Regeneration of the Recent Past

Teac h

ing INTE RNA TION AL R ESEA RCH ING &

Inter natio nal N etwo rk of Rese arch and

TEA CHIN G EX PER IENC E

PierAntonio Val

REGENERATION OF THE RECENT PAST INTERNATIONAL RESEARCHING & TEACHING EXPERIENCE

edited by PierAntonio Val

New edition with a new introductory essay

International Network of Research and Teaching

The International Network of Research and Teaching - INReTe wants to be a platform for critical dialogue, for ordering and comparing didactic and research experiences. It aims to offer an open space for reasoning where stimulate the interconnections and the comparison between different knowledge and skills on the project.

Scientific Committee PierAntonio Val (series director) Università Iuav di Venezia Guya Bertelli Politecnico di Milano Hervé Dubois École Nationale Paris Val De Seine Donatella Fioretti Akademie der Künste Düsseldorf

Regeneration of the Recent Past International researching & teaching experience edited by PierAntonio Val ISBN 978-88-32050-99-8 Project sheets editing Emilio Antoniol Mirko Capuzzo Giacomo Malvestio Simone Manfreo Francesca Marchetto Gianluca Marin Francesca Peltrera Angela Perazzolo Andrea Praolini Translations Olga Barmine

Giovanni Vragnaz Università di Udine

Published Issues 1. Regeneration of the Recent Past [2016] (2021) 2. Reversed Archeology (2020) 3. Tropical Architecture Rwanda (2021)

Published by Anteferma Edizioni Srl via Asolo 12, Conegliano, TV edizioni@anteferma.it Second edition: 2021 Copyright

This work is distributed under Creative Commons License Attribution - Non-commercial - No derivate works 4.0 International

The publication is the result of a research funded by the Department of Architecture Construction Conservation (DACC) of Iuav University of Venice and directed by PierAntonio Val that is entitled “Building on Built”.

A thanks goes to the Department Head Antonella Cecchi, to the Head of MA Degree Course Armando Dal Fabbro and to all the colleagues with whom I worked together and that supported this work, even if they are not present in this book, like the professors Andrea Benedetti, Emanuela Sorbo and Lamberto Borsoi.

This project involves four other foreign Universities for the necessary international dimension that these issues imply. For this reason I have to thank Marielle Riche, as anciet Director of ENSA Marseilles and Jean-Marc Zuretti as the new one and the Assistant Director Roblin Véronique; Philippe Bach, as Director of ENSA Paris Val de Seine and Donato Severo of ENSA Paris; Mr. Narciso Vázquez Carretero, as the Director of the High Technical School of Architecture of Seville, and Mr. Luis Rey Goñi, as Embassador of Singularity University Seville.

I have to thank Emilio Antoniol for the effort and patience put to the conclusion of this book and to all my teaching collaborators.

A thought goes to Guya Bertelli, Director of the Piacenza Pole of the Polytechnic of Milan, where for the first time I started this Skype connection pilot experience.

Finally a thought of gratitude goes to Carlo Magnani, promoter since the 2002 of the international workshops, thus giving off a broader discussion on the architectural design issues and about the relationship between teaching and research.

Cover image: Taxonomy of different settlement strategies concerning the regeneration of wine tasting places along the Prosecco road, 2014-15.

Table of contents

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The hand of Emanuele Severino and/or the open hand of Le Corbusier PierAntonio Val

21

The Art of Design - The Art of Action

27

Designing shared relationships and identities

35

Exterior additions to existing buildings: forms and structural types

45

Reality and truth

51

Building on built

79

For a new dialogue of rationality

PierAntonio Val

PierAntonio Val

Roberto Di Marco and Paolo Foraboschi

PierAntonio Val

Seville José Morales and Sara De Giles

Venice PierAntonio Val

105

Building by layers

131

Reflections reflected

157

The soft and the rough

183

Experimental teaching as experimental research

Paris Hervé Dubois and Laurent Lehmann

New York David Turnbull and Guido Zuliani

Marseilles Jean-Luc Rolland

PierAntonio Val

The hand of Emanuele Severino and/or the open hand of Le Corbusier PierAntonio Val

The hand of Emanuele Severino and/or the open hand of Le Corbusier Introduction to the second edition PierAntonio Val

“Sense therefore also comprehends non-sense, anti-Logos [...]. The dimension of sense is not only sense, it is also the absolute genesis of sense in general, and it is self-sufficient. Immanence is complete”.

Jean Hyppolite, Logique et existence, Presses Universitaires, Paris, 1953.

There were many reasons that led me to make some considerations on the occasion of the release of the second edition of this book.

The book, released in 2017, has been out of print for some time. It is now coming out with a new publisher, becoming the first volume of a new series entitled: INReTe. A second volume of the same series was already released a few months ago, a book of mine entitled Reversed Archeology. There is a third volume that illustrates a different teaching experience in Africa, in Rwanda.

The purpose of the series is to contribute to giving order and organic structure to the definition of a research and teaching direction for the project. The acronym itself INReTE - International Network Research and Teaching sums up the intentions. It aims to be a platform for critical dialogue, for ordering, comparing and integrating teaching and research experiences. The goal is to provide a lively and open place for reflection to stimulate interconnections and the discussion of knowledge and skills regarding the architectural project. This must begin from the experience, from project practice and starting (we think) from the awareness of the centrality that the architectural project implicitly presupposes.

Everything happens in the common belief that the architectural project is not only a solution for a place, but is also an analytical means to describe the context. The project must especially be an indispensable tool for reflecting on itself to construct the margins, as well as defining the canons, of its possible transmissibility1. It is a tool to be practiced, but in an effective manner, only if it is critically confronted with the metamorphosis of the civil reality, if it relates to the world in its entirety.

