealing with, and at least until today we are really having fun, especially me! This is the most important thing, when you are developing architecture and you are having fun, and you are smiling while you are drawing, I really feel that, afterall, somehow the people will enjoy your space and will smile as well. I feel myself more confortable if I catch in my mind just the way that you feel in a space: you can feel well, or you can feel bad, because for istance your are developing a cemetery. This is for me the central part of architecture. Q: In your project is possible to see a strong relationship between art and architecture. For example in your use of the light, and in your use of the material, their treatment and their appearance. Can you explain us this relationship?

A: When you see a beautiful paint and you really feel this emotion of feeling it, and when you enjoy a space and you feel comfortable you really feel that it is something beautiful you really understand that art and architecture are linked and at the end is the same, and you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t understand why. And this is the most beautiful thing in architecture: that sometimes you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t explain why, many time is difficoult to put in numbers why a space really point out in your soul or not, this is the only thing I am trying to find. Q: Are there some common elements in in all the workshops? Even though the projects are located in different places, is there an element that could be a focus, a sort of common line? A: It is difficoult to me to say that because first of all I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know all the sites of the workshop, secondly it depends on the teacher, actually we have different approaches. There are some teacher that are really technical, it is not my case! Probably there are other teachers that are trying to get the students in the projects. The co-existance of all this different approaches to architecture is very interesting. Maybe this is the point. I think that saturday, during the final presentation will be very interesting to see the layout of all the different approaches. Q: What is your approach to sustainability? A: I think that sustainability is something that should be present inside the projects, there is no discussion, it has to be there. Do we need a structure in a building? Of course, otherwise it will collapse. Do we need sustainability in our projects? Sure. Do we need that a building has an entrance? Sure. The traditional architecture was sustainable, so also the modern architecture has to be sustainable. It is only to use the common sense. We have to take care of this world.

Helena Coch . Roura

FEEL THE SUSTainability Interview with Helena Coch Roura By Margherita Napolitani, Clarissa Ursini, Claudia Scaravaggi

Di cosa parliamo quando parliamo di architettura, dove vuole andare questa professione ma soprattutto che mezzi vuole utilizzare per raggiungere i suoi obbiettivi?

Abbiamo intervistato la Professoressa Helena Couch Roura che ci ha svelato una grande verità: i veri professori non amano insegnare, amano apprendere. Attraverso questa frase ci ha raccontato il workshop con la sua esperienza; gli stimoli che sono riusciti a trasmetterle gli studenti e le opportunità che ha svelato l’area di progetto scelta (ex-macello). L’architetto Couch Roura ci ha parlato del suo lavoro e del suo modo di vedere ma soprattutto vivere l’architettura ponendo grande attenzione a ciò che è davvero la sostenibilità in architettura e negli edifici. La naturalezza il benessere, il confort interiore ed esteriore di un edificio sono per lei elementi fondamentali non solo per realizzare un buon progetto ma soprattutto per andare avanti in questa professione e uscire da questo momento di stallo dove sembra che l’architetto dia più importanza ai “gadget”, come li definisce lei, che a veri pensieri rivolti al benessere non solo dell’uomo all’interno di una casa ma del pianeta rispetto alle nuove tecnologie che si stanno sviluppando sempre più velocemente. Q: Estamos haciendo este workshop que desarrolla el tema de recuperación de algunas áreas abandonadas de Milán en maneras diferentes dependiendo de cómo los profesores quieran acercarse al trabajo, que le parece su taller y todo el MIAW en general? A: Creo que este tipo de workshop son muy interesantes para los estudiantes internacionales y también mucho para los profesores,

los estudiantes nunca piensan que los profesores aprendemos mucho, un profesor cuando es profesor no le gusta ensenar, lo que le gusta es aprender. Normalmente cuando se da una clase habitual se aprende mucho menos pero en cambio cuando estás mas en relación con los estudiantes, cuando haces talleres y cuando haces este tipo de workshop es mucho mas fácil aprender de los estudiantes que en este caso además son estudiantes de distintos países y distintos niveles. Q: En que campo trabajas? A: Yo trabajo sobre el área del control ambiental en la arquitectura con medios físicos, es decir la percepción, el confort interior y exterior. Mi tema de trabajo es la percepción y el confort, eso se puede conseguir con los que llamamos medios naturales (luz natural, térmico natural, ventilación, acústica) o medios artificiales ( iluminación, ventilación, climatización) y yo creo que en esta segunda parte que es el tema de la iluminación, la calefacción, la climatización los arquitectos están perdiendo territorio, un territorio muy interesante porque, por ejemplo en el tema de la luz, si tienes un teatro con el mismo espacio solo cambiando la luz tienes el campo, una taberna…muchos escenarios y prácticamente la escenografía de teatro se hace por el 80% con la luz. Los arquitectos hemos entrado muy poco en el tema de la luz artificial y creo que deberíamos utilizarla como recurso arquitectónico mas que simplemente como hecho: hay luz no hay luz, hay niebla no hay niebla, como un fluido que se pasea y que mágicamente ilumina; en cambio hay espacios que están iluminado con voluntad y cambia muchísimo, si es que realmente quieres ver el suelo, quieres ver las

