Trailer The pertinent project

Not eligible for AIA CES Credits

Based in the capital of the Savoy kingdom, Picco Architetti bases its practice on contextual architecture, capable of reading and rewriting the place it belongs to. The project crosses and reinterprets the needs of the territory, rethinking space starting from the signs of its past and intercepting the needs of an ever-changing society, between landmarks and mimesis, understanding and synthesis.

From drawing to method, from observation to translation, the project for “living places” explores space in all its semantic dimensions: living, growing, working, from projects for school and recreational architecture to work on residential buildings, student housing and the nursing homes, up to the Lavazza space for events and the new AMIAT headquarters. A complete and transversal vision capable of transferring concepts and visions from architecture to the urban scale, of listening and translating social and physical demands between tradition and innovation, considering “sustainability” as an essential condition and an integral part of transformative thinking.

Thus, the numerous works on domestic spaces explore the different dimensions of living, from private residences to social housing, starting from the Sinfonia Verde urban villas in Rivoli, to the multi-story residential buildings in Ravenna, up to the social complex of the ex-Siva area in Settimo Torinese or the Torre Blu of Spina 3 in Turin, where each of these projects relates to its own context by redefining urban borders, processes of expansion and regeneration of fragments of consolidated or abandoned cities or reinterpreting the way of living of contemporary society in new, dynamic and flexible solutions.

With these assumptions, the lesson by architect Cristiano Picco, contract professor in Architectural Composition at the Politecnico in Turin, crosses the work on “living”, a work underlying analysis and measure where the project materializes respecting the place and time, past, present and future.

Picco Architetti’s research, therefore, delves into the design of student residences and nursing homes, involving several generations in transformation processes involving not only the territory, but also and above all the uses of spaces through the reinterpretation of a new contemporaneity in continuous and rapid change.

An emblematic case is the project of the Lanzo Torinese nursing home, an accurate action of structural, architectural and functional recovery and renovation of the former nineteenth-century College that turned restoration into an opportunity to recompose a wider system of reconnections with society and local economies, as well as with the surrounding territory and landscape.

Living, growing, working. But also opening up to the city and opening the city to the project, as for the new Spazio Eventi Lavazza, an ambitious project carried out with Cino Zucchi Architetti and set in the context of the Integrated Urban Redevelopment Program of the area of the former power plant in Via Bologna in Turin. In this case, the theme of the functional reuse of industrial voids becomes the essence and driving force to promote dialogue between transformation and cultural promotion. The architectural project scans the stratifications of the artifact with the aim of preserving historical memory and, at the same time, proposing a new life for the building and its context.

A pertinent project, capable of imagining new functions and uses for the recovery of the historical and landscape heritage in balance between pragmatism and vision.

The measure of the project.

Learning objectives

• Highlight possible responses to the relationship with the existing heritage starting from the reuse and re-functionalization of industrial voids, suggesting recovery and restoration strategies that focus on the architectural project as a mending element, as well as the attention paid to the settlement issue of new interventions within the landscape;
  
• Analyze the issues of architectural, urban and landscape regeneration and recovery, the transformation of different parts of the city of Turin and its edges, between margins and the consolidated city, through different case studies, from work spaces to recreational ones, from private residences to social housing, from student residences to nursing homes;
• Explain the themes of the profession, the role of the architect in listening to and interpreting requests, needs, resources and energies, in addition to the close relationship with the place, the territory and the economies in the different phases of the project;

• Illustrate the projects by Picco Architetti, studying their compositional language and their placement in the context, evaluating their technological and building aspects, as well as its formal-compositional experimentation in the research between tradition and innovation.