I am writing this introduction in the early days of 2021, after the break of the end of year holidays. In this very short period, an assortment of

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news measured the complicated dynamic, accelerated and global picture of the metamorphosis underway.

Vaccinations against COVID-19 have begun these days throughout the world. A success achieved in less than a year, thanks to the extraordinary “power” of scientific and technical knowledge, and above all thanks to the possibility of working and comparing knowledge and skills, on a global level, in a very short time and online.

Europe launched a coordinated health and economic programme for the whole Union. Accordingly, the Next generation EU outlined the prerequisites for an overall European green renewal plan for the territory. It was an unprecedented project and was the product of a metamorphosis of the same economic and political paradigms that had governed the Union up to now.

At the same time, we saw a shift in the direction of the United States of America. The new Biden presidency intends to prepare a New Green Deal: an economic policy aimed, here too, at the sustainable regeneration of the environment, cities and territory. However, resistance and friction with respect to such a change of direction, within the United States itself, are evident and disconcerting.

In this composite framework, there is some discussion also in Italy. The state is confronted with the indispensable need to define a programmatic direction for a major project of renewal and economic and physical reconstruction of the country, in line with Europe and with these renewed Western policies.

Everything is happening while the significance of the East continues to grow, interfering more and more in the gravitational, economic and cultural and global fields. The annual world budget estimates indicate China, as early as 2025, will be the number one world economy.

The conflicts generated by such an accelerated global transformation of the “forcefields” radicalise the aporias of a development that seems unable to combine population density and a sustainable use of the environment, resources and technology. It does not seem to be a coincidence that China is one of the places where the latest

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global epidemics have originated most often, and not just the current COVID-19 pandemic.

The Middle East and Africa fluctuate within a framework of tensions and conflicts, despite their very profound differences. Here too, however, the issues of construction, and above all of reconstruction, are central today, and are measured in a contradictory way, with the themes of redefining the ways and forms of living. Here, too, the issues of lifestyle must be capable of intercepting environmental issues, the search for sustainable development, which is targeted and above all compatible with these different specific cultures and diverse complex economies.

Here too, however, we should take into account that such a complicated framework of diverse economies and cultures is increasingly interfering with, and interfered in turn by, the global framework.

The whole world is now demonstrating the need to redefine ways and forms of living, according to the accelerated framework of transformations, and also according to climate change and the depletion of resources. In the same way, the redefinition of the forms of living must be confronted with the search for social sustainability according to the rapid changes in our lifestyle on an individual, collective and employment level. Above all, this must be measured against the values of differences and specificities, both environmental and cultural, that this social sustainability implies and above all requires.

These are issues that are inevitably influenced by an important dialectical conflict. The conflict is generated, on the one hand, by the tension towards an irresistible adhesion to an increasingly strong, unidirectional and global economic, cultural and technical mainstream.

On the other hand, the conflict is produced by the recognition of the presence of a widespread and necessary resilience, both passive and active, in defence of identity values and in support of the richness of differences and specificities as well as global climatic and cultural environments. In essence, resistance is the product that emerges from the refusal of standardisation, both environmental and social. It is the awareness that difference is not only a social value, but also an economic one.

In this situation, we must ask ourselves what this resistance implies, also on the project level? Should it be taken as an opportunity, or as an impediment? What does this conflictual relationship that emerges in a widespread way entail for accelerated transformation and resilience? From the point of view of the architectural project, what does all this imply, on a strictly disciplinary level and on the level of the necessary transmissibility of the architectural discipline?

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What can the form “of the precipitate” of this dialectical conflict be with regard to the built environment: with regard to the cities, the territory, the landscape and the morphological and constructive strategies of the project itself? Most definitely it is the need for a vast regenerative project of the anthropised environment.

Everything needs to be analysed, both from the point of view of research and teaching and on a broader level: interdisciplinary and necessarily international. The approach must be international because today there are fewer and fewer borders and more and more networks. It is also, necessarily, interdisciplinary, because in reality there are no disciplinary sectors “as Popper said”, but only issues to be resolved.

In particular, on a more specific level, another question emerges as a priority. How and in what way should we face the necessary modernisation of buildings and the relatively more recent city: the architecture of the second half of the last century?

Construction after the Second World War is the most significant problem, at least in terms of size in almost all parts of the world. Today, the problem of the regeneration of these parts of the city is definitely a difficult but fundamental and specific issue to deal with.

Does addressing the transformation of this type of architecture, defined in this book in 2017 as “the architecture of the near past”, presuppose a paradigm shift with regard to the assumptions and techniques of architectural design? Or at least, is a realignment necessary? Does this framework, and any underlying change of paradigm, also influence the transmissibility of the discipline of architectural design, in its teaching? Again, based on these assumptions, could it be argued that in architecture a language of modification and of layering in dialogue with reality, in contrast to a language of the new, can grow stronger and stronger today? By language of the new, I mean the language of the modern based on ideological imposition, and standardisation of forms and models and practiced in forms of a priori contrast with respect to the diversity of the contexts and their histories. This language of the new has almost entirely typified the culture of the twentieth century and has, unfortunately, very often hardened the very concept of modernity within it.

Our commitment, and implicitly the INReTE series, is founded on the attempt to engage with these questions and try to give shape to the answers. We have been doing this for many years, mainly from within the University, but not only. We intend to do this essentially by constructing a dialogue as broad (international) and as comprehensive 9

(interdisciplinary) as possible. The intention is to construct a place for reflection, a field of relationships, to feed a network.