paredes, lo que quieres enfatizar de aquel espacio, en los temas técnicos nos involucramos pocos y es un terreno con muchísimas posibilidades. Q: Estas intentando llevar a los estudiantes de este taller en este tema en algunas manera? A: Estamos mas en la parte natural que en la artificial, no estamos llegando, no creo que vayamos a llegar a tema del artificial pero el tema del confort creo que si, es un tema que estamos considerando. Q: En que área de Milán estáis trabajando y como le parece ese sito? A: En el ex macello. Se han hechos muchas operaciones sobre en tema del ex macello y creo que sea un tema interesante y recurrente, en muchas grandes ciudades se han hechos experiencias, el matadero de Madrid por ejemplo es una referencia que el otro día les ensené a los estudiantes, hay algunas ciudades en el norte de Italia y algunas en el norte de España que han tenido una época industrial importante en la industrialización del final del siglo XIX y el principio del XX y estas zonas ocupaban un espacio que era externo a la ciudad, en el momento que la ciudad ha crecido estos lugares se han quedado dentro de la ciudad. Hay dos operaciones posibles cuando tenemos un terreno que antes era muy barato porque estaba muy lejos pero ahora esta dentro de la ciudad: está la primera opción especulativa, hagamos viviendas, creo pero que aquí en todos los proyectos que se están proponiendo se está desarrollando la segunda opción posible, la versión no especulativa que intenta lleva el pensamiento a encontrar una manera para que este trozo de ciudad revierta en la cuidad y dé mas vida en el entorno y que actividades se pueden organizar. Aquí tenemos de repente una súper plaza que sino no la tendríamos. Q: Los habéis dejado libres de elegir el tema que mas les guste? A: Si, los hicimos solo reflexionar un poco sobre las ventajas de tener

una superficie muy grande como la que tenemos en el ex macello. Hay muchos metros cuadrados, entonces la pregunta era que actividades requieren de muchos metros cuadrados que normalmente no se pueden hacer porque no hay suficiente espacio? Al principio proponían por ejemplo una escuela de teatro, pero una escuela de teatro se puede hacer en un lugar muy reducido, en una zona urbana muy consolidada, entonces busquemos actividades que no pueden estar normalmente en la ciudad porque requieren muchos metros cuadrados de terreno libre y verde. Esta era un no tanto la condición que les poníamos si no un poco sobre lo que les hacíamos reflexionar para que tomaran decisiones ligadas a esta gran superficie que teníamos. Q: Están llegando a resultados satisfactorios? A: Hay varias de las propuestas que mas desarrolladas creo que serian interesantes. Lo que plantea nuestro grupo es hacer algo productivo, algo que produzca algo, como una serie de zonas donde se cultiva; organizan tres tipos de cultivos: uno de huertos urbanos particulares donde la gente pueda ir a cultivar su hortaliza, porque así hay muchas personas que van a ir a este lugar, luego hay otra zona como de cultivo mas a grande escala para producir un tipo de comida que luego se pueda procesar allá mismo y acabar haciendo restaurantes de kilómetros cero, luego hay otro edificio que queda un poco separado y han hecho una propuesta de reciclaje: tienen un espacio como de reciclaje donde hay unas oficinas de carpinteros, pintores… que arreglan muebles y luego hay un mercadito donde vuelven a venderlos para cerrar un poco todo el proceso productivo. Producen verdes y se lo comen, reparan obyectos y los venden; me parece interesante como propuesta. Q: In your lecture of yesterday you spoke about very contemporary and important themes related to sustainability (soil consumption, re-use of architecture, sharing of spaces). How and where did you develop this

sensibility to these environmental themes? A: It is a long time that I am working on the natural architecture and in the field of bioclimatic architecture. But I think that we are in a certain point in which there is a great interest in the global energy, bioclimatic architecture and we are loosing the things that are more related to design without adjectives, only design. We are in a circle in which we are producing buildings that are not sustainable and we add a lot of “gadgets” to make them more efficient, but I think that their role should start at the beginning of the design process. I am coming back to this beggining point of the process, I have been working for a lot of years in bioclimatic architecture, lighting of buildings, and all these things, but I think that it is important to include this idea in designing from the beginning. If architects can not include the rennoval energy in our reportois we can’t go ahead. We have to deal with photovoltaic, solar panels in the same way in which we use windows, doors. 81

Q: If you think about the current situation of the earth, which can be the approach of new generations of architects? Do you have any suggestions for us? A: I think that the new generations have to forget the gadgets and the word “sustainable” and think more about architecture from the point of view of the comfort, and having in mind to share things, to have the right dimensions, to forget this huge buildings that are like points in the cities and don’t have in account the users. We must return to the users, and to their feelings, to make them feel more comfortable, we have to deal with the human scale. (...) Q: Can you tell us some books that change your way of seeing architecture and that you think a student of arcitecture should read? A: I don’t have an answer to this question. I read a lot. I think that is different for everyone, and even it depends on the moment of your life. If I read a book that I had read

ten years ago, now I can see and understand things that I coudn’t see then. It is the same thing with the films. It depends on your mind, you are always changing. The important thing is that you have never to be without doing anything, you have to walk, walking means understanding and seeing different things. I think that not only architectural reading are important, every kind of book can open your mind, maybe more.

Jon Schwarting .

Thinking the context Interview with Jon Schwarting, Giovanni Santamaria and Antonella Contin By Elizaveta SudrĂ vskaya

Q: What is your teaching approach for this workshop and why did you choose the Rubattino area? J.S: Rubattino area has enough problems to solve. It is impossible to solve the problem by just looking at it. You need to know the circumstances that effect the problem. For me it is the discussion about the physical, social and economic context. Every projects is influenced by surrounding context of all those issues. We were probably emphasize the fact that there are a lot of important information coming from outside. We could not solve the problem internally with its own logic.

analyze, interpret and project and try to catch something absolutely new. It is an acceleration of your way of thinking. You have to be able to imagine something that is utopian because you are stressed and have only short time.

