Project I: Atelier Prats

The studio proposes to work with the urban heritage, to discover the physical and emotional reality contained within existing buildings and to test their capacity to adapt to new conditions of occupation. We will work in Mendrisio, and the project areas will be located along the former course of the Morée River.
The numerous interventions that have taken place along the course of this river, leaving it covered a few meters below the ground, have completely transformed the morphology of Mendrisio, concealing the original topography of the primary settlement. The river has remained invisible, while the new buildings have introduced a larger scale, which is unrelated to the inherited scale of old Mendrisio. The new buildings do not respond to the public urban spaces and the pedestrian scale, but rather to the new infrastructure and the mobility and speed of the car. 
The exercise will work on the articulation of the two scales by introducing a new programme to establish a dialogue between these two stages of urban development. The programme of the school of gastronomic sciences, with its different spatial hierarchies, from the most private of classrooms to the most public of auditoriums and foyers, will help link these two different scales of the city.

The proposal of the Atelier is to think on the combination of two parallel themes and to research on the relationship among them: the capacity of existing buildings to adapt and accommodate new programs, and the role of food in our daily lives, exploring its social and cultural potential. 

Our places of work are urban contexts in transformation, and this semester we will be working in the historic city center of Mendrisio, a place that is still capable of accepting new readings and programs. 

At the beginning of the semester, we will visit the sites to get to know and to draw the contexts of the brief.

The new functional program that will be set up in this context, with the intention of reactivating it, has at its focus the creation of a school of gastronomic sciences, dedicated to the study of culture, politics, economics and ecology of food, capable of applying these sciences to production, distribution and sustainable consumption.

To learn more about this program, at the beginning of the semester we will also visit the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, founded and promoted in 2004 by the international SlowFood association, to discover the multiple dimensions of food as a value and its role in creating and shaping society.

In presence

The Atelier requires the project being entirely hand-drawn, not for aesthetic interest but rather valuing it as an instrument that allows for a more intuitive reflection on the design ideas, helping for deeper concentration, as well as allowing to build an atmosphere in the Atelier where work is shared and evolves open to all participants.

At the beginning of the Atelier we will make a tour to discover the working areas in Mendrisio. During this day, each student will be able to choose his or her own project site from those proposed. 

Afterwards we will travel to Pollenzo and Milan. The first day of the trip we will visit the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, to see the carried out activities, exchange experiences with the students, and learn more about the program of the proposed exercise. We will also be able to analyze how this preexisting building has been adapted to accommodate the different activities that are part of the educational course, ranging from the cultivation of food to its presentation at the table. The second day, in Milan, we will visit different faculties of the Politecnico, which will give us the opportunity to discover examples of the organization of academic activities, from the design of classrooms to common spaces of all the different disciplines that are taught in this university.

Course evaluation will take place on an ongoing basis, assessing every document developed during the semester. Each student will be requested to present from week to week the materials produced during the two days of Atelier.