For this reason, and starting from the Iuav, an international group of professors from various European universities wanted to increasingly unite to put this comprehensive field of study “on the net”, to share thoughts and experiences, using IT tools for dialogue and the work of remote research, and for e-learning.

The network was formed with the intention of building a necessary low-cost international discussion, integrating research and traditional teaching. It was born from the belief that research and teaching must be intertwined. It was set up to discuss the issues and the respective places of experimentation in the successive and various years, and from here to arrive at more general considerations of a theoretical nature. The network has directly brought together, over time, more than a dozen professors from various universities, and not only in Europe.

While the number of those who have been indirectly involved, in the various universities, however, is much greater. This book is the first moment of public reflection and discussion, to organise and disseminate experiences and considerations regarding particularly the regeneration of architecture and the city of the near past.

Many places are addressed, ranging from New York to Venice, from Paris and Marseille to Seville. In the same way, the themes are comprehensive and are emblematic of the open questions in the present, such as: the regeneration of neighbourhoods created after the war; the reuse of buildings and industrial areas; the redevelopment of smaller towns and villages in Europe, as well as the restructuring and mending of the suburbs of large cities and metropolises. The theme of the regeneration of the recent past also presupposes a critical discussion, both with minor buildings and with the qualified architecture of the recent past and with its language (in this book, for example, with the architecture of G. Samonà to F. Pouillon). The issue requires not only a critical reinterpretation of places and environments but presupposes, in a more abstract form, a profound and more difficult critical rethinking of the models of living, and also requires a reinterpretation and reinvention of types of buildings and settlements. Basically, it requires the shaping, through design, of a specific and non-dissolutive constructive and prefigurative critical attitude towards reality.

Perhaps this is why I prefer to use, in these cases, the word resistance (in particular by reinforcing it with the adjective: active) instead of the abused term resilience, for an active (and not passive) meaning that this term implies.

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fig.1 Portrait of his own hand, sketch by Álvaro Siza Vieira.

With “active resistance” I want, above all, to define an attitude that pursues a critical distance with respect to reality and equally seeks both the essence of its necessity and the characteristics of its persistence over time. In this way, I would like to allude to an attitude and consequently to a thought and a project that is conversant and at the same time resistant, durable not only in the present but also in the long term. A thought and a resistant project that intertwines nostalgia for the past and desire for the future, to illuminate the light of the present and the absolute need for its renewal through the civil challenge that the project must inevitably envisage.

In fact, the meaning of the term resistance or rather of “resistant action” implies an active orientation towards a goal. The word resistance flanked by the term “criticism” takes on a reinforced meaning, which we could say civil, in the direction of reality. It takes on political significance.

The events of recent months have shown that such an attitude has already been transformed from a simple cultural attitude into a political one.

This is demonstrated, for example, by the New European Bauhaus programme to support the themes of the New Green Deal launched

by President Ursula von der Leyen and dedicated to the themes of beauty and sustainability in disciplinary areas that are central to us and relevant to the efforts made so far.

Precisely with respect to this current political situation, it is necessary to continue to operate and specify our commitment to ask ourselves, on the civil level, what the role of the architectural discipline is and how it can be renewed, to realign architectural theory and practice consistent with this approach that is inescapable today. According to these policies, we need to continue to guide and integrate research and teaching within the university, intertwining speculative aspects and knowledge with skills.

To reiterate, it must be done in the awareness of an ever-changing general framework. Above all, it must be done through a continuous and attentive dialogue of the world of construction in general with the accelerated development of the technology. Today the relationship with technology is an equally important and inescapable part of the issue. This relationship is not only important because construction technologies have profoundly changed today, similar to what happened in the first half of the last century when the modern movement took off.

A relationship of critical resistance towards technology is essential, because technology today, from an instrument at the service of the other 11

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forces at play (science, social expectations, economics and politics, etc.), has tended increasingly to become itself the goal, which needs these other forces. In other words, it is a question of realising “that the inevitability of the domination of technology belongs to the new sense of the foundation”2, as Emanuele Severino claimed. On these issues, the debate and literature are immense and obviously they are of vital importance also for the field of artistic practices, and therefore in this case architecture and its contents. For this reason, it is necessary to interlace knowledge and disciplines in the research and teaching of the architectural project, also with respect to these aspects.

The text that here deals with the question of constructive and structural strategies regarding the issue of building on the built, from the viewpoint of the engineers, is indicative of wanting to pursue such a direction. Again in the book, in the projects for New York for example, research on new possible types of houses floating in concrete that can be created through the use of new construction technologies, integrated with the use of new materials, goes in this direction. The intent is to try to combine technology with the issues of sustainability, climate change, low construction costs and maintenance of buildings.

All the research work is done in the conviction that it is, in fact, necessary to be convinced, again paraphrasing another text by Severino, that “preventing the means from becoming ends, does not mean suppressing the means”3 nor does it mean not taking them into account; much less does it mean, “in a Freudian sense”, to remove the means from the centrality of the academic debate. “It means [instead] eliminating their claim to become ends”4 knowing , Severino argued, that behind at the helm of tools, methods and technology there is the “hand of necessity”5. For this reason, the hand of the man that Severino implicitly evokes (without any affection and optimism), must be ever more wise, lucid and disenchanted, but just as capable of guiding the technology towards fragments of rationality, to manage changes, in the search for a possible future. Especially in our specific case, it is necessary to build an architect’s hand that is also aware

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fig.2 New York, Newton Creek River, project of new floating houses in concrete achievable through the use of new construction techniques integrated with the use of new materials. Gusmaroli, Breda and Rombolà.