G.S: Sometimes that what we deal with is just a reaction on something that evolves different space and time. The context is not only spatial but also a temporal: the past and the future. Sometimes we do not understand why now the place is that way. We need to use critical analytical process, which is wider and goes better in time. J.S: Rubattino is an interesting project to think about, because surrounding condition are so different. Every joining area is different from the other. You need to consider the relationship between all these areas. This project is good for teaching and learning.

J.S: The workshop is about working together. The first week we divided the students in thirteen groups so they stared to work on their own project. They did not even want to show their projects to the others. Therefore, we tried to break that down. Then we had our group of eleven American students, which were supposed to work together with already existing groups. But after we have changed the idea.

Q: What is the role of workshop in the educational process? A.C: It is interesting to understand what a workshop of fourteen days is. Rubattino is a very problematic area so we need to understand its role inside the city and look at the scale of that huge building that have a strong relationship with the industry on the other side of highway. The fact that we put this scale project in fourteen or ten days help the students to erase their previous tools and knowledge to

G.S: The workshop breaks the dynamic that you have during the design studio, because you are really putting your intuition. Everyone is engaged in a personal way. In this situation, you do not have a student in front or you but an architect. That is very important to be involved in a dialog with the other architects.

A.C: You need to be open for other ideas and be able to analyze them. G.S.: Workshop is not only about producing something; otherwise, we could make a competition. It is trying to know new tools and to explore new ways. It is a moment for each student to open to experimentation process. We are trying to open the dialog between the different teams through this brainstorming moment when everyone exposes his works to the others. It is responsibility of criticizing or having something to say about your classmates work. The feeling of the responsibility of their ideas and critical thinking is very important. Q: Is there any difference in the

working approach of the American and Italian students? J.S: We have five graduated students who got their degree somewhere else. They come from all over the world and they already the system of education. I think that the process of making the projects is quite similar all around the world. G.S: I know that in this workshop American students need to see and analyze the reality of Mila, which is already familiar to the students of Politecnico. It is a good point because they need to go to the site and see it with a clear eye. Looking at things for the first time gives you an opportunity to see them, perhaps if you are fully emerged in that reality. Almost you do not see any more, because there are those things you are thinking to be used to. The same happens when Italian students come to New York. They see immediately what make the feature of that place. It is the strength of a foreign eye ready to catch a surprise A.C: American school is practical while here in Italy we are much more analytical. It is important to confront yourself with the other schools and professors. Working alone is a sterile job; you do not even know who you are. I think that we reinforce our internationality not by going abroad and looking for something new but just because of our awareness of who we really are.

Jurjen Zeinstra .

Feel the pattern interview with Jurjen Zienstra By Elizaveta Sudràvskaya

Q – Could you tell us a little about your own history and studies?

A – From the post-war 1970’s-80’s period in architecture where you might say that there was a strong position of Dutch architecture in the Team10 movement, in establishing a certain architecture that was very based on a human scale, people like Aldo van Eyck and Herman Herzberger were teaching in the school, but you could also see this movement already becoming a bit tired, a bit aged, you could see that there were some people that were their followers they built a lot of social housing, and of course they were very concerned about all kinds of social issues but there was a kind of lack of awareness of materials and detailing. But there was you might even say in the Dutch architecture at a certain time, a difficulty to relate to history or relate to a kind of cultural context because they were focusing so much on social-political issues that the idea of architecture as also kind of an artistic expression got almost as if people were suspicious about it, the idea that if someone has artistic pretentions he cannot be an architect because an architect has to work for the people. It’s a kind of almost socialist or social-democratic idea of architecture. I think Herman Herzberger and also Aldo van Eyck are great architects, don’t make any mistake about that, I really think they are very important, they have done very interesting buildings, but as this movement that they started became quite popular, you also saw that the intensity slowly disappeared and became some sort of way of working, and what was interesting when I came into the faculty at Delft, you saw people looking for a new kind of thing that would inspire them. So you had on the one hand people like Max Rissélada who was

one of my teachers, he also gave a lecture here and did some amazing exhibitions, but he was introducing looking back at the very early sources of modernism so he was for instance one of the first to rediscover Russian Constructivist architecture not only as an architectural style but also to look at it as one of the origins of social housing for instance. I think these studies that were done in the 1920’s by people like Ginzburg with the Narkomfin building, but also studies that were not built, there was a lot of energy and a lot of condensed knowledge in these studies, and this was one of the very important sources also when I was studying, these kind of very detailed studies into configurations of housing. (…) And of course this idea of these communal spaces, what people could share, this was also inspiring for us at that time. (…) On the one hand we were not very inspired by this kind of architecture from the late 70’s early 80’s, we were looking for something new, from some of our teachers we got in touch with this 1920’s architecture which we found interesting, it was kind of a re-appreciation of modernism, but actually to be honest, because of these studies of Russian constructivism there was a strong focus on typological studies, so you might say that the side effect of this was that our thinking about architecture turned to be quite diagrammatical, so we were very good in thinking about these housing models, you could make a corridor and from the corridor you could go up and down and make all kinds of complex project which combined different typologies into one building, and this is also a very important Dutch tradition, because we have a small country, it is very dense so we are always looking very carefully in housing project to be very efficient with

