Thoughts

In recent years, the relationship between design, construction and learning has returned to the centre of the disciplinary debate, particularly concerning the themes of urban regeneration, the reactivation of inner areas, rural contexts experiencing seemingly irreversible depopulation, sustainability, and community involvement in spatial transformation processes. Within this framework, design approaches incorporating self-construction practices assume a significant role, not only for their operational dimension but also for their capacity to generate forms of knowledge through doing.

The experience of the Unica Space Force collective, developed at the University of Cagliari, stems from this perspective. It was initially conceived as an experimental pedagogical device aimed at returning students to a concrete dimension of design, grounded in the direct relationship between ideation, construction, use, place, and people. Over time, this experience has progressively consolidated through workshops, summer schools, temporary interventions, and applied research activities, ultimately evolving into a fully-fledged, cross-disciplinary line of work spanning teaching, research, and the university's third mission.

Since 2012, Unica Space Force has carried out numerous interventions in different contexts, involving nearly a thousand students, international schools of architecture, public bodies, and local administrations. The activities have engaged inner areas, university spaces, temporary installations, and fragile urban contexts through the construction of transient spatial devices, made predominantly of wood and conceived as tools for social activation and design experimentation.

By adopting an approach based on community involvement, the performative speed of self-construction, and collective commitment, the creation of low-cost, low-tech micro-architectures and spatial devices has made it possible to question places, test regeneration strategies, and restore new potential forms of habitability. In doing so, it pursues the idea of reactivating processes rather than achieving finalized outcomes.

In this sense, designed self-construction is interpreted well beyond its role as a mere exercise in building technique or a tactical mode of rapid intervention; it is viewed as a research practice that proposes a sustainable operational model, granting architectural design a renewed role in guiding transformative strategies for places and regulating the relational and inter-scalar dimensions they entail.

Practice as Theory:
Towards a Pedagogy of DOING

Unica Space Force reinterprets the relationship between design and construction by proposing a working method that considers these two traditionally separate moments as indissoluble. It reduces and overlaps their timeframes while predefining techniques and materials. In this way, the constructive dimension becomes the constitutive essence of the project and a central element for reflection on its genesis and development—both from the standpoint of construction and its consequent spatial potential. In other words, starting from the definition of a basic syntax that regulates the building process, the semantics of the project are pursued through a linguistic code common to all designs, yet open each time to unique and specific interpretations.

Activities are developed through intensive workshops in which students are called upon not only to design but also to directly build what they have conceived. This approach, summarized in the expression «from drawing boards to timber boards»1 (dai tavoli alle tavole), shifts the project from a predominantly representative dimension to an experiential and material one, helping to increase awareness in the construction of reality.

This mode of learning is closely aligned with the concept of "learning by doing" of Bauhaus memory, adopting the stance of Walter Gropius, who as early as 1919 wrote in the Bauhaus Manifesto: «Art cannot be learned, but craftsmanship can. The basis of creative competence is craftsmanship skills [...]»2.

Indeed, construction becomes an integral part of the creative and design process, bringing the educational experience back to the concreteness of reality. It reconnects architecture and its intellectual production with an increasingly strong link to the matter of which it will be composed.

Practising architecture also means constantly measuring space, matter, and constituent elements, generating proportions, and creating internal and external relationships. To measure is to think; as Alberto Campo Baeza argues, for him, «[...] architecture is built idea»3. Paolo Zermani's thought aligns with this same cultural lineage when he states that «design is essentially measuring things [...]»4.

This approach intends to refocus the designer's attention on achieving the construction of the work as the very goal of the project, conceiving the material dimension as the backbone of design. It restores a direct knowledge of matter, learning its characteristic and often critical behaviours and its reactions to stresses. Through full-scale simulations of small pavilions, all of this becomes the object of a more comprehensive and circular pedagogical experience that allows participation in the entire cycle: from thought to action, to tangible and experienceable reality.

