Architecture, Culture and Heritage - A design and research agenda at the UEL. Considering that heritage represents 70% of the profession’s workload, we understand cultural heritage, transformation and restoration as integral components of the design practice. Interest focuses in the cultural, site-specific and material aspects of contexts and more broadly in socio-political, economic and climatic influences. The historical dimension is for us a challenging and inspiring resource, driving a sharpening, sophisticated and potential effect on contemporary design in architecture. Carlo Cappai, Alan Chandler and Maria Alessandra Segantini work on this research in collaboration with the Soprintendenza Regionale del Veneto, led by Renata Codello (Italian Ministry of Culture) to generate a series of guidelines for the regeneration of the Riviera del Brenta in Italy, a territory punctuated by some of the most important Venetian Villas, which are presently under pressure due to the recent financial as well as environmental crisis. The research is linked to teaching of the MArch studio of Cappai and Segantini - C+S Architects - which aims to evaluate and question the whole design process, through the development of a series of design strategies at different scales, in complex stratified urban landscapes; to create and suggest programs, as well as possible clients; to evaluate the potential of each site with a strong interdisciplinary mapping of the proposed contexts: climate, budget, social and economic perspectives, materiality, topography, history, socio-political expectations, to name some; to acquire an open-ended perspective of the design output, with the character of the non-finished, in the aim to allow further future interventions. A parallel theory module is taught in collaboration by Chandler and Segantini who, through a series of lecture, touch the main topics of Histories and Historiographies.
Literature and history reviews, relating to the physical changes within the area of study: The Politics of Heritage intended as the Methodology for Heritage and Conservation and challenges for re-generation; The Soft-Tech Challenge as a Methodology of technological adaptation and lowimpact technologies to plug in the environment as challenges for re-generation; The Politics of land use in the urban realm as aspects of economic potentials, ownership and surveillance in the definition and management of public, quasi-public and private space within the specific case-study and the Politics of ‘Community’, meant as the manufacture of ‘communities’ within the process of regeneration. Both the theory and practice module aim to provide students with a methodology and a set of knowledge to map the contexts and develop a series of design strategies at different scales in complex, stratified urban landscapes, enabling them to understand and communicate the relationships between the physical features as well as the social, economic, political forces and policies acting in one specific urban casestudy and the responsibility of the design actions to activate processes of ‘urban regeneration’ in the respect of the identity of the places.
P21 RESEARCH – PROJECTS – AWARDS – CONFERENCES
INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH COLLABORATION