Q – Could you tell us a little about your own history and studies? A – From the post-war 1970’s-80’s period in architecture where you might say that there was a strong position of Dutch architecture in the Team10 movement, in establishing a certain architecture that was very based on a human scale, people like Aldo van Eyck and Herman Herzberger were teaching in the school, but you could also see this movement already becoming a bit tired, a bit aged, you could see that there were some people that were their followers they built a lot of social housing, and of course they were very concerned about all kinds of social issues but there was a kind of lack of awareness of materials and detailing. But there was you might even say in the Dutch architecture at a certain time, a difficulty to relate to history or relate to a kind of cultural context because they were focusing so much on social-political issues that the idea of architecture as also kind of an artistic expression got almost as if people were suspicious about it, the idea that if someone has artistic pretentions he cannot be an architect because an architect has to work for the people. It’s a kind of almost socialist or social-democratic idea of architecture. I think Herman Herzberger and also Aldo van Eyck are great architects, don’t make any mistake about that, I really think they are very important, they have done very interesting buildings, but as this movement that they started became quite popular, you also saw that the intensity slowly disappeared and became some sort of way of working, and what was interesting when I came into the faculty at Delft, you saw people looking for a new kind of thing that would inspire them. So you had on the one hand people like Max Rissélada who was one of my teachers, he also gave a lecture here and did some amazing exhibitions, but he was introducing looking back at the very early sources of modernism so he was for instance one of the first to rediscover Russian Constructivist architecture not only as an architectural style but also to look at it as one of the origins of social housing for

instance. I think these studies that were done in the 1920’s by people like Ginzburg with the Narkomfin building, but also studies that were not built, there was a lot of energy and a lot of condensed knowledge in these studies, and this was one of the very important sources also when I was studying, these kind of very detailed studies into configurations of housing. (…) And of course this idea of these communal spaces, what people could share, this was also inspiring for us at that time. (…) On the one hand we were not very inspired by this kind of architecture from the late 70’s early 80’s, we were looking for something new, from some of our teachers we got in touch with this 1920’s architecture which we found interesting, it was kind of a re-appreciation of modernism, but actually to be honest, because of these studies of Russian constructivism there was a strong focus on typological studies, so you might say that the side effect of this was that our thinking about architecture turned to be quite diagrammatical, so we were very good in thinking about these housing models, you could make a corridor and from the corridor you could go up and down and make all kinds of complex project which combined different typologies into one building, and this is also a very important Dutch tradition, because we have a small country, it is very dense so we are always looking very carefully in housing project to be very efficient with space and all that stuff. The side effect of this was that there was less attention for materials, for detailing. (…) And then, finally, Rem Koolhaas which I think has an enormous influence on my generation. (…) I was one of the first to make use of this European exchange, which is now the Erasmus program, and I studied in Berlin for a while, around 1984. (…) When I started studying, in the early 80’s, like today there was a very serious crisis in the building industry, so I remember the first day I came to the Faculty in architecture, the dean was telling to us as first year students “you can look at the one sitting next to you on one side and on the other side, and you have

to realize that only one of you three will find a job”. But actually we didn’t really care, because we were not so interested in becoming an architect or finding a job, because the welfare state was still quite generous in the Netherlands at that time. (…) When I graduated at the end of the 80’s beginning of the 90’s, by coincidence a friend of mine had a small commission for building nine houses and he said “do you want to join me” and I said “ya let’s do it” and we had an office just like that. We didn’t know many things but we had a lot of friends who worked in other offices (…) And this was great because it was the best way of learning these things, is by simply doing them. (…) I was already in my studies also interested in writing, in discussions on theory, I became a member of a magazine which is called OASE, it was initiated by students in Delft, especially from this group that I described before that was interested in Constructivist typologies. (…) I made an issue on another topic that I find interesting which is the idea of kind of the “world consciousness” in architecture, for instance you could say already in very old architecture, a certain kind of microcosm of representing a kind of “world”, but you could say that is a very classical notion of architecture, and say “how does that appear in modern architecture?” (…) I wrote an article about Buckminster Fuller, which I also found an intriguing person, I didn’t know really if I liked his projects, but his ideas were fascinating. (…) I like to look also at the boarders of architecture, when things are pushing the boarders of the discipline a bit. (…) What is interesting is that if you go to the boarder of things, you become more aware of what the discipline is about. If you only stay in the safe middle, your work also might become too restricted. So I wrote an article in that issue on the 1960’s, what was going on in art and architecture. I wrote one that is called “Houses of the Future”, [http://www.oasejournal.nl/en/Issues/75/HousesOfTheFuture#203] and I relate the work of Archigram, because they did a lot of explorations about what are the limits and consequences of thinking about