This theme is particularly timely in a historical moment where the virtual world increasingly prevails over concrete experience. It guides architecture students towards mastering dimensions, proportions, and qualitatively assessing the impacts that architecture—even if small and temporary—has on its immediate context and future users.

The curators of the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale, Pritzker Prize winners Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, have titled the twentieth edition “Do Architecture – The Possibility of Coexistence in Real Reality.” They argue for this seemingly counter-trend choice by emphasizing the centrality of the: «[...] need to engage with real reality and local practices, to 'do architecture' directly, prioritizing a physical and tactile dimension of 'doing'. It is precisely through this concrete act of 'doing' that seemingly incompatible elements can find forms of coexistence within the same space [...]»5.

Students work in real-world contexts, facing concrete constraints of time (very little), material availability (extremely limited), logistics (never easy), and construction site organization. Wood represents the preferred material for these experiences, both for reasons of transportability and speed of assembly—even for the less specialized—and for the possibility of developing simple, reversible, and adaptable construction systems.

Over time, the conviction has matured that choosing a single basic construction element—the 7x7x400 cm fir timber post—represents a further degree of process simplification, consistent with the principles of necessity and synthesis that should underpin design choices. On one hand, this contributes to achieving an always unexpected complexity by varying between rule and exception; on the other, it builds a language that references form, construction, and the structural tectonics of architecture. This process leaves open interpretative possibilities, pluralities of solutions, and the optimization of material use and structural choices, guiding students toward an increasingly expert use—enriched each time by previous experiences—of a shared method and apparatus of techniques. If you will, it is the adoption and invention of a school method and language with which to experiment with possibilities, without any ambition of absoluteness.

The use of a single element is a pedagogical pretext to make students reflect on the complexities hidden behind the relationship between rule and exception, type and variation, as well as the multiple possibilities related to the theme of the joint and tectonics, both in structural and linguistic terms, as well as constructive ones. It means being able to create full-scale joints that are faithful to the structural model and understanding the consequences and impact they can have on the project's outcome, especially concerning the mechanical responses of the material.

Wood is particularly indicative in this sense: it is a living, non-isotropic material; it moves, expands, and contracts. It is easily penetrated in some directions and much less so in others, relative to the grain and the cuts that originated the basic components. Consequently, manipulating wood allows for an immediate understanding of its behaviour and fosters greater sensitivity regarding the design choices involving it. Evidently, learning through these modalities—though developed and tested in a very specific condition based on the construction of timber pavilions—holds a value that can inform design approaches in different conditions and constitute a solid methodological foundation for a more concrete and realistic approach to design. This approach also represents an excellent design and operational compromise: it allows economically sustainable experimentation, enables the reuse of basic elements at the end of the structures' life cycle, and introduces elements of shared recognizability in the solutions proposed from time to time, allowing opportunities for comparison among the different protagonists who designed and built them, even at distinct times and in distant places.

The temporal dimension constitutes an additional determining factor. The workshops are organized according to an extremely concentrated schedule: a few days dedicated to design and a few days destined for construction. This condition imposes a strong synthesis between thought and action, reducing the distance between design elaboration and material verification.

Speed is a tool to intensify decision-making processes and build a more immediate relationship with places and the communities involved, without renouncing the knowledge and study of what the Sri Lankan architect Palinda Kannangara defines as «the visceral qualities of architecture»6, meaning those qualities with which architecture responds to its initial conditions, proposing its own most intrinsic and constitutive rules.

In this sense, self-construction also assumes a pedagogical value, as it allows learning through the direct verification of design choices.

Researching / Reactivating / Regenerating:
From Drawing Boards to Timber Boards to Squares

Over the years, educational experiences have progressively merged into applied research activities and third-mission projects. Self-construction is thus utilized as an exploratory tool capable of testing micro-transformation and urban/territorial regeneration strategies through rapid, transient, and low-cost interventions.

