The Laboratory offers an introduction to the issues concerning Architectural Design, from a theoretical point of view and from a preliminary approach to the project. The issues addressed will be addressed above all on the volumetric and constructive definition of the architectural artefact and its figurative language.

The course is divided into two phases structured in continuity to allow the student a gradual deepening of the issues addressed.

The first phase of the Laboratory (4 CFU) takes place over six days, in intensive mode, and aims to develop an initial learning of the issues concerning the composition of architectural volumes, from the point of view of measurement and the spatial relationships between the elements that make up.
The lessons and exercises will focus on the reading and decomposition of projects for family homes, selected from the large production of the masters of modern and contemporary architecture.

The second phase of the Laboratory (10 CFU) proposes a residential design theme of minimal residential complexity with the aim of introducing the student to the basic notions of the elements that make up the living space, starting from the concept of size, of measuring space in relationship to human activities and to the proportions between the parts that make up an architecture, focusing on the need for continuous reference between the study of the compositional elements of the volumes, their construction and the fulfillment of the functional program.
The reflection on living - and, at its minimum, the reflection on housing - implies the acquisition of awareness, in the student, of metric issues, relating to the paths, the qualities of the space, its ways its alternation in public and private, internal and external, serving and served etc.
The theoretical topics addressed in the lessons also question the possibilities of the architectural form to adapt to the demand for a ductile and malleable spatiality while keeping alive a spatial quality deriving also from the tension between specific activities and volume.
Designing in a specific site requires awareness of the notion of context, in its various articulations and in its various effects on the project itself.
The main topics of the lessons will focus on the following topics:
- Space and human activities
- The space and the architect
- Life of architecture: process, processes, evolution of the project
- Architecture: place and context
- Architecture: use and function
- Architecture: form and figure
- The house - ways and worlds of living
- The house "like me" - the private universe
- Living together: individual space for everyone
- From inside to outside: continuity or caesura?
- Form and time: the house remains, the inhabitant changes - notions of flexibility of space.
The program includes individual exercises. The work done in the classroom is different from that done at home, as it allows a comparison with the activities of other students, evaluating similarities and differences between ways of doing. This confrontation is a moment of reflection and therefore of growth. Students are required to come to the classroom equipped with
essential equipment for the job (paper, pencils, pens, cardboard, cutters, glue, adhesive tape ,.)
The reviews on the exercises are a fundamental didactic moment, the intent of which is not only to direct the processing towards the best outcome, but also to make the student acquire awareness about the mechanisms of the design process, the internal coherences of the project, to a conduction of the same congruent with the premises and the initial reasoning, even in the case of their complete subversion. Students are required to bring with them, every time, all the documents of the previous phases, to allow the teacher to evaluate the development of the work and to highlight the various steps of the project development. Furthermore, they are required to search and show the references used in the development of the work (notes, reasoning, photocopies of articles and projects..).
The progressive accumulation of references, various materials, reflections, sketches, diagrams etc. it will constitute a course book, that is a sort of instrument for recording and measuring the growth achieved; which is also a way not to disperse the thought and the work done. This book must be constructed day by day and will be requested and observed by the teacher during the seminar and will be subject to specific assessment.
The examination will consist in the "cleaning up" of the progress achieved by the project in a number of documents that will be decided at the appropriate time. But also in the critical reassembly of all the intermediate stages of the work and any preparatory exercises. The quality achieved by the course book and the quality of the answers to questions relating to the topics covered will also be part of the evaluation