The History and Design Atelier aims at promoting the following skills: - the knowledge of the histories and theories of architecture and the related disciplines; - the understanding of the social and cultural background in which the architectures, the cities and the built environment are (and have been) shaped and transformed; - the awareness of the processes that guide the architect in the choice of the solution that adequately answers to the programme requirements; - the ability to gather, organize and interpret correctly the historical information at the different scales in, at least, one foreign language; - the ability to work in team in order to find appropriate solutions to design problems by taking into account the programme requirements, the social and cultural values, as well as the limits and potentialities implicit in contexts; - the capacity to apply the acquired tools and methods to the single disciplines, and recognise their mutual interactions; - the capacity to critically analyse the design process referred to the single building in its relation with the pre-existing conditions, the urban and the environmental scales; - the capacity to elaborate a simple historical/critical text about the city and its architectures; - the capacity to comply with the deadlines of practical exercises and delivery of papers, analogously to what typically happens in the professional world; - the capacity to complete an architectural project within a given deadline.

The basic skills and competencies acquired during the first year course of History of Contemporary and the Urban Planning/Architectural Design Atelier will be taken for granted.

Turin: From Grand Transformation to Urban Renewal This course studies the city of Turin’s passage from its grand urban transformation to its crisis as an assembly-line city. Its transformation resulted from the growth and evolution of its identity as an industrialized city. Its crisis left in its wake more than 6,000,000 m2 of disused industrial areas. Important production centers were dismantled, but reconversion, urban renewal, and social integration policies were implemented. This course reviews several significant steps in the construction of the industrialized city in order to understand what socio-economic, cultural, city-planning and architectural processes worked to set up the contemporary urban pattern. With the demographic and industrial crisis of the 1980s, this pattern became the ideal grounds for new transformation and experimentation tied in with a new conception of what a city could be. This conception no longer focused on the expansive and fragmentary development of urbanized territory but rather on the renewal of what is already there, according to a model of growth typical of European urban history – i.e. stratification, densification and substitution of old parts by new parts. The composition module aims to consider urban renewal and regeneration in outlying public neighborhoods and disused industrial areas. The neighborhoods have been declining in terms of their functions, identities and urban quality, something common to all advanced industrialized countries that were hit by post-industrial negative shrinkage. The module is meant to take an approach that is as integrated and trans-scalar as possible in relation to punctual and reticular processes of the transformation of urbanized territory. The module will emphasize several types of measures taken in several building-reconversion and urban-regeneration initiatives in Italy and abroad, where “self-limitation” was required as a “form of suspension of acting, constructing and occupying.” Thus new elements were “grafted” into sensitive points of the territory, elements that are able to lead the physical-ecological and socio-historical environment to greater bio-diversity and wealth. Some neighborhoods in Barriera di Milano and Madonna di Campagna made up the working-class heart of the development of manufacturing and the heavy industry. In a significant way, they represent the origins and evolution of the contemporary city along with the rhetoric that went along with their construction, growth and dismantling of their industrial identity. This course will inquire into the interpretations that the terms ¬– home, neighborhood, community, typology –¬ have taken on here in one of the most important working-class outlying areas in Turin. Students will compare and contrast different interpretations of these terms over the course of the twentieth century. What were the processes that helped determine the contemporary urban pattern? This pattern became a field of investigation for gaining a perspective on strategic planning and on the current policies of social integration and urban regeneration. The areas of the students’ projects will be analyzed both in their present form and as they evolved over the years. These are urban spaces that today are critical but marginal in relation to the post-industrial city and great transformations that Turin went through in the early years of the twenty-first century. They had been key areas whose features were very characteristic of the city of the late 1800s and, especially, the 1900s. The students should work on one of these areas, investigating its present pattern as well as several case studies – i.e. architectures, examples of industrial archeology, and/or public housing neighborhoods and services of the old company town that emerged near the project areas. The student’s historical analysis should be made through research of documents from different archives. It should aim to work out a critical interpretation that will proceed through their taking into consideration the data that has emerged in relation to the existing literature. The students’ final overall evaluation will be based on a project and a written memoir. The project work will be conducted in groups and accompanied by each student’s paper, which will treat some of the topics in the composition course that are considered important for the proposed project. The memoir, featuring a student’s historical work, should present the project as an intervention within the context of the nature of the place and should result from critical historical work based on research of sources in relation to pre-existing circumstances. The project work will be conducted in groups, but the papers and the memoir will be done individually.

