Studio MA1 (Piovene et Fabi)

AMBIENTE VULCANO

ARCHITECTURE, OBJECT, TERRITORY. Architecture materializes both cultural and technical answers to primary collective needs. If on one side architecture shelters and protects, on the other, it frames the space for the community. Following that definition, scale becomes sometimes secondary, if one needs to define a precise border between what is architecture and what is not. If on one extreme, objects of common use could be included for their symbolic value, on the other natural formations certainly play an important role in how we live.

Our studio transcends scales of intervention, questioning the boundaries among actual disciplines and specializations. Urban planning, architecture and design merge back into a unique realm called architecture, where all the different scales are summoned at the same time. In doing that, our studio looks at a certain productive context, which developed in Italy between the 60s and the early 90s, where architects were seen as overarching intellectual figures, capable of navigating between the production of objects and the definition of environments.

Firstly, our studio looks at design objects as fragments of architecture. Objects contain, in fact, all the complexity one can also find in an architectural project. They encourage reflections about how materials come together and how things are manufactured. Ultimately they manifest the value of labor.
Secondly, our studio interrogates the interdependence between a specific geographic condition and the way we inhabit a territory. It looks at valleys, high plains, and hillsides as ecologies capable of influencing specific habits.

Under this perspective, the culture of living needs an architecture that can look at the very big and the very small at the same time.
AMBIENTE VULCANO. This semester we will study the politically grounded design production of Enzo Mari, a seminal figure who operated in Milano. Mari, throughout his projects, never stopped fighting against mass consumerism and the banalization of the message. His design for the people strongly questioned the fundamental acts of living on their very basis.

In a second moment, we will relate Mari's production to a territory which from time to time inspired his work: the Vesuvian region, centered on the volcano's crater, and extended to all those areas which are influenced by the presence of the iconic landform.
During our field trip, we will experience how the intimidating and fertile ground of the volcano became through time the support for an intense popular culture. We will then witness the fragility of a densely inhabited landscape coexisting with a powerful and monumental nature.

Back in Lausanne, students, through their projects, will reformulate the connection between the Vesuvian environment and its inhabited slopes. With their proposal, students will infrastructure a Greater Vesuvian Park, relating to the volcano geologic crown rather than to the administrative borders of the actual National Park. They will forcefully work the friction between the volcano and a sparse and discontinuous settlement.

Students will ultimately condense throughout architecture the specific culture of living of the Vesuvian region.