housing in a very radical way, and I position them against the Smithsons. (…) You have to be aware that I wrote about it because it was part of the discussions going on between young architects. So when Rem Koolhaas appeared we were fascinated by him because he brought in these 1960’s tradition that we didn’t have in Delft. (…) He was also influenced by these 1960’s but he also was taking a position against it, because they were literally his teachers, so as a student one of the things is you have to “kill” your teachers to take over their position. So for us it was a great time. (…) One of the other editors of OASE was Mikel van Gelderen, he started at Delft a little bit later. We worked on a certain issue together and we had communications, became friends, but I never did any projects with him. One day when we were having a discussion we said “There is this competition Europan” (…) I said “ya, I’m considering doing this competition” and Mikel also said “I’m also considering doing this competition” and we said “maybe we can do it together, ya let’s do it”. (…) Q – Could you talk about the role of writing in your architecture? A – For me writing is a way of investigating something. If I’m writing, I mostly write not so much about our office, but I like to use writing as a way of researching. So for me that’s always the most interesting thing. Q – What about today’s workshop? A – I’m not doing this alone, they say I’m the teacher but actually it’s cooperation with Enrico Forestieri and also with Gennaro Postiglione, so what we decided was to take the area of Corso XXII Marzo, there we did an amazing discovery of a housing block, and the housing block has a kind of traditional late 19th century facades, but when you go in it’s completely new. This was for us a very interesting thing, because in a workshop it’s a very difficult thing to work on the scale of the city and to try to avoid just making a formal, diagrammatic scheme, where you can say “ya, I work with this axis, and this block”,

of course you can do it, you can make schemes in a very short time, you can make a beautiful urban scheme in two weeks, it’s not a problem, but you have to think what is the relevance of this? Of course I can make something beautiful on an urban scale which has towers and slabs, but will it ever be done like this? What is the context that you are working in? So we said, let’s use this block as a kind of microcosm of the city. You could say there is a strange thing happening, some parts are very ugly, some parts are maybe even beautiful, some parts are occupied by the people that who live there, there is this strange thing of a combination of historic facades, and new elements, this block is not a piece of very known architects, many people in Milan don’t even know it. We used it like a found object, something that you discover, and we will concentrate just on this one block.

is doing a small fragment. But it’s very important to also get the larger picture and therefore you need this kind of pin-upp thing and this idea of a police station working on a crime scene.

Q – Do you have any nice sketches ready to show? A – Well I asked the students this morning to put everything on the wall, because I want to have a kind of atmosphere a little bit like what you find if you look at detective series on the television, you see the team is coming and they say “here are the photos of the crime scene, here is the picture of the victim with the bullet through his head, and here these are the victims” and they draw lines and they have these meetings and update each other, and they go away and work on the laptop and come together for the meeting. It’s very important that it’s not only digital, like dropbox and sharing information, but also really see the information. When I walked in the room this morning I said “No, it’s an empty room, it’s not a space to work in”. It has to be visible. We divided the students in sub-groups so all the sub-groups are working on different small parts of this project. Some are doing interviews with inhabitants, some are doing interviews with the architect, and they discovered who the architect is. Some are doing a little bit of historic research about the background of social housing in Italy, so everyone

Nicolas. Gilsoul

FEEL THE LANDSCAPE Interview with Nicolas Gilsoul By Margherita Napolitani, Clarissa Orsini

We had the opportunity to speak with the French architect Nicolas Gilsoul: landscaper, architect with a PhD in sciences, these three things combined together allow him to carry out his profession with a different look and probably more careful and profound. These three aspects, related in some way but also very different, allowed him to develop his design methodology with sensitiveness to the needs of the human being, but especially to those of the external environment, to seek all possible solutions to find how these two entities so different from each other can learn to live with.

Q: How would you like to introduce yourself and your work, your projects with few words? If you would have to introduce yourself and your projects with few sentences which words would you like to use? Could you explain us your point of view on architecture and on the relationship between architecture and landscape, giving us also some tips or anticipations about the tonight’s lecture? A: Ok that’s a difficult question! Ok maybe it’s easy to start in this way… I’m an architect and a landscape architect and I’ve also a PhD in Sciences and actually those three things are coming together, are connected together in my works. Most of my works are landscape projects and here the idea is always to find the way to create a kind of hybrid between cities nature but, of course, not by paintings the walls in green but by using the natural dynamics. So tonight we will try to travel a lot together in Japan, in Africa, in Singapore, in India just to see how the cities are creating resilience strategies against the sea-level,

river water-level, or against the climate change, the flooding areas, and so how can the landscape react to these phenomena? How can the landscape be modified? Q: Ok I will now ask you something not so general, or rather, more related to this workshop. As you may know, there’s a group of students working on the Lambro Park, here in Milan, and so I would like to ask you what do you think about it. Have you already been there? Is there anything that you would like to suggest to the student working on it? A: No, unfortunately, I haven’t been yet there, but that’s a very interesting place. And actually it’s interesting because I didn’t visit it yet, I just check on Google how it is and how it looks like trying to understand how it works. I saw a lot of polluted areas, post-industrial lots and it is very common in our cities nowadays. I’ve been also working on a similar scenario with my students in Paris, and on the same question more or less: what can we do in this situation? What can we do with this kind of landscape? When I checked the Lambro Park on the internet I’ve seen some beautiful pictures of idyllic places and then just next those you find picture of horrible places with black water and of course the Lambro could overflow and that’s the interesting because we don’t know how to work with an area like this one, with so many problems and different situations. (I will tell you more after visiting it!) And it’s the same in India, it’s the same in Japan, in Africa. The city grows and while expanding it hurts somewhere, very often along rivers.

