AIMS AND CONTENT

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

Through lectures by the professor and external guests and two design exercises, the Studio’s general objective is to transmit tools for the design of living spaces and their manipulation. Particular importance is given to the notion of the "room" and the role that this elementary and primary space assumes in the development of an architectural project: a further training objective for the students is therefore the study of the complex relationships between the components that form the room, understood as a central space in the entire composition. 

In particular, the Studio aims to:

- provide tools for the understanding and critical interpretation of architectural organisms and their main elements;

- encourage the development of critical design reasoning, analytical reading and writing skills on architectural disciplines and the control of compositional actions and choices;

- demonstrate the emblematic role of the room as the beginning of architecture;

- reasoning about the meaning and functioning of central spaces in a design composition;

- train the students in the main 2D and 3D drawing codes necessary for the correct communication of an architectural project;

- provide students with an initial and selected set of bibliographic and design references for progressive and autonomous learning.

TEACHING METHODS

The teaching program will be developed over one semester (February-May). Two preparatory sections are planned, each corresponding to the two exercises organized in different ways. The exercises, carried out individually (the first) and in pairs (the second), complement each other by encouraging the development of a unique and continuous design process.

EXERCISE 01
THE MORPHEME
Reading of a basic text and design of a small room

Reading of the text "The room, the street and the human agreement" (Kahn, L.I., Pensieri sull'architettura. Writings 1931-1974, Falsetti, M. (ed.), 2023 [2003]).

Formal composition of a small room, understood as a morpheme (the elementary unit in the system of grammatical forms), a three-dimensional object without geographical location that has the potential to become architecture.

Creation of a 1:25 scale model and 2d drawings (plan, elevation and section) of a cubic room (5m x 5m x 5m in real size).

Each student will be assigned a primary function that the room must fullfil (bedroom, living room, bathroom, kitchen, garage, garden, etc.). Particular attention should be paid to defining the following components of the room distribution (how is the room divided internally, how many levels does it have, are there primary and secondary spaces, presence of internal walls, partitions, stairs), accesses (where do you enter from, where do you exit from), openings (how and from where do you look outside, how and from where do air and light enter, how and from where do you communicate with the outside), structure (how do you enclose the room in the roof, how do you support the external walls, internal walls, any stairs and the roof), furniture (what devices allow the assigned function to be performed).

The exercise is carried out in individual mode (i.e. each student designs a room).

MATERIALS REQUIRED:

• 1 grey cardboard model of the room, scale 1:25
• architectural drawings (1 or 2 plates A2, 59.4 x 42 cm, horizontal) containing a plan, an elevation and a section of the room, scale 1:50.

EXERCISE 02 
THE LEXEME
Design of an house with a central room

Following the additive principle of construction ‘by rooms’ employed by Kahn, each student will form a two-person group to develop the design of a single-family residence. Each group will develop the design from the two rooms designed in Exercise 01, taking them as the starting point for the new residence. 

The two rooms can either be integrated and hybridized, generating a third room that will become the space at the centre of the new residence, or they can be selected in order to favor one room that will become the space at the centre of the new residence.

Whichever strategy is chosen, the project must converge, spatially and conceptually, around the central room by developing its components (distribution, openings, accesses, structure, furniture) in order for the room to become the nucleus of the new residence. 

Particular attention should be paid to the realization of ‘served spaces’ and/or ‘servant spaces’, ‘intermediate spaces’, and ‘autonomous spaces’.

A functional program and detailed space sizes will be provided for the design of the new residence. 

In the development of the project, specific interest will be directed towards the application of specific graphic codes, the control of spaces and detailed design choices, and the development of project presentation techniques (graphic and oral).

MATERIALS REQUIRED

• architectural drawings (scale 1:100, minimum 7 horizontal A2 format plates);
• 1 perspective section (A1 vertical format, free scale);
• 1 physical model (architectural, scale 1:50).

