After successful completion of the course, students are able to work on complex design tasks in an existing context. Their competence ranges from the recognition of fields of action in the urban context and the development of appropriate urban planning solutions to the solution of technical details for new and existing buildings. Students are able to conduct independent research and collect topic-related basic information. They are able to create design concepts and to present them comprehensively in form of draft and detailed plans.

ExistenzMaximum: la Dolce Vita in “provincia”

https://youtu.be/xxBW5GQrLE4 

Most of the urban debate today is based on a duality that confronts the inner city -the economic, cultural and lustful centripetal motor- versus the pastoral countryside -the “empty land” devoted to the production of food and goods-.

Still, what stands in-between them? These peripherical areas of impunity and unintentionality have a name: “zwischenstadt”.

It is precisely in this in-between city that we are going to swim.

The uncontrolled changes and cluttered developments that shaped the Italian provincial landscape from the seventies on will be our site of interventions. In defiance to a rich artistic, architectural and agricultural heritage, the Italian “provincia” (a very particular kind of zwischenstadt) has been shaped by a multitude of solitary interventions: little houses, housing blocks, shopping malls, industrial warehouses, headquarters, infrastructural leftovers, malls, … that homogenized the development of entire regions. The provincia was never a project, it was a consequence.

Geographically, “provincia” defines a scattered and large territory formed by the sum of a mid-size city, its suburban environments and countryside around. This ensemble structures a territory in which topics of mobility, production, housing, leisure, transgenerational co-living and labor are not defined by the speed and the propelling power of the metropolis, yet they can offer a higher quality of life (larger living spaces, good food, cheaper living costs) and a deeper encounter with natural environments, other species and cosmic rhythms.

Vita Activa and Dolce Vita.

Living the provincia today affirms new desires: it is a tentative of reinventing oneself within a community; an alternative yet concrete propulsion towards a new normality built upon the maximum and out of the inner city.

In the open sea of the provincia, we identified a city that already five hundred years ago embodied the same desire and that today stands out as a typical element of the in-between city of the Pianura Padana region: Vicenza, a fragment in a 21^st century diffused cityscape and lifestyle.

Acting on the periphery around Vicenza, we will close-read and learning from its most definitive idea and answer: the Palladian Villa.

Originally ideated as farmhouses erected on a land devoted to agriculture (with the exception of the Rotonda), these villas were both a pragmatic answer and an abstract model. Not villas of seclusion, but villas of conviviality, they formed the typological answer for a humanistic desire of living the “used-to-be” countryside within an enlightened circle of intellectuals. They were not villas of seclusion, but villas of conviviality.

Today, the pastoral nuance got lost in favor of a “battlefield” filled with any kind of reliquiae and in which nothing has been projected, in which everything is a (bad) result.

We will embrace the typological answer Palladio gave us centuries ago to affirm maximum and common in the provincial as well as to understand how to dwell, to work, to move, to love, to betray, to get older, to have fun, … in the in-between city.

Palladio will be our friend with whom we will talk continuously in order to learn his gestures as relevant architectonic model for a “off-the-city” life. What are the consequences that emerge from the field when we “reinject” the Palladian villa principles in the contemporary in-between city of the Vicentine suburbia?

Palladian villa will be for us a figure of thought in which we will look for answers and elements able to represent a tentative of universality of a specific problem of a spatial (society and life) organization.

The good life in the countryside now turns to be the Dolce Vita in provincia.

At the beginning of the semester we will create a dense environment through lectures, research and discussion in collaboration with other studios. At the end of October we will go on a 5-day field trip to Vicenza to see Palladio, Vicenza and other beautiful fragments (among others, Scarpa’s works) that stands out from deep waters.

Back in Vienna, a project will then be developed in individual work in workshop formats and in weekly laboratory days.

The introduction to the design process begins with short tasks, basic analyses and accompanying lectures (group work). An excursion to Vicenza will enable students to engage with the city's current transformation processes and its architectural production. The design (individual work) is developed on the basis of plans as well as models in different scales, starting with the urban development scale and ending with the focus scale.

Proof of performance is provided by active participation in the analysis phase, the excursion and contributions to discussions in the joint design meetings and the final presentation with (multimedia) project documentation and model.