AIMS AND CONTENT

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

Since the goal is to train future architects, the course aims to frame teaching within a contemporary vision that both educates students and updates them on the current state of Interior Architecture as a discipline, referring to the ‘topic’ of dwelling as the result of scalable and transferable thoughts and actions. These will give rise to projects where the relationship between void and envelope becomes the subject of experimentation, with the aim of rethinking spatial habitability in line with new needs, new desires, and a new (more sustainable) materiality that also corresponds to a new aesthetic.

From an operational point of view, students will be called upon to intervene on an existing building, working inside (but not only) one of its housing units, designing a fluid spatiality capable of accommodating bodies (understood as individuals) who, once considered measuring instruments, have now become carriers of experiences, in interiors where everything is potentially in motion, and variation generates engagement and interaction.

Attendance and participation in the proposed educational activities (lectures and group exercises discussed in class), combined with the study of the texts listed in the bibliography, will enable the student to:

• engage with the current state and potential of Interior Architecture as a professional field that is both evolving and rapidly growing;

• understand how Interiors are no longer confined within a built structure but can define a true modus operandi for the architect;

• propose sustainable and meaningful actions and relationships between ‘bodies’, ‘homes’, and ‘things’;

• respond to the new demands of living with originality, awareness, and appropriateness.

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

Cheapscape, alternative materials, and inhabitable furniture is the starting point for a dynamic reflection (and design opportunity) on the ongoing transformation of domestic landscapes and, consequently, of domestic design.

Unlike the post-WWII period—marked by very few changes in home interiors, often mistakenly reduced to “furnishing subculture”—today we are in a moment of evolution, as many contemporary projects demonstrate.

Rethinking how we live today means addressing shifts in family structures, the climate crisis, post-human thought, and accelerating processes that disrupt conventional domestic arrangements. Change is no longer perceived as something radically new, but rather as a hybrid of familiar and innovative models—often rediscovered through the memory of places.

We now see the home office and the return of activities like the workshop, studio, and atelier, once excluded from the domestic sphere. New modes of living emerge: co-living, multitasking living, fluid, intergenerational, interspecies, and on-demand lifestyles—spaces shaped by well-being, mental and physical health, and a renewed desire for nature.

The course raises more questions than answers. It examines:

• the reuse and reconversion of existing buildings,

• how these are lived and experienced by inhabitants with diverse life stories requiring design attention,

• the evolving role of furniture and objects, now seen as central architectural elements—sometimes becoming “rooms within rooms.”

Themes like ultradomesticity and extradomesticity invite us to ask:

• How much more will homes accommodate unexpected indoor activities?

• To what extent will interiority expand into public space, assigning Interior Architecture new responsibilities?

Through student contributions, the course will explore living as a series of continuous flows, where habits and daily practices evolve, adapt, and are reinterpreted. Relations between container and content, private and public, permanent and temporary will become more fluid—boundaries between inside and outside more porous.

Functions will be reconsidered as dynamic, requiring maximum flexibility and adaptable concepts that can withstand radical shifts, sudden reductions, or unexpected additions. Rather than envisioning utopian futures, students may reevaluate temporary, here-and-now solutions.

Temporariness and precariousness will serve as design prompts, influencing material choices and aesthetics.
Here enters cheapscape, understood as reuse, recovery, and recycling—a renewed vitality in design centered on heritage and materiality, and a new aesthetic ambition that embraces the already-extracted, already-made, already-built.
At the heart of this is not mere preservation, but the cultivation of a new culture of inhabiting the planet.

TEACHERS AND EXAM BOARD