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Students who have a valid certification of physical or learning disability on file at the University and who wish to discuss possible accommodations or other circumstances relating to lectures, courses and examinations should speak to both the lecturer of the course and the Department Architecture and Design's disability contact person (https://architettura.unige.it/commissioni_e_referenti_dipartimento).

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

the room

The Design Studio "the room" develops critical reasoning and two design experiments starting from the notion of the room in architecture. A recurring place in the collective imagination, the room - literally ‘the place where one dwells, stays’ - is an emblematic and archetypal space. For the architect Louis Isadore Kahn (1901-1974), the room is ‘the beginning of architecture’; in his lectures and public talks, Kahn often claimed that ‘architecture comes from the making of a room’ (1971).

Inspired by Kahn's theoretical and practical work, The Room Studio questions the need for architecture to be a reflection of human life. Size, structure, lighting, openings and closures make a room the principle of all architecture: in this primary, elementary space are summarized the spatial rules that govern all transformations and, in particular, human relationships. In this sense, Kahn suggested, human action and architecture are indivisible.

In Louis Kahn's drawing entitled The Room, made for the exhibition City/2 (City over Two) held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in June 1971, two human figures sit inside an enclosed space, next to the fireplace and daylight from the window. This opening offers a glimpse of the landscape just outside, the trees seem to surround the room and demarcate the outside environment. With the view into the distance closed, the viewer's gaze is drawn to the occupants who seem intent on starting a conversation. For Kahn, the room is the place of the mind: ‘[...] in a small room with only one other person, what you say may never have been said before. It is different when there is more than one other person'. (1971: 253) Occupants' ideas and resonant but evanescent voices fill the bounded volume.

The figures in The Room have inimitable characteristics, while the intersection of their vectors - literally the two lines that unravel from the figures and extend into the free space of the room - is conveyed by a conversation. According to Kahn, this intersection of vectors is generative, that is, it leads to an agreement concerning the production of architectural forms. In light of this interpretation, the architectural principle is affirmed that human beings and built forms are similar because they resist the same gravitational loads.

The human and built forms depicted in The Room respond to the forces they carry. The anthropomorphic frames of the window and the overall structure envelop the two figures. Their interaction through conversation is thus associated with a coherent architectural composition, in which the window environment nestles into the larger volume.

Sketched out on a large square sheet of tracing paper measuring 106.7 cm on a side, The Room drawing parallels the AIA Gold Medal acceptance speech entitled "The Room, the Street, the Human Agreement" (1971) in representing the culmination of Kahn's explorations of the influential and determining relationships between human beings and the built environment. The Room was accompanied by four other similar drawings depicting streets, cities, and large public buildings in the city of Philadelphia.

The relevance of The Room to the architectural debate stems from Kahn's conviction to formulate an alternative to Modernism, its free plan and universal space. Drawing can stimulate reflection on the affinities that human beings can develop with a room-like space; likewise the implications for the design of houses, public buildings and cities.

Particular attention is also directed at the study of central spaces, that is, literally works that put space at the centre (not only in a physical sense), materializing the Philadelphia architect's deepest reflections on the construction of architectural space. In the many lectures and conferences he gave during his career (and reproduced in the form of essential texts in numerous publications), Kahn often returns to the same concepts, gradually refining them. They are concepts expressed through single words that acquire richness of meaning when read together with the architecture that Kahn was realizing. Monumentality, Form, Space, Inspiration, Institution, Design are only some of the thematic containers on which ideas and interpretations are offered: Space, specifically, is the materialization of a Form and, in this sense, Architecture is a meditated construction of spaces (1957). 

The notion of ‘room’ and that of ‘space at the centre’ meet when they are transformed into strategic design principles. Kahn, in fact, develops in numerous architectures the principle of building ‘by rooms’, an additive approach similar to the principle of Roman architecture. It is the same approach that inspires the idea that ‘the plan is a society of rooms’ and, by extension, that ‘a long street is a succession of rooms’. (2023: 255)  

Through two design experiments - the exercises "The Morpheme" and "The Lexeme" - the Studio the room questions the formal characteristics to be attributed to the elementary space of the room, conceived as the first step in a more complex process of architectural composition. Operationally, the Studio applies theoretical reasoning on the notion of the room in architecture to the design of a living space intended for residential use. 