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- as Luciano Gallino argued - that “technological reason does not like to discuss ends, but results”6. The hand must, therefore, be capable of confronting both the ends and the results.

For this reason, the collaboration of everyone is required, that universities dialogue with the local authorities and the productive forces of society. By linking knowledge, one can think of reaching an advancement of thought; it is possible to envision and measure a project for the renewal of the city and of the coherent and shareable landscape, towards a new and different modernity. The hand evoked by Severino is a non-pacifying political hand, but capable of reading reality by establishing a critical and rational dialogue with it, and hence giving shape to the desire for its transformation.

Another symbolic hand, very much for the architect, could emerge in a dubious form from this discourse in relation to these themes, and in function of the regeneration of the present.

In fact, we can ask ourselves whether the same open hand, systematically re-proposed in symbolic form by Le Corbusier, has similarities and differences, with the hand evoked by Severino in his writings?

Is it not perhaps a coincidence that Le Corbusier progressively tended to favour the symbolic fragment of an open hand, over the image of the whole man juxtaposed to the parametric measurements of the Modulor? If this were the case, we could think that the apparent prevalence of the symbol of the open hand, compared to the whole man (vaguely proto-Renaissance of the Modulor), corresponds to the belief by Le Corbusier of an inevitable loss of confidence in regard to the desire for unity, centrality and standardising integrity of the structure of human thought in the modern day? Could it be said that this prevalence of the symbol of the fragment of the open hand corresponds, more or less consciously by the Swiss architect, to a realignment of thought? Could it be interpreted today that even behind the fragment of the open hand, the conviction emerges of having to confront, in the present, a comprehensive archipelago of different realities, produced by a collective construction, with different tempo-

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ralities, in which various branches of knowledge and also various ignorances are at work constantly and only in the best of cases for the apparent sharing of a single purpose? Could it be hypothesised that the fragment of Le Corbusier’s hand can symbolise, for today’s architect, that it is only possible to search with the project (occasionally and with extreme patience) a constellation of transformations and adjustments aimed at modifying reality, each time orienting (with the will and ability of the hand) ends and means to progressively construct fragments of rationality, to realise micro truths, limited but specific?

Le Corbusier’s hand should also have other meanings. The open hand is a symbol of availability, of welcome, tolerance and appropriateness with respect to the differences and plurality of social and environmental contexts. It is inclusive and not exclusive. For this reason, attention should be paid to the places and their histories and the right pietas practiced towards the present and the past.

The “urge to build [...] through a maieutics of the limit”, as Tafuri said about Alberti, must dominate. Likewise, we should be aware of the indispensable need to delineate a better future (both in the short term but especially in the long term). Today, the open hand must be able to pursue a design that not only transforms but “takes care” of the environment and the human space, and must be able to specify the purposes and not only interpret them, let alone mystify them. Today’s open hand must strive, above all, towards a genuine improvement of the quality of the living space, cities and landscape and not strive to create fetishes, whether they are objects or all the more just images at the service of the market and fashions. Architecture must first of all be space rather than an object. It is a hand “capable of wandering in more knowledge in order to identify the need, for the techné, to recognise itself in its own limitation” (again quoting Tafuri).

Some titles and subtitles in the form of slogans in the index of this volume and the successive book, construct an initial taxonomy that attempts to begin to describe the complexity of the issues at stake.

The art of design- The art of action; For a new dialogue of rationality; Designing shared relationships and identities; Building on built; Reality and truth; Building by layers; Metamorphosis of the forms of living; Open project; Change the present; Project, construction and maintenance; this is a part of that list of themes. This list of themes can constitute a framework for constructing a manifesto for the transformation of the present. An open manifesto, of course, subordinated to a continuous and patient clarification and/or transformation.

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fig.3 The hand of Le Corbusier reproduced at the entrance of the Iuav university in Venice.

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Today, in fact, continuous and constant research is needed around these issues and the quality and plurality of the characteristics of the living space, the home, the workplace and the city, characteristics aimed at reflecting these issues, convictions and changes. We need to pursue a design that privileges spatiality, both for the individual, but above all urban for the community. It is important that architecture seeks the tools to govern the relevant transformations taking place, consistent with the political framework outlined, and with the relative changing paradigmatic framework. We need to dig deep within the architectural language, seeking to practice experimentalism rather than radicalism in the project.

Likewise within the university, at this moment it would be good for there to be greater attention to the transmissibility of teaching, maintaining a tension towards the reality of the execution, as an extreme synthesis of the design approach based on knowledge and without evaporating an essential degree of autonomy of architecture, such as to guarantee its implicit cognitive dimension as a rational dialogue and dialectical process. For this reason, design laboratories should be transformed into spaces where knowledge is not transmitted, but is produced, between prefiguration and progressive familiarisation with reality and with the measure of things, accepting a limited unpredictability of results (a gap) and always proceeding in a dialectical way by affinity and difference. The hope is that all this can be the background to the New European Bauhaus, a programme to support the themes of the New Green Deal. This is our modest wish, in the awareness of the difficult civil challenge that the project inevitably envisages within the paradigmatic framework in transformation.

“Everything that lives must constantly regenerate itself: the Sun, the living being, the biosphere, society, culture, love. It is often our misfortune, it is also our grace and our privilege: everything that is precious on earth is fragile, rare and doomed to an uncertain destiny. It is the same for our consciousness”. Edgard Morin, La tête bien faite, Paris, Seuil, 1999.

P.A. Val, Trasmissiblità, in P.A. Val, Lezioni parigine, Incipit Editore, Conegliano, 2018, pp. 82-119.