The course will have several formats: contact classes, exercises, review sessions, educational excursions, and presentation. The contact classes will cover the issue of the urban renewal, requalification, and regeneration through examining several case studies that will give students theoretical and critical project tools. Along with the classes, students will develop their analyses of the areas of their studies located in the north of Turin in order to study in-depth both the historical developments and current problematic and potential issues -- a work-in-progress – in relation to the measures (programmed or not) that could, over the short/long run, be plausible and/or able to be implemented. The study of the evolution of building fabric, morphology, architectural typologies and the most significant pre-existing features of the macro-area will be decomposed into more narrow and homogeneous areas that will be the subject of analysis for individual groups. The analysis of the areas will come to the study of the overall area. Both levels are considered to be prerequisites and useful for the projects. The composition exercises (done in groups of three students) will begin with a contextual analysis of the present state of affairs and lead to the elaboration of a meta-project (5000-2000 scale) as well as a final project on a more limited topic (500-200 scale), possibly with further partial elaborations. Students should hand in several intermediate written assignments (to be evaluated), developed in parallel to specific topics defined in consultation with the instructor. These topics should be developed from individual cases of urban regeneration (which have been presented, at least partially, in the contact classes). These intermediate assignments should help set parameters to orient their final projects and construct, in the final phase of the course, their individual written reports. The contact classes in history will be dedicated to the so-called company town (in particular and in comparison to the history of other cities), to the most widely recognized historiography of Turin, and to the topics and leading figures of the reconstruction in the “boom” in Italy in 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. These classes will alternate with the collective reading of reference texts. The course will also feature classes held by guest professionals, authors of projects and texts of interest for the course, these lessons giving all involved a chance for discussion and opening up to new perspectives. While students are working out their projects, the research and analysis of primary sources (planning documents and construction dossiers) and secondary sources (historical and critical) will be considered fundamental both for gaining knowledge of the places and for making choices about their projects. The writing exercise is considered the phase fundamental for learning and for the development of critical though about course topics. Excursions and surveys will give students the chance to get to know significant places and types of architecture as well as to produce study materials (notes, photographs, designs, and interviews) that can serve to deepen their knowledge of the topics developed in the contact classes and to help them draft the final paper on the case study that they have chosen.

The study material for the composition module will mainly have to do with the analysis of recently completed projects related to the topics of the course. The variety of cases analyzed during the classes will at times be summarized in PDF files available to students at the university educational portal. The texts required and recommended by the history module will be available in digital copy on the didactic website and in printed format at the press center. In addition, both modules will provide a useful bibliography for more in-depth study for the topics under consideration. The course will be complemented by classes held by guest professionals, authors of projects and texts of interest for the course, who will present their work. Required texts: Anthony L. Cardosa e Goffrey W. Symcox, Storia di Torino, Einaudi, Torino 2006, capitoli VIII, IX, X, pp. 201-268; Michela Comba e Rita D’Attorre, Fiat e la costruzione di Torino attraverso l’industria (1900-1965). Tre guerre per una company town, in «Patrimonio Industriale in stampa», n.15, aprile 2015; Carlo Olmo, Un racconto e due attori. Città e metropoli nel XX secolo, pp. 90-101, in Dizionario dell’Architettura del XX Secolo, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, Roma 2004; P. Gregory, Paesaggio: architettura in Enciclopedia Italiana di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Appendice 2000, vol. II, pp. 396-401; XXI secolo. VII Appendice, vol. II, pp. 524-527; Nona Appendice, vol. II pp. 295-297; Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Roma 2000, 2007, 2015. R. Piano, La responsabilità dell’architetto. Conversazione con Renzo Cassigoli, Passigli, Firenze 2002; S. Boeri, L’anticittà, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2011.

Exam: Compulsory oral exam; Individual graphic design project; Group graphic design project; Individual essay; Group project;

1. Attendance at classes, seminars, and other laboratory activities is considered a prerequisite for participating in the prospective activities positively. 2. During the Atelier, students must discuss with the instructor and possibly revise their projects (sketches, models, writings, drafts, tables, etc.) in light of the study of the contemporary history of Turin and its bibliography. The ability to communicate proposals clearly and effectively is an important element for grade evaluation. There are 3-4 intermediate deliveries for each module, of which the first joint and the others differentiated for each module. 3. Even though the Atelier activities may be conducted in groups of 2-3 students, final evaluation is individual, taking into account revisions and discussions, mid-term evaluations, and individual participation during the Atelier. 4. The synthesis study on the evolution of building fabric, urban morphology and some buildings types of the area will involve the production, for each group, of 3 representation’s tables and 1 virtual model. The deepening of the history of the most important historical architectural preesxistences will be individual and developed by writing a case-study (memory) of a minimum of 5 pp. There are 2 deliveries (and two evaluations) for each elaborate. 5 The design of the project at the required scales and its discussion during the examination will be the focus of the compositional module. Along with the project plans, produced in groups, both in the analysis of the current status (in A3 format, relating to mobility, green areas, residential fabric, services, perceptions and normative aspects) and in the project (from urban scale 1: 5000 and 1: 2000 to architectural scale 1: 200, in the number that will be necessary to explicate design choices at every step), each student will be required to have an in-depth look at some of the design aspects discussed during the course; these aspects may include project approach methodologies, exemplifications of industrial reconversion and so on (for a development of approximately 6 pages printed in A4, including images and bibliography). For both modules, the final test will consist of an oral exam (with two questions about the bibliography and the works produced) and verification of all works. The evaluation criteria will take into account both the product and the final oral exam as well as the training process of each student during the Atelier. The final test evaluation will average with the previous ones, taking into account the accuracy of the deliveries and their evaluation during the course, with a percentage that for each discipline will be 50% on midrange evaluations and 50% on the final test. In particular, an important element of evaluation - for each candidate - will be the ability to communicate clearly and effectively the proposals and the individual work carried out (10% of the final vote), as well as the attendance at classroom activity and the student growth during the atelier (10% of the final vote). 6. The ability to work out an architectural project within a specific deadline is a specific skill in the work of an architect. This skill will be tested in the final exam which will be held - in preference - in the first exam week of the session immediately after the Atelier.

In addition to the message sent by the online system, students with disabilities or Specific Learning Disorders (SLD) are invited to directly inform the professor in charge of the course about the special arrangements for the exam that have been agreed with the Special Needs Unit. The professor has to be informed at least one week before the beginning of the examination session in order to provide students with the most suitable arrangements for each specific type of exam.