As part of the general three-year training project, the Architectural Construction Studio “Building in the built environment” has two main objectives:
• To incorporate into the education agenda a design experience focused on the individual building organism and its relationship to the nearest environment;
• To provide specific knowledge for the design of a new building organism located in the built urban fabric, with the aim of regenerating the entire urban area.

• Ability to grasp the full design potential arising from the interaction between form and technique, related to the nearest environment.
• Ability to fully address the architectural design at the building scale.
• Ability to identify - from the reading of the character of existing buildings - the criteria of coherence between the project and its environment.
• Ability to select properly the materials as well as the building systems according to physical properties and technology feasibility.

The interpretative readings of the reference areas will be conducted in relation to the urban matrices, the urban settlement forms, the landscape and symbolic characters of the urban scenario, the building typologies, the plan organization, and the technical and material of construction.

In this learning phase of design, the construction detail plays a central rule. It has to be thought as a consistent design choice based on the ability of managing the repertoire of construction components, technologies, original built environment knowledge processes, and the formal and functional needs of the architectural agenda.

Having passed the examinations of the 1st year Atelier and the of 1st year course of Architecture
Fundamentals of Architectural Technology by February 2012.

The disciplines involved - Architectural Technology and Architectural Design - will work with a strong interdisciplinary approach, in which design directions and composition and technological solutions will affect each other.

With regard to the specific learning path of the disciplines involved, the Studio teaching program will be oriented to the study of:
• Analysis of the relationship between interior and exterior of buildings in relation to the envelope design
• Role of the different elements that make up the built organism.
• Study of the detail and the relationship between the parts and the whole in the architectural design.

Particular attention is paid to the issue of sustainability, understood as a basic design requirement for the definition of the building morphology, its orientation, and its construction characteristics.

With regard to the development of the design experience, it will be organized starting from the scale of the project settlement, including the nearest urban relations (roughly in scales from 1/2000 to 1/500), proceeding in the description of the building characters, and following to the scale of construction detail (roughly in scale1/50 to 1/20).

The final work will consist for each group in 6/8 panels, including a summary panel, at least a three-dimensional (physical or virtual), and a booklet that collects the intermediate material summarizing the most significant steps of the process.

For this Studio, the students will work on selected single building scale case study sites in a consolidated urban fabric in the area of Torino,in the Dora River neighborhood recently invested by the “Variante 200” project. The case study won’t involve any kind of restauration skills. The design agenda will be developed around the filling of an urban void with special attention to programmatic needs, sustainable behaviour, and the experimentation of digital design techniques.

Students will work in groups of 2-3 members.

The educational activities will proceed through the organic development of a design process, supported by theoretical lessons and constant design revisions by the professors, on single basis and in tandem.

The Atelier activity can include: presentations of external architects or experts, visits to buildings, visits to manufacturers, etc.

Theoretical classes and presentations will rather take part in the first part of the semester, while the second part will be mainly dedicated to design improvement, to the drafting of the exam documents and cross-checks on different scales.

A Blog of the Studio will be activated to record the educational process, publish selected students work and share references in support of the Studio activities.

Bibliographic references will be provided by teachers during the Studio, to support theoretical classes and specific group works and will be available on the web.

The teachers will establish periodic monitoring of learning and progress. The comparison between the work of various students groups will be arranged at regular intervals and will have to be intended as a path towards the final exam.
The exams will take place after a collective presentation of the works of all the 2nd year Atelier and will consist in the presentation and discussion of the A1 panels, 3d model and process booklet for each students group.

The final assessment will result in an individual vote assigned to each student, based on his learning on each discipline and his contribution in the development of the overall project.