E. Severino, Destino della necessità, Adelphi, Milano, 1980.

3 N. Irti, E. Severino, Dialogo su diritto e tecnica, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2001.

4 Ibidem.

5 E. Severino, op. cit., Premessa.

6 L. Gallino, Critica della ragione tecnologica, Einaudi, Torino, 1998.

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The Art of Design - The Art of Action PierAntonio Val

The Art of Design - The Art of Action Research&education: a necessary integration PierAntonio Val

Driving a car has become a “natural” action for us today.

Yet it is extremely complex to illustrate the sequence of steps required to correctly perform this action that we consider to be automatic, requiring a long detailed description. To drive a car you must: press the clutch pedal to the floor, release the brakes, change gears, release the clutch while simultaneously depressing the accelerator, turn the steering wheel, signal to turn, look both ahead and into the rear-view mirror, etc.

It is more complex, and sometimes problematic for the driver education teacher, to get across to the driver the relationship between his actions and what actually takes place in the mechanics of the vehicle; and even more difficult to make him aware of the laws of physics that govern the vehicle: for example, the principles of thermo-dynamics. Oriental thought sustains that an operation achieves maximum precision and perfection when it becomes second nature, when the author of the action has absorbed the reasoning and the operations he must execute so thoroughly that he appears to performs them unconsciously.

This immediacy and apparently instinctive approach is not a given, on the contrary, it is the result of a long and arduous learning effort and discipline, that leads progressively from the conscious learning of a process, to its systematic enactment in increasingly rapid and repeated form, until it is absorbed so thoroughly that it becomes an integral part of one’s self. To build connections between the art of designing architecture, the ability to drive a car, and the art of action, as described by Yukio Mishima in “The Way of the Samurai” may seem a paradox, and in some ways perhaps it is, but only in part1.

The iteration of the design process in a “condensed” timeframe is conducive to learning and to focusing on design, because the repetition of the action, and the timeframe for the process contribute in terms of quality to the validity of the action itself.

At the same time, the very practice and exercise of design can become a tool for improving and exploring the forms and strategies for

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action through design. In other words, to verify the foundations of the art of designing. With these firm convictions, Iuav undertook the international experiment illustrated in this book. Research projects focusing on the same sites and themes, explored by different graduate design studios at different universities in different countries, during the same academic semester, and in various academic years.

The goal was to demonstrate how a design experience in condensed but reiterated periods of time, can be a virtuous example of research on both the disciplinary and educational level, leading to an expanded debate and dialogue on the same themes from diverse perspectives. There is nothing new about this concept.

The tradition of the ex-tempore in architecture schools in centuries past confirms this attention to the practice of design in reduced timeframes. Short time-frames are also typical of professions, not just today, and not just for architects.

As Kappelmeister, Johann Sebastian Bach would be commissioned just a few days before the beginning of Advent to compose the choral works for the Christmas novena. It certainly cannot be said that the limited timeframe negatively influenced the quality of the work, or that it limited the character or quality of his musical experimentation.

It is perhaps a degenerative legacy of Romantic thought to conceive architectural design as a practice with no time limits, that implicitly pursues the search for a “definitive”, peremptory act, beyond which nothing else is possible.

Architecture is in the world, in place, in time and in its passing, and if it is good, architecture can aspire to become a witness to its “Time” after the fact. Design thinking as synthetic thought internally pursues the need for a contraction of time in order to become manifest, just as it requires the densification within of a plurality of themes.

To abide by and make this practice clear to the students, to train them for action with reiterated exercises in the practice of design, understood as both solution and experimentation, is a fundamental issue.

But to address the question of time today, one must necessarily be

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aware that the unity of time has been broken in the modern era and that the contraction of the timeframe of relations in “digital real-time” communication has had an impact on reality and on the economy.

But it is a mistake to believe that there is a banally linear relationship between all of this and architecture.

Nothing is simple in architecture. There is hardly ever a linear relationship between the many factors involved, between the teacher and the student, between research and education, in the development of a project, not to speak of the procedures to construct the designed building. The apparent clarity and simplicity demonstrated by these procedures is the result of an arduous process of learning and discipline, reiterated and continuous, that becomes manifest in but is not limited to a single design studio, or an entire university curriculum. Comprehensively, the research and learning process involves the entire duration of our existence.

The task of the university is to make this clear to the students, fostering in them a life attitude in which the project is always both a solution, and further research into the foundations of one’s personal practice.

This research project addressed, through the design process, the theme of the transformation of buildings from the second half of the twentieth century – “Regenerating the architecture of the recent past”2 – one of the most significant and problematic issues of our time. It is the most important and widespread issue in our cities at the international level. The projects developed for all the sites selected in various nations from Paris to New York to Venice, prove it.

Basically, all the projects were confronted with the need to develop renovation projects that could give form to the residential density and the process of stratification over the present. In all of the projects, a recurring theme is the idea of design as addition understood as the stratification on the present, and the need to establish an architectural language open to a dialogue with the existing buildings that require modification, and with the conditions of the surrounding context. Above all, it appeared essential to construct a consummate

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fig.1 The new exibitions tower (in black) in the ex Altadis Tobacco Factory of Seville (in oragne).

Students: Dalipi, Zambon and Conte.

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and lasting language that was able, however, within its very linguistic structure, to maintain certain aspects open to possible transformation in the future, so that it might “dialogue, not just in the moment, but as potential” with the future, with change. This openness, I believe, is the answer that will allow architecture to resist over time and at the same time to respond to the needs of the present and the demand for transformation in the future, particularly for the near future. With these goals in mind, the book presents an articulated sort of collection of design experiences that address the theme of the transformation of the present. The various projects are gathered in chapters on the basis of their specific site and theme, and not on the universities. The projects developed in the different universities were mixed together.

