Concept Design for Architecture

The workshop will provide an opportunity for practical synthesis through which to test all the notions that will be provided by the other teaching modules, guaranteeing strategic responses to a future global scenario, deliberately defined as extreme. The workshop is in fact conducted in collaboration with CNR and will look at the future dimensions of habitability of the planet in relation to the exacerbation of the current climate and environmental challenges. Indeed, given the current global warming trends as well as the decrease in biodiversity in recent decades - considered as the 7th mass extinction in the planet's biological history - the workshop will propose long-term scenarios, with ecosystems collapsing or widely varied, as well as extreme livability conditions in relation to desertification, global warming and sea level rise. How will humankind survive in a dystopian environmental scenario in case all current efforts to contain the human impact on the environment fail? Around such a question, students will be asked to identify a geographical context of reference, then propose visions and ideas of cities or housing aggregates resilient to future environmental challenges. By stressing concept design at the urban scale and according to extreme scenarios, designers will have the opportunity to put to the test a method of interpreting conditions and responding creatively and imaginatively across design disciplines.