After successful completion of the course, students are able to.understand the complexity of a design process. Students are able to operate in different levels in this processes in their own design project.
Post-Pandemic Countryside
Lorenza Baroncelli / Michael Obrist
The global pandemic has emphasised the modern world as volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
The last American elections confirmed the trend that has characterized Western national contexts in the last ten years: the inhabitants are divided between those who live in the countryside and those who live in cities.
At the same time, the peripheral part of our cities looks abandoned in eternal conflicts between deniers, migrants and working class.
Our historical centers has become own by the accommodation booking company such as Airbnb and Booking and today without tourists looks like ghost cities in which politics has not anymore tools to act.
Even if the new computational tools and calculating power of this period could provide the means to adapt to contexts that change at incredible speed, the new technologies of today, however, seem to reveal a new impossibility of building, either due to the ethical transgressions of clients (or architects themselves) or to the sheer scale of humanitarian need, both of which the traditional field of architecture proper seems unprepared to address.
“Post-pandemic Countryside” aims to continue the research carried out last year during the course entitled “Post-pandemic City” and transform a difficult moment in an opportunity to reflect on the ethical and political values of the future architecture.
Throughout the course, students will be invited to design new forms of living in the post-pandemic city. Each lesson will change the scale of the project, from the European one, passing through new city models until the design of the interiors of an apartment. At the same time they will be asked to develop in-depth research through the reading of theoretical texts and newspapers that will support the design work. The lessons will have a first short part of theoretical debate and then each student will be invited to present the design work developed during the week, in front of all the other students.