The individual chapters respectively feature: for the New York site, the projects from Cooper Union and Iuav; for Paris, the projects from ETSAS in Seville, Iuav and Paris-Val de Seine; for the Venice area, the projects from ETSAS in Seville, Iuav and ENSA in Marseilles; for the area of Marseilles, the projects from Iuav and ENSA in Marseilles itself.

Each university tied to the specific project area, presents the theme and the work for them all.

The intention is to show how the articulated sequence, focusing on each single area, displays a constellation of possibilities, even when approached from different perspectives. In the same way, it consolidates a direction (in a paradox that is only apparent) that delineates a methodological unity of approach and at the same time describes an articulated but coherent oscillation of possible solutions.

Yukio Mishima, “The Way of the Samurai: Yukio Mishima on Hagakure in Modern Life”, translator Kathryn Sparling, Tsunetomo Yamamoto, Basic Books, 1977.

2 PierAntonio Val, “Verso una nuova costruttività, frammenti per un linguaggio della rigenerazione del passato prossimo”, Il Poligrafo, Padova, 2016, with English translation by Olga Barmine.

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Building on built Seville: José Morales and Sara De Giles Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Sevilla

JOSÉ MORALES - SARA DE GILES

Building on built

Singularity University Seville chapter in the Altadis Tobacco Factory

The growth and expansion of our cities in the Sixties, has led to certain industrial plots having been absorbed by the city itself. Occasionally, industrial obsolescence has caused these large buildings to be left abandoned, generating areas without a plan or a use in spite of their central situation, causing disconnects between areas of the urban fabric itself.

The public institutions seek solutions for these planning gaps in order to reactivate the urban fabric and return it to openness, without wishing to renounce the industrial heritage. On the other hand, large multinational companies seek central locations in the most important European cities, to give them greater presence and connection with the citizens. Usually, they are faced with dense plots that do not satisfy their deployment needs, thereby having to resort to peripheral locations or technology parks.

Exceptionally, both interests can coincide, returning to a common interest. This is the case of the Tobacco Factory of Los Remedios (Seville), and the institution, Singularity University .

Building on built

Building on the built leads to the consideration of a unique mix of different and distant times, places and spaces.

To the need to intervene on an already configured architecture or a place, is added the intention to update changing ways of life, which are to be introduced in these pre-existing architectures. On the other hand, no architecture that intervenes on what is already built can ignore the raw material at the beginning of the project, to intervene on a nature, a space and a materiality that are ready to be transformed.

The multiple implication of intervening on the already built is even more extended, if possible, with the premises that are planned for the future location of a new “Chapter of the Singularity University”1.

The way in which the Singularity University is located, or more aptly

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Renovation Of The Altadis Tobacco Factory The project involves the reuse and redevelopment of the former industrial area Altadis, a tobacco factory, in the city of Seville.

The design project involves the redevelopment of the river bank, giving importance to the industrial prospectus that can be seen through the natural vegetation. This new facade becomes the connection point between the city and the water, where people can find plug recreational and sports activities.

The part that connects to the city aims to redevelop and return a different light to the neighborhood, considered an example of “bad urbanizacion”, inserting attractions activities involving citizens and positively influenceing the social dynamics of the neighborhood as a covered market, a flamenco dancefloor and a mirador.

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MANFREO - PERAZZOLO

IUAV

MANFREO - PERAZZOLO

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For a new dialogue of rationality Venice: PierAntonio Val Iuav University of Venice

PIERANTONIO VAL

For a new dialogue of rationality A patient research

Many years ago, Carlo Magnani and I edited issue number 22 of Rassegna magazine1, sustaining that Venice could be the city of a new Modernity for the very reason that, historically, it carried double potential, for change and for stratification, and despite the continuous mutation, maintained a long-term resistance as well.

With this in mind I chose to address the theme of Venice, and with the same intent I proposed it to my colleagues in other universities in Paris, Seville, New York and Marseilles as a theme for the island of the Giudecca.

Context The island of the Giudecca seems to be a perfect fit for these ends, especially given its present-day condition. Giudecca has always been an integral part of Venice.

Its history is strictly connected to the city, notwithstanding its peripheral status.

In the past the island was an area with many gardens and cultivated fields, and was traditionally an island of leisure and villas. In the nineteenth century, it became one of Venice’s major industrial areas, with a population of workers and some more dilapidated areas. The island has been regenerated in recent decades. Residential complexes built on the island are complementary to the projects to renovate the abandoned industrial spaces.

For these reasons, the Giudecca today is the area in which the signs of modernization have been most prominently stratified. The public housing projects designed by Carlo Aymonino, Aldo Rossi, Alvaro Siza and Gino Valle are just some examples of this complex regeneration process. The significant amount of public housing is another specific characteristic of the island.

The Giudecca is almost totally urbanized. Despite the mutation underway, the island on the southern edge (facing the lagoon) looks quite different from the northern edge, facing the central part of the city.

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A New Modular Front The buildings designed by us are part of a residential building complex that aim to thicken the structural grid of the Sacca Fisola’s island in Venice. The density and the mesh construction of this island are very different from those present in Venice and also the services are less efficient.

For these reasons, our intention was to give back to Sacca Fisola a more coherent identity with the Venetian one, using a more modern architectural style.

The final result is characterized by modular elements that interact each other to provide dynamicity and movement to the continuous sequence of residences that is articulated on the water front. This modularity gives an hight flexibility to the new dwellings with duplex and triplex appartmens that can be adapted to the inhabitants needs.