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Classroom presentations and lectures will be available on the Studio’s AULAWEB page.

Below is a selected/in-progress bibliography:

Bonaiti, M. (2002). Architecture is. Louis I. Kahn, the writings. Electa, Milan.

Di Domenico, C. (2007). The place and the room. Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane.

Dogma (2017). The Room of One's Own.The Architecture of the (Private) Room. Black Square, Milan.w

Galardi A. (1967). New Italian Architecture, Verlag Gerd hatje, Stuttgart.

Kahn, L.I., Wurman R.S. (1986) (eds). What Will Be Has Always Been: The Words of Louis I. Kahn, Rizzoli International Publications, New York.

Kahn L.I. (2023), Falsetti M. (ed.). Thoughts on architecture. Writings 1931-1974. Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, Turin.

Kohane P. (2009). ‘Louis Kahn and the Art of Drawing a Room’, in Architecture and Urbanism, no. 461, pp. 171-174.

Louis Kahn, Zodiac, no. 17, 1967.

Mau B., Koolhaas R. - O.M.A. (1995). S,M,L,XL, The Monacelli Press, New York.

Molinari, L. (2024). Rooms. Abitare il desiderio. Nottetempo, Milan.

Ottolini, G., Cerri, P. (2010) (ed.). The room. Casamiller, Silvana Editoriale, Turin.

Perec G. (1989). Species of Spaces, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin (original edition Espèces d'espaces, Galilée, Paris, 1974)

Rossi A. (2018) [1966]. The architecture of the city, Il Saggiatore, Milan.

Rudofsky B. (1977). Architecture without architects, Editoriale Scientifica, Naples.

Venturi R. (2012) [2008]. “CONTEXT IN ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION EXCERPTS FROM M.F.A. THESIS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, 1950”, in Gleinige A., Vrachliotis G. (2008) (a cura di), Complexity Design Strategy and World View, Birkhäuser, Basilea, pp. 13-24.

Venturi R., (2002) [1966]. Complessità e contraddizioni nell'architettura, Edizioni Dedalo, Bari.

Venturi R., (1996). Iconografia ed elettronica in un'architettura generica. A View from the Drafting Room, The MIT Press, Cambridge.

Venturi R., Scott Brown D., Izenour S. (2010) [1977]. Imparare da Las Vegas, Quodlibet ABITARE Edizioni, Macerata.

Visconti F. (2023). Lo spazio al centro in Kahn, Letteraventidue, Siracusa.

Wigley M. (1991). “Prosthetic Theory: The Disciplining of Architecture”, in Assemblage, n. 15, pp. 6-29.

TEACHERS AND EXAM BOARD

LESSONS

LESSONS START

According to the 2024/2025 academic calendar

Class schedule

The timetable for this course is available here: Portale EasyAcademy

EXAMS

EXAM DESCRIPTION

The final exam will cover both exercises carried out during the semester.

Students will be assessed individually on: quality of the project, quality of the papers (architectural drawings and physical models), effectiveness and clarity of the final presentation, commitment and presence in the classroom during the semester and during the final intensive workshop, group work. 

The two exercises will be assessed separately by means of a grade on a scale from A to E (A = max; E = min). 

In the examination, these assessments will be compared with those obtained during the first semester, configuring the final grade for the Studio in thirtieths. 

ASSESSMENT METHODS

The final exam, conducted in presence and in oral form by all the students, will make it possible to verify the level of learning of the primary notions of architectural design and the themes proposed by the Studio.

Following the two exercises (01 and 02) that will be developed during the semester, an intensive one-week workshop will be held in preparation for the critiques and the final exam.

The presence of external guests during the final exam, as jury, will offer a direct and qualified confrontation in which the student will have to demonstrate the critical-theoretical and strategic-design skills acquired during the course.