models in side the city _ in the framework of tirana architecture week

Italian architectural and urban heritage has been constructed, erased, modified, augmented and re-constructed with precise intentions from its governing bodies. Embedded within the long history of incremental urban improvement there is a sense of connection to times past as well as desire to move forward. The city lives in perpetual palimpsest as a registration of accumulative planning; layers, striations, and erasures are evident throughout the built environment and the psyche of its residents and visitors. (Ersela Kripa) In order to strategically act on the urban scale architecture has to define models. To create a model means to find consistency between certain fixed combinations and positions. We can distinguish two kinds of models, the visual and the intellectual model, which are used as conceptual tools to structure our experience and translate them into functions or make intentional. Through these two models we can express an objective structure that translates the events into something more secure and therefore more real. It is nothing but a formal principle that makes it possible to visualize the complexity of all the potential facets in a more systematic way, a creative approach set up on the understanding of a model. The workshop aims to build a model from an existing building the students will choose in Rome Actions to build models: 1. Analyse the context and define an abacus of building 2. Design new models based of the existing types through a series of manipulation and transformations of their formal and functional qualities in order to reinvent them as a project for the city. 4. Apply the models in the urban context and verify the results of their interaction with the urban tissue at different scales. "It was well into the detailed design of the project that, at an alcohol-inspired brain-storming session off Times Square in 1962, we decided on the name Fun Palace for our short-life conglomerate of disparate, free-choice, free-time, voluntary activities, planned as a public launching-pad rather than a Mecca for East London." – Cedric Price, from Talks at the AA, AA Files 19 (Spring 1990), p. 32. The main purpose of the workshop is to determine what relationship exists today between architecture and urban history, and how this relationship can be represented by a hybrid urban space where leisure and culture come together in a space freed from functional constraints. In Rome, the historic center of the city is slowly dying defeated by several factors, its architectural heritage is protected and frozen at the time of the story and is no longer considered a common and shared heritage. The ws intends to define the idea of reclamation and reuse of monumental spaces that at the moment are only a tourist attraction: to rethink them it is necessary to bring them back within the city life cycle and restore their collective value. The purpose is to define a vocabulary of spaces as a basis for rethinking the form of the contemporary city as tools of preservations. The context for this exercise will be Tirana, Rome the reference model, its walls, its ruins, and those areas that used to be the quintessential places for politics, health and wellness, culture, infrastructures. The class will try to define the concept of collective space, neither private nor public, according with the definition given by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their “Commonwealth”: by collective we mean, more precisely, all that is derived from social production, which is necessary for social interaction and for production continuation, such as knowledge, languages, codes, information, feelings and so on. The concept of communal does not presuppose the separation of humanity from nature, as if humanity was her pimp or her guardian, but she emphasizes the practices of interaction, care and coexistence in a world that is very communal, practices that contribute to increase the most productive aspects and forms of communal and to limit the most harmful..... There is no doubt that during a long process of appropriation the earth's surface has been almost completely divided between the public and private property.... Despite all a big portion of the earth is still common, accessible to everybody and enriched by an active participation. Where is, or better, where it can be the common space within the contemporary city? I think we can find it on the threshold between public and private spaces, within the huge monumental heritage of the historic city, a place to be reinvented through architecture. Students are asked to design here a freed space that dialogues with the ruins, defining a place that could be an area of work and discussion, a place to share knowledge, produce a quality that can oppose the demands of the market. No shopping malls, neither museums, but places where life, culture, politics are absorbed in a continuous space of relations, the collective space. The collective space arises from the contrast between the historical strong space and the generic space of contemporary architecture. By careful planning we could have an environment in which the human mind and spirit may either relax or find the stimulus and delight which leads to creative activity.... This series of forms, these ideas, shall not be sealed or enclosed by some limiting scheme or statistical or sociological theories regarding the activity of the people, but in their incompleteness the place will leave to people themselves the possibility of developing new experiences for themselves. Cedric Price It will be fundamental for the ws the investigation of projects that by their radical nature have shown us how architecture can be a tool through which to rebuild a notion of social space that can reinvent our cities.