Museums: new icons of the Digital Age

Museum is much more than a place for preserving artifacts and objects. Indeed, throughout history, the museums, flexible and adaptive places, have been designed as social aggregators, to house objects and collections in which community could identify. They have always represented powerful means of communication through their ability to convey knowledge and to involve its audience (tourists and local residents). For over half a century, museums have become an important design topic, accompanied by a sharp increase in the creation of new architectural formal configurations. Also the role of museum has been changing: museum is not only a place for exhibiting, also the container itself has beco…

Un centro rururbano.

Il contributo illustra il progetto, elaborato durante lo svolgimento del 9° Seminario itinerante di Progettazione Villard, di un campus universitario, dotato di laboratori, residenze, biblioteca, per la Facoltà di Agraria dell'Università di Bologna.

Architectural Design in the Digital Era. Identifying computer influences and new expressive trends in current architecture

La ricerca propone una riflessione sull’architettura contemporanea in funzione del ruolo sempre più preponderante che le tecnologie digitali hanno assunto all’interno del processo progettuale. L'introduzione dei computer nel panorama dell'architettura ha prodotto una rivoluzione nei metodi e nei processi progettuali che contribuiscono alla generazione della forma architettonica. Si è osservato che l'uso pervasivo dei software ha contribuito a modificare sostanzialmente il linguaggio architettonico. Obiettivo della tesi è capire in che modo l'espressività dell'architettura si è modificata e si sta modificando, quanto pervasivo sia l'uso del computer e quali possano essere gli sviluppi futuri…

Digital revolution in current architecture: towards a new architectural expressivity

The triumphal entry of computing in architectural design has produced a real revolution in architectural scenario, but, until now it is unclear how we can identify digital influences in each project and how they have contributed to the birth of new expressive trends. We have developed a framework for identifying and classifying architectural design elements that should be attributed to the methods and techniques of design computing. This framework is then applied to sixty prominent recent buildings which are acknowledged products of digital means. The goals of this are, firstly, to verify the applicability of the descriptive framework and, secondly, to identify combinations of elements that…

Towards which expressive horizons?

Today’s explosive developments in digital technology have also affected architecture and urban landscape. The new possibilities opened up by digital simulation have led to an increasingly strategic approach to planning, an approach based on generating scenarios, which thus represents a radical departure from traditional planning. But, up to now, what is the prevalent trend in architecture? Can we talk yet in term of language? Or have the extreme freedom in design destroyed the style? In this paper we present an analysis of the contemporary architecture, strongly influenced by digital technologies, through an objective analysis of several case-studies and we show the first result of this in …

The Architecture of the Limit. The recovery of the southern Agrigento's historical walls.

The fourteenth-century Agrigento's walls was interested by strong interventions during last century that led to the present image. In this critical place there are no project, no order, no logic, everything is left to chance. The ambitious target of the project was to give an order to this self caused chaos, to this route that should show the lost historical memory. The project aimed to reshape the urban area through zero-volume interventions and to make manifest the peculiarities of this territory trough small gestures, creating sequences of recognizable places that are able to express sense and identity of the urban space. The most significant intervention is designed for a doubling of th…

The Digital change. Reasons and meanings of a new architectural expressivity

The entry of computing in architectural has produced a real revolution in architectural scenario, changing the designer's arsenals and producing new expressive trends. However, up to now it is unclear how designers have actually taken advantage of the use of software to develop new styles, it is unclear what is the relationship between programs, operations and tools provided by them, and the formal configuration of new architecture. Moreover, the only element to identify digital influence on design seems to be only what designers or critics say-so. Then, the goal of the research was to actually identify these digital influences on architectural designs by developing a framework for identify…

Architecture in the digital age. Evolution of language and contemporary design.

The ‘computer revolution’ is the most obvious phenomenon of our time. The new capabilities introduced by the digital drafting have triggered a substantial evolution of the relationship between representation and design. The diffusion of digital technologies in Architecture has opened new frontiers in the design field, stimulating the development of a new expressive language that promotes generating complex shapes. On the other hand, the shape often becomes the main interest of the designers. Then, is the project only a formal question? Are the glamour images become the main target to which the ‘New Architecture’ aims?

Nuovi spazi sacri nella contemporaneità

Negli ultimi anni la CEI (Conferenza Episcopale Italiana) ha messo in atto una politica di grande attenzione verso l'architettura contemporanea per la progettazione di nuovi spazi per il culto cattolico e molte recenti realizzazioni meritano una trattazione più approfondita. Nell'articolo l'Autore presenterà il nuovo Complesso Parrocchiale di San Gregorio ad Agrigento progettato da Giuseppe Pellitteri, inserendo l'edificio all'interno del panorama contemporaneo dell'architettura sacra italiana e mettendolo a confronto di alcuni interessanti esempi di recenti architetture ecclesiastiche, progettare da Paolo Zermani, Franco Purini e Laura Thermes e Monestiroli Architetti Associati.

Antoine Picon: Digital Culture in Architecture

Today’s explosive developments in digital technology have also affected architecture and the urban landscape. The new possibilities opened up by digital simulation have led to an increasingly strategic approach to planning, an approach based on generating scenarios, which thus represents a radical departure from traditional planning. This volume provides a profound introduction to the important role of digital technologies in design and execution. In four chapters, the author systematically examines the influence of digital culture on architecture but also on the urban landscape as well as product design. The relationship of digital architecture to the city is also an important focus.

Bernard Tschumi, Irene Cheng: The state of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century

L’ampliamento come occasione di recupero della memoria e dell’identità

We present the enlargement plan of an isolated cemetery in a small town of the west Sicily as it exemplifies some way to carry out the design for an “addition”. The enlargement faces a still readable and characteristic nineteenth-century building. Even introducing unavoidable innovative characteristics, the architecture we designed tries to resolve the difficult relationship between the new portion and the old cemetery, bell shaped, in steep slope above the town. The recovery of this place for collective memory, once realized as a closed enclosure, is realized by the mediation of a space which seeks to maintain, recover and reinforce the identity of places altered in the last years by uncon…