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BIASOTTO - DE TATA - MORETTI

IUAV

MODOLO - MODOLO - PASIAN

New Entrance For Sacca Fisola The aim of the project was to create a new entrance to Sacca Fisola with services such as public transport dock, new shops on the ground floor and a hotel. It would make the island more attractive both for the arrival that for crossing it in the direction of the sports center, passing through the central “campo”.

The layout of the buildings helps the recognition of certain public parts of the island through the prospective framework and the dimensional hierarchy of streets, divided into public, semi-public and private, allows to navigate easily and become familiar with the paths system.

The residential part, instead, tries to complete the incomplete block of Samonà project, using new types of settlement based on the appartments versatility in contrast to the “rigid” and static types of the exsisting buildings.

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Building by layers Paris: Hervé Dubois and Laurent Lehmann Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Val de Seine

HERVÉ DUBOIS - LAURENT LEHMANN

Building by layers

The comparison with the quality of modern: Fernand Pouillon

Theacing experience

I met PierAntonio Val in July 1991, during a summer seminar in Bergamo, organized by the Polytechnic University of Milan. It was directed by Sergio Crotti and Roberto Spagnolo, who had invited me, as a young assistant, to participate after the completion of my first teaching year in Geneva, with Michel Kagan.

Today, this crucible of architecture enthusiasts, where we can find also Franco Purini, Luigi Snozzi, Gonzalo Byrne and Esteve Bonnel, seems to me to be the original and magic hotbed of study and friendship, that has continued steadily now as then.

After that summer, we would then meet up for successive seminars until, little by little, our respective occupations pulled us away from this haven of thought.

Then, a few years ago, we had the good luck of being invited by Guya Bertelli, the new director of this branch of the Polytechnic, to come together to work in Piacenza, each to oversee a project group for one semester.

During this time, I discovered the work that Pierantonio was doing in Italy in partnership with Cooper Union, in Brooklyn, and it particularly interested me. The approach involved working on architectural projects on the same site and sharing student work on this project through Skype.

After this experience, we came up with the idea of expanding upon this approach, through a cross-educational collaboration between the Iuav University of Venice where Pierantonio taught and the Marseille School of Architecture, where I was teaching.

We agreed to concurrently lead master’s level project studios the following year, on common curriculum and program themes - the rehabilitation of modern heritage and the attention to building issues that are closely linked to project design - on sites chosen by each school in regions pertinent to our themes.

Thus, all our students were free to choose between a Venetian site, with social housing and a small industrial area to rehabilitate, situated around a transversal canal on Giudecca Island; and two areas cho-

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Multipurpose Building The project is a multipurpose building, in the heart of Boulogne Billancourt district at south-west of Paris.

The project is located within the residential area “Point du Jour” created by the French architect Ferdinand Pouillon in the postwar years.

It is mainly divided into two types of interventions: a newly built and one that operates on the existing. The intervention on the existing building of Pouillon improves its internal distribution, the vertical organization and adds a new plan in elevation on the building roof.

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FENT - TOSONI - BERGAMO

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FAGOTTO - BOCCINGHER - BERTOGLIO

Point du Jour Connections The project site is located in a stretched and narrow space, on pre-existing building foundations.

The construction was set between the Point du Jour, a sixties residential complex designed by the architect Fernand Pouillon and another residential building. A modular structural grid characterizes Pouillon’s project: it defines the connection to the ground and it is reproduced along the exterior generating bodies of water, green spaces and paths. Moreover this order is also present on the elevations, due to a strict repetition of the base module.

The new building’s proportions are more modest than the surroundings, using identical elevation rhythm, according to the contemporary living needs and the economy of the project. The relationship between the new and the existing produce harmony in the volume composition. An elongated shape of the three floor building, characterized by an arcaded walk at the ground floor, combines the highest three elements that are in turn related to the highest buildings of the Point du Jour, creating two large courtyards.

Lastly the new complex is categorised by the predominant residential function that is providing an opportunity to reflect on the contemporary way of living.

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Reflections reflected New York: David Turnbull and Guido Zuliani The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

DAVID TURNBULL - GUIDO ZULIANI

Reflections reflected

A dialogue between Guido Zuliani (GZ) and David Turnbull (DT)

On November 10, 2016 I met with Professor Guido Zuliani at The Cooper Union to reflect on a project that we had both been involved with four years ago, working in collaboration with PierAntonio Val at the Iuav University of Venece, bringing two schools together, where students from Venice worked on a site in New York City, and Cooper Union final year students had the opportunity to work on a site in Venice as part of their Architectural Thesis.

The New York site was in Brooklyn and Queens adjacent to Newtown Creek, an estuary that forms part of the border between the two Boroughs, and one of the most polluted industrial sites in the USA. The site in Venice was the external edge of the Giudecca, with its ship-yards and neglected industrial infrastructure.

For both, proximity to the water was critical.

GZ: There was the issue of the waterfront, existing buildings, and in Venice, the very particular morphological character of the Giudecca that has this kind of comb structure.

Newtown Creek was appealing in that it was a very active area in relation to the expansion of the city beyond the boundaries of Manhattan.

The format that you and I discussed was to offer the students in thesis, because of the open structure of thesis at Cooper, the possibility to engage one of these two areas as part of of their own project and consequently have a dialogue with the Italian students.

DT: We gave our thesis students the chance to work on either site; the thesis projects were developed in the studio here over the course of an entire academic year, with one significant difference - the dialogue across time-zones and between cultures. There were common themes, the valorization and reinterpretation of industrial

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Horizontal Skyscraper This project was developed trough two types of approach: a new construction and the restoration of an historical building.

An urban-scale project to make this area an important infrastructural hub, taking advantage of the presence of a subway, a railway station and a boat station for a fast link with Manhattan.

