Project BSc2-I: Housing - Atelier Angonese

As usual, each academic year is dedicated to a theoretical theme that characterizes the teaching experience. This practice allows the project to be framed within a broader reflection on themes in contemporary architecture.
The annual theme will be "Figure." Figure shares its root with words like to feign, figulus (potter), fictor (sculptor), and effigy—that is, to model, to transform, to sculpt—actions that belong to the very act of forming. The figure thus becomes both a matrix and a prefiguration of the completed form, its possible embodiment. It is precisely in this suspension between the real and the abstract, between things and ideas, that the ambiguous and dynamic nature of the figure takes root—poised between the visible and the hidden, between the sensory and the intelligible. Therefore, it is not a graphic construction, but a projection of form through imagination.
In the first semester, we will work in dialogue with a place that engages with figures of great power and importance—the void, topography, and tectonics: the Villa Imperiale in Pesaro. We will design domestic spaces in dialogue with the existing structure, with the landscape and with history—inhabited structures and sculptures, additions, excavations…
To begin engaging with the theme, we will start the semester with the exercise Redrawing and Reconstruction, dedicated to ten architectural objects.

The ambition of the course is to broaden and consolidate the students' architectural awareness, in particular related to the theme of domestic space, providing them with those architectural tools necessary for the continuation of their studies and future professional practice. The method employed is based on the well-established principles of the “Construction of the Idea”.

• Sustainable cities and communities
• Responsible consumption and production

In presence

The atelier's method is based on the process of “Constructing the Idea”—that is, the formulation of an architectural idea only after a careful and conscious process that begins with an initial intuition and passes through phases of cultural, tectonic, and interdisciplinary reflection.
From a methodological point of view, the construction of an idea is always strongly influenced by individuality—that is, by processes that make systematic or dogmatic classification difficult. This does not mean that arbitrariness is permitted. On the contrary, the process of constructing the idea requires translating intuition through a process of investigation into its origin and motivations, always keeping in mind a precise system of cultural values that are also, and above all, the object of our teaching.
The tools necessary to engage with this methodology—and which the atelier seeks to transmit to students—are curiosity, passion, and a certain degree of self-criticism.

Intermediate and final critic with guests.

A presentation that includes large-scale and detailed architectural drawings, three-dimensional images and photographs, as well as models and other materials that help convey both the design process and the final proposal, constitutes the body of documents required for the final critique.

• Emilia Romagna, Marche - Italia, 04.06.26 - 04.06.26 (Compulsory)