Thoughts

The School of Architecture of the Department of Civile & Environmental Engineering and Architecture at the University of Cagliari, following didactical methods now widely established in European schools of architecture, grounds the teaching most directly related to architectural and landscape design oscillating between traditional lectures and the development of themes through design studio-based work.

These “design studios” do in fact propose more or less realistic “simulations” of certain phases of the design process: they select real sites and choose real or realistic themes to develop, often in agreement with potentially interested institutional interlocutors. In particular, they explore issues of context, the scales of design, the relational and multiscalar system that design involves and activates, the semantic and syntactic questions of architecture, its inseparable relationship with the more intrinsically constitutive aspects of structure and construction — and therefore of matter — as well as sustainability, accessibility, inclusiveness and, in some cases, the concrete feasibility of the proposals. We are, of course, speaking of the “learning by doing” approach, a formula that has now entered a broadly shared — and sometimes overused — pedagogical vocabulary: after all, every studio-based activity implies some form of learning through doing.

And yet, in conventional teaching practices, as we were saying, the act of doing remains confined within a formative simulation: it produces drawings, models, prototypes or semi-finished outputs which, however useful for learning, exhaust their function within the pedagogical experience and are not meant to have an autonomous life beyond the course, studio or workshop.

In our view, the most incisive pedagogical quality of Unica Space Force lies precisely in the inversion of this perspective: in doing by learning — in fare imparando — rather than (only) in learning by doing.

One does learn by doing, but here one truly does by learning, and learns more precisely because truly doing. The product of the process is not merely an exercise, nor a pedagogical leftover, nor a pretext for learning: it is a completed generative architecture, in its own measure, responsibility and fullness. It is a real object, intended to remain in place, to be used, modified, recognised, criticised, maintained. It is precisely this tension towards a full outcome that brings out pedagogical qualities that mere simulation does not activate with the same intensity: attention to matter, safety, precision, feasibility, maintenance, time, public use, responsibility towards people and towards places.

Since 2012, the research and teaching group Un Space Force of the University of Cagliari, composed of teachers, researchers and students from the School of Architecture, has introduced this innovation through dedicated summer schools and intensive workshops: reducing the size and scale of design elaboration in order to focus on design choices directed towards real completion in self-built form. Through practices of thought/action and laboratories of design and self-construction, it produces Generative Habitats in urban and rural contexts across Sardinia. By Generative Habitat, we mean a set of architectural devices that stimulates the mutation of abandoned and undervalued public space, revealing its unexpressed potential and multiplying its possible uses through transitional configurations that adapt and are implemented over time.

The regeneration of forgotten, underused, waiting spaces has from the outset provided the background theme of these experiences, in urban and rural contexts and within university spaces, with the aim of improving their conditions of habitability, according to an approach that Gian Giacomo Ortu describes as a passage «from site to place».¹

Self-construction, as a key stage in the learning process of architectural design oriented towards the concreteness of the built outcome, is based on several pedagogical objectives:

• to infuse teaching with the dimension of doing by learning, through implementation phases within workshop-based micro-building sites, useful for confronting an idea of design oriented towards the construction of the real, and capable of leaving an “indelible trace” in the educational path through unique, exploratory and shared experiences;
• to imagine and produce “pulsating spaces”: places of reappropriation for communities, to which the dignity of multiple, open, changing uses is restored;
• to stimulate, through an innovative and concrete form of teaching, the ethical awareness and sense of responsibility of students, who, consistently with their future social mission, themselves become protagonists in the care of places and communities and in the first phase of their reactivation;
• to convey the disciplinary message that it is possible to work with quality by relying on the principle of «much thought and little money»², a key imperative not only for design but for contemporary society, and a true challenge for the future;
• to understand that «place-building»³ is a long-term process of sedimentation, the outcome of negotiations, balances and conflicts, and that therefore no project can ever be definitive; in this sense, what matters is to accept the processual dimension within which the project may be inscribed, rather than relying only on the specific outcome it produces;
• to develop the transitory dimension of these experiences as an opportunity, oriented towards rapid changes in response to urgent needs; this usually does not require major infrastructural revolutions, but can be developed with few resources and in short timeframes, as the beginning of more durable transformation processes that require far greater resources and longer periods of conception and implementation, while limiting the risks they entail;
• to accept time as a far from irrelevant variable in processes and in every project: the time of architecture is often not aligned with the time of people, which is usually faster; experiences of “tactical urbanism”, and of the associated architectures, themselves tactical⁴, have the capacity to reduce this gap through a responsive and adaptive approach;
• to always remember that the real objective of projects is people and their needs, because designing means constructing, integrating and improving the conditions of habitability of places — and therefore creating habitat.