Q: How can we solve this kind of problems with practical solutions? A: Actually I’m going to explain this tonight, but we can talk very shortly about it now. I found five strategies, if you find a sixth one, please just call me, because I would like to know it! The first strategy, that is becoming very common in Asian countries like China and Arabic Gulf, could be an ark, a boat, a sort of ship, creating a floating city but, of course, the problem would be that it would be just for few people only, for few rich people only! The second strategy is the wall, a sort of shield that you create to protect yourself, but this wall would never been high enough since the water can rise very high level, and then after a period this kind of board becomes the new topography itself creating new dunes and hills. The third strategy is not an object but is an action that we can do. We can try to divide the dynamic of the water and it’s flood and movements. This operation could be realise by re-shaping the river and making its flood slower. The fourth one is living on sticks, you could live on wooden sticks or concrete sticks or pillars and that’s very interesting in a landscape like the tropical area, for instance, because you create a new microclimate and you can play with it, modify it study it. And the last and fifth strategy is… mmm… I just forgot it! Aaah no, yes of course, the last one is sponge! You can absorb the water. But absorbing the water means creating a resilient lanscape like in the Rio Madrid, for instance, where you have a long one and it absorb all the rain water but also the overflow of the river. And of course you can combine those strategies together creating something new, like in a project I will show you tonight. It’s a project for the Tokyo Bay in Japan, in which we try to protect the bay against a huge amount of water in once, by combining together all these strategies we tried to protect the bay against tsunamis.

Renato d'Alencon . Castrillon

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feel the heritage Interview with Renato d’Alencon Castrillon By Claudia Scaravaggi, Yafim Simanovsky

Coming from Chile, Renato is currently a professor in Berlin, among his other work. Towards the end of the first week, we spoke with him to hear more about his recent works in restoration and buildings in disaster-struck areas, his experience in Haiti and his views on lessons learned. The following is the interview conducted. Q: How did you translate and apply what you have learned in Europe in your experiences in Chile and in Haiti?

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A: We took the idea of reusing materials from Europe, in the Netherlands in particular there are two or three architectural practices doing this work: they developed a methodology called “harvest mapping”, where they chart the sources for reusing materials out of the urban context, abandoned buildings, farms and industries that were left over, containers and so on. Moreover the experience of trummer frauen, of the woman of berlin that worked after the war, and other experiences, we have a semester in which we had to think about “what can we bring from this experience that can have a good sense and utility, and that is not already there?”. Chile is not a country that is indifense and people are very clever; there are a lot of things, so we needed to be very selective, so we brought this and we put it into a test and what we brought back for the most part is something that is very fundamental for the students. The experiences of build objects, new technical knowledge, the understanding of how much you sweat when building and how much money it costs, how much time and effort. So when you do this experience your plans are never the same again (...). Further the reuse of materials has potential and we forced the limit of this by

going to Haiti where we have seen the effects and the limits of this experience. In the case of Chanco we took all these things that had a heritage cultural value and in Haiti, instead, it was not the case of a very cultural thing, there was collapsed concrete, it was heritage in the more material sense. It is a different dimension of the same problem, so when we tested it in different sites we have seen the coincidence and the non-coincidence, so we could appreciate which was the core of the thing. We are starting working in Italy, in L’Aquila, and there are many coincidences, surprisingly i can see the same problems even if they are totally different countries and there are totally different contexts, with a very strong cultural context, there is a very massive operation, closure of the city, the political will, but all these things exist everywhere, (...), they happen with a different balance but you can recognize many continuous factors. Much of the learning is that these phenomena are one same nature, they happen and fault with different emphasis but they are the same thing basically. Q: In Haiti what did you learn from the people of the city? Did they collaborate with you? A: This is an interesting thing because in the case of Chanco we worked among ourselves with the local government, the Municipality, and it had some advantages, but we never really interacted with the people of the city. We realized this and we decided that the next time we would work with the citizens. In Haiti it happened, and it was really a wonderful experience because we realized how committed people can be. When we started I thought that we were the main builders, the students and the volunteers. But in the end it was very different

because the community started to collaborate seriously, it was an initiative for them to develop as an enterprise for building things. We worked together to build the first ten houses, and now they are continuing working by themselves, basically because they believed in the project, and this is quite a compliment for us. So we could leave the people and we could really trust that they go on with the project, even if they are not paid, and nevertheless they are investing their time to develop this project. So what we have learned is that given an opportunity, people are ready to seize it. The empowerment of the community, we didn’t bring anything, not much money, we had a budget for materials, but nothing else. The rest we paid, organized events, fundraising, crowd funding, so in that we could contribute, but this was not something that was given to the workers, it was given to the families that were in the houses. Some of these were the same, but not all of them. (…) So now all of us, we here all over Europe and they in Haiti, are hoping and working for a second part of the project where we will continue to work more professionally, for a longer period, more houses, with a different model because it needs to be scaled up to make it cost efficient. So we are negotiating with an NGO to see if we can make an alliance so that they can help us administrate and apply for funding etc. etc. It’s an ongoing learning process for us. Q: About the South American “Favelas”, there is an element of material reclamation there, can you say something about that? A: Well Haiti is different from South America in places like Brazil. We have worked there too, with other projects, but in the state capital of Vitoria; they have favelas in a central but difficult site, we have partners who work there. (…) It’s all about community development based on credit, and this credit is administered by the community and the community makes assemblies to make decisions, and for that our architect partners reuse a dump-yard and turn it into a Forum. And urban forum for the favela people to meet, and party and so forth, but

also to make decisions and discussions in a more political sense etc. (…) Basically it is recovering the ground floor, and providing benches and things for the community to sit around etc. (…) You need to be creative to find the possibilities and identify the problems and turn them into an advantage for your purpose. Q: Are you going to organize some workshops/work camp where students of architecture can apply? Where can they find the information? A: Well we have several web pages. The main one is http://www.reclaimingheritage.org/, the other one is http://www.rebuildhaitihomes. org/, we also have an indiegogo for that. We have another project in Ulan Bator in Mongolia, which is now building something there. And for the most part this has been a project of students from Berlin, but we are drifting a bit out of that and making it a bit longer, and this year for the first time we had a guest student from Valencia who had nothing to do with the university at all and somehow managed to get the funding and the “ok” from the university to come and do this workshop with us. (…) We are very open. As I tell you it is basically stopping to be just a student initiative and it’s becoming a little NGO or foundation.

