EFA studio di architettura

Project
construction environment

Ten lessons in architecture

Emilio Faroldi (ed.)
Clup Bookshop
Milan
2003

ABSTRACT
The architectural project and the construction phenomenon connected to it are at the centre of a debate that involves the themes of technical innovation and environmental quality, highlighting the need to identify tools, processes and technologies capable of responding to the new performances required of architecture, in an attempt to outline possible research directions capable of favouring training models consistent with the current process of rethinking and reconfiguration of the organisation of the professions. In the face of the progressive enrichment of the performance contents of the artefact, in relation to the formal, functional and technological requirements of architecture, the project is delegated the task of organising and controlling the entire process, from the planning and design phases to the realisation and management of the construction life cycle, with the consequent extension of the skills and variables that intervene along the design process. The logic of performance tends more and more to assign to the project tasks of preventive verification of the phenomena, assuming the adoption of systemic approaches for the management of relations between the built work and the environment. These transformative dynamics, which intervene on the articulated aspects of the construction sector and the labour market, in close relation with scientific research on process and product innovation, involve the cultural and professional training of the architect, which today highlight the need for a reconfiguration of disciplinary competences with the consequent rearticulation of training curricula. Perimeter of the role of technology as a strategic disciplinary field in the design action, equipped with tools and procedures suitable to govern situations of high environmental complexity, the architectural project is assumed as a synergic moment, as a whole of a "system of projects" that increasingly requires articulated and integrated readings of the elements that make up the architectural phenomenon. The text Progetto costruzione ambiente. Dieci lezioni di architettura collects the contributions of some professors who are particularly sensitive to the transformation of the scientific paradigms of technological design, developed in a series of meetings promoted by the PhD programme in "Innovazione Tecnica e Progetto nell'Architettura" at Politecnico di Milano, with the aim of investigating the complex relationships between design and construction in the new scenarios of environmental sustainability, in relation to the profound transformations of paradigms and disciplinary contents. The exploration of borderline thematic areas in the changed contexts of the project, elaborated through points of view characterised by original stimuli, promotes in this logic a reflection on the founding aspects of design research capable of reknotting the link between theoretical and methodological levels and the new operational scales within the building and urban processes.