The interventions carried out in the inner areas of Sardinia, in small municipalities, and within university spaces do not intend to propose definitive solutions, but to activate processes. The built architectures function as temporary devices capable of questioning places, generating new practices of use, and building collective awareness. If you will, they are multipliers of interest that recirculate vital energies into places that had disappeared from the geographies of the possible.

This is a pedagogical approach ontologically directed toward reality, taking students out of the enclosed classrooms—where learning the principles of the discipline risks assuming a self-referential character and becoming an end in itself (architecture for architecture)—and into the open world, in contact with people and critical contextual conditions. Here, design becomes a tool for understanding reality, aimed at prefiguring new conditions of habitability closer to people's expectations (architecture for people), and thus directed toward building new, more hospitable habitats.

These habitats are capable of regenerating places and regenerating themselves, modifying them and being modified, changing their configurations like adaptive and rapidly responsive species facing the pressures of their contexts. For this reason, one can think that the original premise of this cycle of experiences, "from drawing boards to timber boards," to which reference has been made previously, can be appropriately integrated by the collaborative, co-designed, and regenerative dimension, becoming “from drawing boards to timber boards to public squares”.

In this perspective, the project is interpreted as an open process attentive to capturing variations in space-community relations. The functional under-determination of the interventions makes it possible to multiply the uses of the areas cared for and to encourage their appropriation by communities. The micro-architectures thus become relational tools and opportunities to experiment with new forms of habitability.

These architectures are distributed across the explored territories as true active research devices. In analogy with the concept of the “pioneer species”7 introduced into ecological science by the American botanist and ecologist Frederic Edward Clements at the beginning of the 20th century, the architectures of the Generative Habitats—temporary interventions capable of testing future conditions of urban and rural transformation—are to be considered true "pioneer species" of settlement, or rather, of re-settlement. Like plant species that prepare the soil for more complex processes, these architectures make it possible to verify usage scenarios, mitigate risks, and gather useful information for potential permanent transformations. In botany, pioneer species, which must survive where no other species can, exhibit specific characteristics: extreme endurance, independence from the soil, an "R strategy" (rapid and massive reproduction), fast growth, and a short life cycle (they colonize space quickly, reproduce, and die in a short time). From this stems the idea that pioneer species in architecture are more than resistant, more than resilient, but antifragile—meaning capable of modifying and improving when faced with stresses, stressors, volatility, and disorder8; they are "alien," meaning not definitively rooted in the soils where they are implanted, rapidly replicable, and rapidly replaceable.

Furthermore, Clements and subsequent botanical scholars define the so-called «pioneer anomaly or pioneer paradox»9, which points to a suicidal dimension of pioneer species: by transforming harsh environments into more hospitable ones, they create better conditions for the arrival of larger, more competitive plants. As the latter grow, they deprive the pioneers of light and space, which almost always results in them being replaced.

The architectures of the Generative Habitats play the same role: they prepare the conditions for more stable and lasting interventions after a short-to-medium-term verification cycle and, if effective, conclude their task fairly quickly. This does not mean, however, that Generative Habitats must always and systematically be replaced; in some situations, it is appropriate for their conditions of instability and indeterminacy to persist, continuing to serve as realms for verification and research.

This approach proposes a cultural posture for designers who take care of people and places, renouncing superficial protagonism to pursue a structural commitment to their work. Sam Mockbee, founder of Rural Studio—perhaps the most extraordinary contemporary experience in the field of socially engaged self-constructed architecture, structured around the idea of «[...] lifting the spirit of the people»10—repeatedly maintained:

«I hope that the Rural Studio experience helps students develop what I call a 'moral compass' and the determination to do something that leaves the world a little better than they found it»11.

The experience gained by the Unica Space Force collective has also allowed these practices to be integrated into more structured research projects, including programs funded under the PNRR (National Recovery and Resilience Plan) and strategic university initiatives. Within this framework, self-construction no longer represents merely an educational methodology, but a genuine research tool investigating the relationship between space, community, and transformation.