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Roelof Verhage .

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Feel the regeneration interview with Roelof Verhage

It’s here with us Roelof Verhage, a Dutch urban planner, who is also a professor and lecturer at the Urbanism Institute of Lyon. He’s the guest of Section E, hosted by Corinna Morandi and Lina Scavuzzo.

Q:Can you tell us something about your background and your academic experiences?

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A: As I said I’m from the Netherlands where i got my PhD in Urban Planning and where I worked for a few years; then I moved to France for a “Marie Curie” fellowship for a urban regeneration project that compared the work of France, Netherlands and United Kingdom. After this program I managed to get a lecturer position at the Urbanism Institute of Lyon, which I am currently occupying. Q: Can you make a comparison between the French urban planning method and the Italian one? A: There’s a difference between urban planning in France and in Italy: the urban planner profession in Italy came out of the architecture tradition with emphasis on urban design and the form; whereas in France urban planning came out of territory analysis, geography and there’s a strong link to urban sociology and human sciences approach. We’re both working on the same things but from different angles. Q: What are your actual and future projects? A: I just finished a big project: a book with some colleagues of London on planning property developement and risk, how to develop urban areas in a situation in which we rely on private investments. We analyzed several projects from the

Netherlands trying to understand what is the role of the public center in obtaining subjects in the urban regeneration projects. My other project is a bit more personal and is about my academical career in France: I’m working on a document called habilitation diriger rechercher that will show the work I’ve been doing in the field of research and this will enable me to advance in my career. Q: Is there any common topics in your works? A: The things that always come back are urban regeneration of the decayed parts of the city and a strong interest for the land developement. It’s very important to understand how the transformation of the land has to be done and what it involves in terms of actors and owners: I think it explains a lot about how regeneration works. Another main topic is european comparison: I try to work in between France, the Netherlands, Italy and the United Kingdom because I think it’s very interesting to know and compare different points of view. Q: What is your opinion about the program Re-forming Milan ? A: I think we’re still quite far from the actual realization of this project, but at this initial stage it is important to think about what are the possibilities we have and what’s the future we want for the city.

SEbastien . Marot

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Feel your nostalgia Interview with Sebastien Marot By Leonardo Gatti, Claudia Scaravaggi, Yafim Simanovsky

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Our following discussion was with Sebastien Marot, a philosopher and architectural and landscape design critic. After his keynote lecture on the first day of the workshop, we took him aside for a long conversation about what writing is about, what challenges face the future of design, nostalgia in architecture, and the subject of space-time. Here is what he had to say.

transformed and the countryside is a place where the people move to, there is a kind of reverse movement, and this is a reason for huge transformations, not necessarily of the form of the villages yet, but for a completly different life. So i do think that we architects need to update our understanding of the all territory, we have to understand that is not divided anymore.

Q: Considering the saturation on the earth, in terms of constructions and urbanisation, and according to the main theme of the workshop re-forming milano, which is the relevance of architecture and the role of the architect nowaday?

Q: Refering to the Jackson’s ideas of vernacular landscape what do you think about the landscape today? Which can be the architect’s approach to the paysage?

A: I think that the city has been for a long time the basic reference for the architects. The city traditionally was something easy to destinguish from something else. Nowadays the situation is really changed. Now the word “city” is carrying so many things that is difficoult to understand what you mean when you say “city”. At least is not that easily distuiguishing from an other background. So I think that there is a little problem today: we don’t exactly know what are the territories that we are refering to. I was really interested in the research that Koolhaas did with his team on countryside, and I think he was right, he said that architects today are more focused on the city, but now the largest transformations are not accurring in what we call the city, but in what it used to be called the countryside. We should better look on what it is happening there, the way agricolture has been transformed drastically through the use of new technological techniques. We still have a kind of basic undestanding that the territory has been divided between the city that now we call metropoly and the countryside. The city has been

A: Jackson made a distinction between three kind of landscape and three different periods. I think that his great hesitation is linked with yperlinks. Because they are both types of landscape, but also periods and regimes of landscape, that if you try to use them as categories in most of the situation you have difficoulties to distinguish one from the other one. So this is what let me propose the idea of yperlink. I really agree with him when he says that we can’t use anymore the metaphore of the landscape as a theatre. With this metaphore we think that we can see the landscape just from a point of view, and for this reason everything is clear and logical related to the point of you that we are assuming. Today with this superimposition of different logics and regimes there is not a specific point of view and they are simoultaneously there. For this reason we need to develop a vertical understanding of what landscape are and to make them in a way simoultaneously enjoyable although they are really different one from the other one. This is why I like the image of the ypertext: it makes you link together things that are completely indipendent one by an other one. This

