SPdA summer school of architecture 2014
living in the city
Residential Summer School of Architecture 2014. An intensive 10-day course including lectures, readings and conferences between Tuscany and Sicily. An opportunity to exchange ideas not only with architects but also with archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, economists and artists.
SPdA Residential summer school of architecture
Poggi del Sasso (Grosseto) – Gibellina (Trapani) – Florence
06 July – 14 July 2014
The workshop
The subject matter of the Residential Summer School of Architecture 2014 was the concept of CITY (metropolitan city, Mediterranean city, favela). The aim was to analyse the contemporary city throughout its history in Mediterranean cultures, while dealing with the design of projects with different approaches. An intensive 10-day course including lectures, readings and conferences between Tuscany and Sicily, where students had the opportunity to exchange ideas not only with architects but also with archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, economists and artists. In fact, ‘city’ means, above all, to live together, to build together and to share experiences, and architects need to know how to design cities with a holistic and multidisciplinary approach.
Living is a human need, living together more so. Architectural forms were created because of the collective need to be together, to live with other people, and to share space and time. To live means, therefore and above all, to build and cultivate relationships.
Architects need to be aware of the power of architecture and its ability to inspire, motivate and trigger social processes, especially as architecture is first and foremost a collective gesture. Architecture is not a field where architects can act alone, and when designing is no longer a purely authoritarian and intellectual action, it becomes an exchange. To design and build outside the typical role imposed by society, or by the routine, means to be able to become a promoter not of a project, but of one’s own way of operating within a personal vision of the world.