The capacity that contemporary architecture shows in interpreting these increasingly relevant themes allows us to think of the new realisms to which Pier Luigi Nicolin⁵ refers: architectures that, through a rereading of the ordinary and the everyday, can reach lyrical heights and restore meaning to forgotten or abandoned places. What now seems to be emerging as a new and fertile frontier of our discipline is the set of possibilities offered by these architectures. They carry an ecological approach based on low-tech solutions and recyclable materials, possibly produced through short supply chains, directed towards local and territorial development, and towards the definition of new coordinated forms of territorial use and landscape construction through the creation of systems for integrated cultural access and use.

This is a substantial part of that frontier which Mirko Zardini, paraphrasing Gilles Clément, defines as «a Third Landscape for architecture»⁶. It is a disciplinary frontier made of much thought and few resources, where, still within the theme of realism, one can be «Poor but Beautiful»⁷, and whose paradigms become ecology, provisionality, reversibility, sustainability. In other words, it is a line of architectural exploration that, while waiting to recover certainties about the relationship between human beings and territory, chooses to place objects lightly on the ground; chooses to leave paths open; chooses to invest few resources, recyclable and economical — in short, sustainable; chooses to care for territory and for its forgotten places, but also for its places of excellence, almost with the same approach, through uses that are neither invasive nor disturbing. It is a form of low-impact colonisation of territory, capable of creating and recreating recognisable and usable landscapes through new uses integrated with conventional and productive ones, uses that in fact can hardly do without them. It is a form of landscape project that designs a territorial-scale installation by creating coordinated systems of services that make these uses possible. Above all, it is a form of territorial use grounded in the construction of a new culture of sustainability, less rhetorical and more aware, one that responds more appropriately to what De Matteis calls «the other face of sustainability, the cultural one», understood as “the capacity to maintain and reproduce over time the principles that regulate the internal relations of each settled society and ensure its autonomy”.⁸ This economy of means also has a precise formative value. When the project has to become real construction, scarcity is not only a technical or financial constraint, but a pedagogical condition. It forces one to choose, measure, renounce, simplify without impoverishing, distinguish what is necessary from what is superfluous. In this sense, doing by learning does not produce operational skills alone: it educates towards a form of design responsibility in which the idea, matter, time, cost, safety, use and care can no longer be thought separately.

From a strategic point of view, this way of operating leads us to rethink the relationship between communities and territories in a more cultivated, contemporary and flexible manner, proposing new connections between conventional uses — those that guarantee the resident care of land, the constant and permanent management of countryside or city — and innovative uses that contribute to the re-creation of the sustainable meaning of places. Design can and must be the true protagonist in giving form and structure to this strategy — which cannot be only the expression of engaged but undisciplined activism originating from communities — through a form of thinking that is first resistant, then resilient and, finally, antifragile. In other words, it is a rapid and adaptive form of design that reinterprets, updating it, the principle of necessity and therefore adopts the paradigm of renunciation: renouncing the superfluous, the costly, the large scale, the absence of a programme, the difficulty of managing spaces over time.

There is no rhetoric in this approach, only pragmatism and concreteness: the result of an awareness of the issues of our time, on the one hand in terms of the quality of space, and on the other in terms of scarce resources and uncertainty about what is to be done.

Generative Habitats, and the self-built architectures that structure them, express an advanced form of ecosustainable thinking oriented towards an idea of rootedness and belonging understood in less absolute terms.

They are replicable architectures because prototypes make it possible to establish limited serial production, from which variations can easily be derived. The concept of uniqueness, always indispensable, here sits well with the possibility of replication; indeed, it is precisely the varied replication of the model at territorial scale that contributes to defining a coordinated and recognisable image of the territory through its most significant networked sites.

They are sustainable architectures in the sense proposed by Ingersoll: they are inspired by an idea of sustainability based on the ecological paradigm, understood as a tool for the «minimisation of the use of non-renewable resources»⁹. But they are sustainable also in the sense proposed by De Matteis, because through their innovative programme they allow new forms of cultural sustainability to develop, strengthening the continuous process of constructing the identity of territories and their communities.

In short, they are architectures for human beings, for the city and for the territory. They contribute to shaping places and preserving their long duration not by freezing the image through which they appear today, but rather through the idea that processes of development and continuous transformation of habitats are the result of the ongoing sedimentation of disturbances and subsequent consolidations.