A new building, called “Horizontal Skyscraper”, 750 meters long and only 25 meters high, with mixed residential and commercial uses, was define as an important land mark.

At last, on the old industrial building of the 1856, was proposed only some small interventions like new stairs and a concrete wall that is the project pivot.

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MALVESTIO - FASOLO

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MALVESTIO - FASOLO

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The soft and the rough Marseilles: Jean-Luc Rolland Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Marseilles

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JEAN-LUC ROLLAND

The soft and the rough Teaching experience

Why Venice, why Martigues? Why associate both cities?

And then, is Venice really a town?

Is it not a place instead, a backdrop, or even more, a background, that of the laguna and its natural environment? An inhabited laguna , certainly, but even more a place of smells, sounds, silences, lights, fog, a place of algae, muddy water, and mud? A typical place with strong emotions whose geography is so marked by history that it has become an amazing and prodigious artifice.

What then of Martigues and the Etang de Berre whose Paleolithic borders collide with hydrocarbon tanks, flights of seagulls and cormorants, highways bridges and old villages, all stretching and rewoven by the industrialization and development of the new city?

Is all of this really a city?

Martigues, the «Venice of Provence» and the real Venice, in fact, are opposed in almost everything.

The road network in the municipality of Martigues is a monstrous scale of implacable logic, such as port and industrial facilities or road improvements, absorbing this little town that has not had the good fortune to grow before its alteration by the brutal modernization of its territory.

In contrast, Venice pathways network is microscopic, foolish, labyrinthine, irrational. Industry, which has been present since the dawn of time, is still artisanal, innervated in the body of the city, or relegated in some discrete and reduced, or now bygone sites.

Venice is a medieval city, frozen in its original shape by the recurrent use of the same «zatteroni», that is by the natural constraints exerted by the lagoon and the permanent challenge of the Venetian to hold it.

Martigues has had only a recent, industrial and land history, having conceded its virgin territory to the predatory grip of industries from elsewhere.

Martigues and Venice are the two opposing sides of the same incongruity, that of a human development, which was plated on an

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Regenerate Martigues: continuous transformation The project aims to restore the island’s identity bringing out its historical, architectural, landscape and social values. Interventions within the historical tissue are designed to appear in tune with it and at the same time renewing it deeply, exactly as Álvaro Siza wrote in “Architecture as modification”: ”Designing in time and not against time means immersing yourself in the territory without destroying anything, but only by adding and placing on it to profoundly renew it, with the authentic conscience to be in tune with it to truly improve the territory”(A.Siza, Casabella n. 498/9, 1984).

The urban analysis showed a number of critical issues: interference between roads and island areas, absence of green spaces, lack of of areas for socialization, exodus of residents to the mainland, absence of a relationship with the water, large voids, result of previous urban tissue amputations, that have been transformed into parking lots. In order to redefine these areas and to allow Martigues to become a place of tourist interest and a city where people want to live, the project excludes the transit of cars within the city, relegating it to the perimeter of the island, creating new bridges, redefining the parking areas, planning new public spaces, giving private green areas and parking areas to every existing houses, planning new residences based on the principle of flexibility and increase of surface, regenerating the existing palace “Tribunal d’Instance” including it in a new commercial area with market, restaurant, conference and exhibition rooms, stores to sell fish and library.

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PELTRERA - CAPUZZO

IUAV

DE SCARPIS - GLISSENTI

New Urban Centrality Our project for the Martigues central area seeks to trigger reactions on an urban scale through interventions on an architectural level.

It aims to discover, in the tiny fragment of Ile, a model of urban centrality (topographic and historical) capable of reversing a trend that is pushing it towards a situation of complete marginality.

We developed two courses of action: a morphological refurbishing of the island and the enhancement of extant urban features of common interest.

The project involves the installation of two volumes which differ from each other for contextual reasons.

Besides the necessary increase of the residential and commercial spaces, the insertion of new volumes aims on one hand to redefine the inner dynamics of the island (i.e. paths, public spaces) and on the other to redefine the relations with the surroundings environment.

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II Edition Printed in June 2021 Press Up - Rome

To regenerate the recent past and build on existing buildings: these are the issues of the present. What this book presents is first and foremost an effort to foster a critical debate at the international level, based on the organization of an experimental design experience to take place simultaneously in various architecture schools in Europe and beyond, connected “online” thanks to the opportunities provided by contemporary computer technology (Skype, Wiki and Google Drive). The goal is to share a concrete experience, exploring themes and sites in common, to verify whether this can help to delineate and orient a transformation in research and “architectural education” in the light of a profoundly changed context. The intention is to show how the articulated sequence, exploring the same issues in different areas such as New York, Venice, Paris, Marseilles and Seville, can reveal a constellation of possibilities, even when approached from different perspectives. And in the same way, how it can consolidate a direction (in a paradox that is only apparent) that delineates a methodological unity of approach and, at the same time, describes an articulated but coherent oscillation of possible solutions. All the projects and the archipelago of essays by the professors from the different universities illustrate the need to develop renovation projects that could give form to the process of stratification over the present. A recurring theme is the need to establish an architectural language open, in fragments, to a dialogue with the existing buildings that require modification and with the conditions of the surrounding context, within the framework of a possible reality. Above all, it is essential to construct a complete and lasting language that can still, within its very linguistic structure, maintain certain aspects open to possible transformation in the future, so that it might “dialogue, not just in the moment, but as potential” with the future, with change. This openness, we believe, is the answer that will allow architecture to resist over time and at the same time respond to the needs of the present and the demand for transformation in the future, particularly in the near future.

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