can be the metaphore of the work that architects can do locally. This different “links” are there together, so it is better if we accept them and then consider them as stories or layers that we have to deal with (not only buildings have stories, even landscapes). Rem Koolhas has a specific idea of skyscraper and my idea was to reverse this concept. In his opinion these buildings are a superimposition of different stories. When I started to write my book I really didn’t know which site should I use, because New York is really powerful, and I didn’t find a place that was enough powerful to do the reverse demonstration, untill I went to Cornell University to do lecture in Ithaca, I discovered a wonderful landscape of gorgees, when you look at a gorge that has been curved by the glacier and modified by the erogical erosion, when you look at its section, you will see that there is a sedimentar layer: the last compressed trace of an epoque of that landscape. So when you are in a gorge you are travelling trough a superimposition of landscape reduced to that compression. So if you think this and you compare it to the skryscraper you can call it “eathscraper”, and this is why I choose that site. This is also to say that we can look at the landscape sectionally and that there are four dimensions, because if you develop all these things you will have a section of a larger reality. Q: Could you elaborate and explain us the quotation “give space to time and time to space” that you mentioned at the end of your lecture? A: I always think about the environmental situation, I am very concerned about the evolution of that situation. Colin Rowe’s work after his “Collage City” in 1981 was the article “The Present Urban Predicament” for the journal at Cornell, a criticism about the city and modernism and the need for the inclusion of Memory and looking to the Future. In our time you can simply replace the word “Urban” with”Environment”, because now this is the scale of the problem; this “sustainability” issue is mentioned around us every day. Throughout recent history people

such as Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford expressed criticism about this focus on the concept of “city”, and tried to offer different views on a larger scale (such as the “region”). I take very seriously the book “The Limits to Growth” (1972), which I mentioned; it is the best book I have ever read on this subject of sustainability, it was very criticized when it came out. Everybody read that book! Rem read that book of course, Ungers read that book, and they were amazed and this brought a huge debate about this issue. The people who wrote it were people specializing in system’s dynamics, and talking about all these things like pollution and growth and sustainable futures etc. This connects of course to the idea of space and time because as they say “the clock is ticking”, and I think that one of our tasks is to give places a future, to give time to space is to actually give time to the earth. Doing a project is in a way entering into a conversation. It was there before you arrived and you have to try to understand first “what is the subject?” and it is not going to end when you leave, the discussion will go on, so you are not going to “solve” the question, you have to keep that in mind when you work. Q: Specifically in the Italian/Milanese context, what is the relationship of MIAW to the idea of “nostalgia” and how can we develop it in an important way? A: I cannot answer for Milan because I am less familiar with it, but what I think is that when everybody in a given milieu start saying that nostalgia is a “sin”, I wonder why. Why is nostalgia considered a sort of “evil”? It is a Freudian repression of this feeling, and maybe it is justified by being an illusion of a time that passed, so you have to control what you filter into your work of course, but nostalgia is a feeling. It is a feeling that somehow the present is not what you hoped and these images come to you as an effect, a force that you reference from your past to project your future. It is a tool in a sense. Nostalgia maybe bad, but repressed nostalgia is even worse! Nostalgia sometimes pushes

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people to invent amazing things, like the Renaissance period as I mentioned in my lecture, I want to “unchain” nostalgia. To turn the past into something eternal, like Proust wrote, I think in architecture it will be something of an achievement. We should imagine that the world could be eternal, but be very conscious at the same time that it could stop tomorrow. Q: Can you explain us the binomy site-programme?

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A: I think that the site arrives before the programme. Actually in many situations the reason why we do a project is not that we have a programme. For istance when a big company leaves the city and the city asks to itself what can it do, they have a site not a programme. It’s never purely a programme that comes first, is more a dialectical binomy. So when we look at the planet and landscape then we add new questions, what can be the rhole of the architect? I think that at least is important coming from the site to the programme in any reason is interesting. There is a nice quotation from André Corboz: you can superimpose all the maps of the region of malpensa that you want but you will never reduce the dimension of the airport. This summer I went with a friend of mine to la ZAD, where some people are occupying 3000 hectars where the city wants to build a new airport, so they built a defense to protect the landscape. Some farmers has already sold their farms, other are still resisting, right now they are doing wonderful experiences, for example the permaculture, just spending a week there is refreshing. Q: Expectations for this workshop, role, usefullness of interview in architecture. A: I’ve seen the mission that you have here, reporting, documenting. I think that you have a rensponsability in a way: rasing the issues. The workshop is really ambitious. You have to be a kind of bee. You have to help them. Avoid cliché, it is difficoult because we are surrounded by cliché. A city is a place where you

can have conversations: this is the most precise definition of what a city is. (…) Architecture is about conversing, gathering and exchanging ideas and the city are the places wheer you should share ideas.

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Blog

http://miawspaper.wordpress.com/

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Facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/MIAW2014

YouTube channel

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq26VpEJ1BOaocPQVAFW4Jg

network Blog, Facebook Page, You tube Channel

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In the process of an international workshop like MIAW, there are many things to experience and learn. Hence for the people who are following this event from outside and haven’t had the chance to participate in, MIAW tries to share its product with them by any means of communication that is possible. The MIAW’s network including MIAW2014 page on Facebook, played a great role in this communication and MIAWsPAPER - the blog - made it possible to get a rough image of what is going on in different sections. Moreover, the lectures’ videos went online on YouTube for you to have a piece, at least. There is also MIAW’s official website to keep you up to date by this event which takes place twice a year. So please check it out time to time in order to get informed for the future activities.

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