The Sustainable Lightness of Building:
Unique Pieces for Generative Habitats

The experiences developed attribute a central role to the involvement of people and communities. Participation, evidently, does not coincide—nor could it—with entirely delegating the project to the inhabitants. Rather, it involves a preliminary, continuously reiterated, and shared phase of building the conditions for activating places. The interventions become opportunities for dialogue, collaboration, and building relations between designers and inhabitants, but above all among the inhabitants themselves, strengthening community ties and contributing to re-signifying places by reintroducing uses and taking care of them.

This approach produces significant effects on a pedagogical level as well. Construction is interpreted as a multi-level learning practice: building to know, building to meet, building to verify, building to demonstrate, building to activate. The direct experience of the construction site allows today's students and tomorrow's architects to gain awareness regarding construction processes, materials, and the social implications of design.

Within these practices, the theme of imprecision also assumes particular relevance. Working with few resources, ordinary materials, limited time, and low-level construction skills—since the micro-architectures in question are mostly built by students with no practical site experience and using elementary equipment like screwdrivers, circular saws, mitre saws, and nothing more—requires a strong capacity for adaptation and implies the acceptance of a certain constitutive transience. Imprecision, an integral part of the process and inevitable under these starting conditions, is not considered a limitation, but an intrinsic character of low-tech and low-cost processes founded on the ability to transform ordinary conditions into significant spatial configurations.

The Generative Habitats of Unica Space Force rely on certain methodological invariants traceable to the idea, widely illustrated in this volume, of using a recurring syntax as a linguistic, structural, and constructive rule for its architectures, while always referring to the “unique piece strategy” (strategia del pezzo unico). Despite utilizing serial processes and simplified construction systems, a condition of uniqueness is sought for each intervention, determined by the relationship with the context, the modes of participation, and the specific conditions of the place. In this sense, repeating the process does not produce a standardization of outcomes; instead, it generates different configurations each time that are coherent with the places for which they are conceived, even if, being transient, they maintain an intrinsic provisionality in their rooting to the site.

Finally, attention to sustainability runs through the entire path, assuming not only an environmental dimension but also a social, economic, and constructive one. The limitation of available resources, the reversibility of interventions, and the capacity to activate collective processes contribute to defining an operational approach that is light yet capable of producing significant effects in the contexts involved.

The idea that these architectures "pass lightly over the earth to the point that no one notices their passage" lies at the core of Unica Space Force's operational principle: temporary, rapid, modifiable, adaptive, replaceable, and recyclable architectures, and therefore so sustainable as to leave traces on processes and people, but not on the ground.

Without Conclusions

The Unica Space Force experience shows how self-construction can constitute an integrated School framework combining teaching, research, and the third mission. Through temporary interventions, participatory processes, and low-tech construction practices, design is reinterpreted as an open process of learning, experimentation, and territorial activation.

The value of these practices, as stated, does not lie in the completeness of the outcomes but in their ability to produce rapid verifications, build relationships, activate new possibilities for using space, and guide processes and strategies. Indeed, the temporary dimension of the interventions, the speed of execution, and the centrality of construction make it possible to experiment with alternative scenarios with limited costs and high adaptive capacity. Within this framework, self-construction assumes a dual nature: on one hand, it represents a pedagogical tool capable of returning design to a concrete dimension of doing; on the other, it constitutes an applied research methodology capable of questioning places and testing urban and social transformation strategies that are process-oriented and never aimed at definitive outcomes.

Finally, the progressive institutionalization of these experiences within university curricula confirms the possibility of building educational models in which the relationship between thought and action, design and construction, experimentation and community returns to occupy a central position in the training of the architect.

This is a long journey that relies on time according to two registers that are apparently in opposition but integrated with each other: on one hand, it introduces the idea of short time—indeed, very short time—with which to stimulate, perturb, and disturb places to verify their transformative potential and regeneration capacities; on the other hand, it activates open process strategies that accompany places and communities through the times of natural habitat evolution, and therefore, without proposing conclusions.