Weeks 1 - 4 | taught by Luca Ponsi
“What is dear to my friend Marco Polo is to discover the secret reasons that led men to live in cities, reasons that could be valid beyond all crises. Cities are a set of many things: memories, desires, signs of a language; cities are places of exchange, as all the economy history books explain, but these exchanges are not just exchanges of goods, they are exchanges of words, desires, memories”
Italo Calvino, Columbia University, New York, 29 March 1983
Starting by analyzing and understanding the structure and characteristics of a selection of historic borghi located in the center of Italy, by focusing on a series of specific issues as “limits & fortifications”, “orography & conformation”, and “urban voids & density”, students will each be assigned one unique city of the 55 cities described by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel “Invisible Cities”, as a starting reference point to conceptualize projectively a vision and interpretation for a near-future scenario of development and transformation of the assigned borgo.
AMO’s “Countryside, A Report” will be the subtext to inform programmatically the direction of future development of the borgo, in a progressive, dynamic and non-nostalgic form. The output of the exercise will comprise a series of maps, axonometric views and collages to represent the students vision.