Università Roma Tre

Sentimental Topography. Project and site in the Other Modernity.
The course proposes a series of study itineraries through heterodox experiences of modernity, in tension between the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Paths transversal to the canons crystallized by internationalism, which outline differentiated design approaches, supported by a common intention.
These are investigated not so much - or not only - in terms of their relations with local building traditions and site characteristics, but rather in terms of the compositional procedures that root the design of the new to the specificity of the site, through a hand-to-hand encounter between artefact and nature. The productive force of memory feeds the design thought, grafting the interventions on a terrain treated not as inert ground - as a pattern punctuated by isolated actions - but as a stratified system of signs, traceable and measurable, revealed by the design of the new.
Composition is the organization of the formal discourse, and of this the lectures - as well as the operative experiments that the students are required to carry out within the course - privilege the analysis of the criteria and procedures implemented to generate form and the study of the figurative variations that determine the character of architecture.
The aim is thus to bring out that inseparable link between analytical excavation and formal research, anchoring the theoretical dimension to the operative one and restoring to the project the role of a moment of synthesis of the relations between figure, form and construction. A poetic synthesis between art and technique, which denies the adoption of standardized procedures and redefines itself from time to time, in a cyclic dimension of time.
With these assumptions, the course will bring Scandinavian and from Iberian peninsula architects to the stage, passing from the Mediterranean as an obligatory reference for that search for origins that leads to another modernity, the path of which is still open today, in the topicality of its lesson.

Fernando Távora, On space organization (1962), in Estudo Prévio n. 20, Lisbon: CEACT/UAL Center for Studies of Architecture, City and Territory of the Autonomous University of Lisbon, 2022, p.29- 39.
Jörn Utzon, Platforms and Plateaus: Ideas of a Danish Architect, Zodiac 10, Milan 1962.
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, Rizzoli, New York, 1979.
Dimitris Pikionis, architect 1887-1968: A Sentimental Topography, Architectural Association, London, 1989.
Sigurd Lewerentz 1885-1975: The Dilemma of Classicism, Architectural Association, London, 1989.
José Ignacio Linazasoro, La memoria del orden. Paradojas del sentido de la arquitectura moderna, Abada Editores, Madrid, 2013.
Carlotta Torricelli, Classicismo di frontiera. Sigurd Lewerentz e la Cappella della Resurrezione/Frontier Classicism. Sigurd Lewerentz and the Chapel of the Resurrection, Il Poligrafo, Padova 2014.
Luigi Franciosini e Cristina Casadei, a cura di, Architettura e Patrimonio: progettare in un paese antico, Mancosu Editore, Roma 2015. (Edizione Italiana e Inglese).
Kenneth Frampton, The Other Modern Movement: Architecture, 1920–1970, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2021.
Álvaro Siza, Imagining the Evident, Monade, Lisbona, 2021.