Una casa è una casa: come farla?

The guiding principle behind ​​the First Year Design Studio that I coordinated was configuring an educational path aimed at projecting the student into the complex dimension of the architectural project by a series of precise approaches through exercises of small size and scale, concluded in themselves but open to wider reflections. In the first phase, three of such exercises were assigned: the first named "A House for the Tree", the second "A Bar for the Street" and the third "Below, the Gallery". These “moments” of design were developed from a series of assigned conditions, through which the student approached the different possibilities offered by architectural composition and its consequent spatial declinations. The second, however, required the students to formalize a small architectural project, a "Home", imagined as a micro-infrastructure accommodating a plurality of different uses immersed in the extraordinary surrounding landscape, the archaeological and environmental system of the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento. The project was an opportunity to broaden the students' horizons while at the same time refining their awareness of three fundamental issues of architecture: ideas, languages ​​and atmospheres.