It's was a "Bella Lezione" - Europan 11

Sometime you just woke up thinking to your business and work, but sometime it happens that you can just think at some things like "yesterday i've been in Eindhoven for Europan 11 award ceremony". that's crazy but it happened like this.


We didn't have a clue of what was going on last days because we received an e-mail some weeks ago saying to go to Eindhoven for the 14th for the award ceremony of Europan 11 . no more, no less .
So we went: we actually were guys from Italy, Spain and France meeting the 13th in Brussels to visit it since it's a very interesting city (i just want to remember la "Galerie de la Reine"-1847).

Lucky me I have my friend Zeynep living there if not i should walk around looking for an hotel! Thanks Zeynep!

The 14th we left the city at 9am ready to go to Eindhoven and we arrived there at 1pm.
I have to be honest; as first impression Eindhoven is presented like a very contemporary city trying to dialog with the past and there's a very interesting thing to say as well: there's a good dialog between Architecture and Art within the centre.
It's amazing how they manage the streets, how they can manage the walk ways and the respect they have for cyclists.
As I said the first impression was so good. I would love to go back there one day :) hope soon.

The award ceremony begins anyway.
Little coffee break where we met some very interesting guys from Holland and then ready for the conference.

The conference was well organized and the speakers were so funny but so good because they were just reading a text and a lot of time they lost themselves reading their own paper. Anyway they began the announcement of the finalists.

All the groups called as finalist had a very nice project that and really appreciated another thing; the jury's Assessment was very critic and honest and true :)

In our section the first price was won by some spanish guys leaded by: Francisco Javer Castellano Pulido, Tomas Garcia Piriz, Luis Miguel Ruiz Aviles, Paloma Baquero Basatz and Juan Antonio Cerrano Garcia.
These guys were from Cuac Arquitectura in Granada and they did a very interesting work. I personally really appreciate they way they managed the housing and its composition. I hope i will get a section or a plan of their work in the next days so i will publish it here (if i can).

But obviously the best group wasn't the first price! :-)
The personally best one was our group who got the 2nd price (runner-up)!
Alina and Leonardo, our group leads, went to receive the honor and the price (Alina was almost dying when the speaker called her :-) ).
Our project was very interesting from the master plan and composition point of view but it wasn't very well composed in the housing-typology and representation.
But as Ivo said: you guys got a "bella lezione" today. And we can promise that we will be stronger for the next Europan and we'll try to hit that thing that the spanish guys got this year :)

I think that sometime these kind of things teach you how to grow up. we are so happy now but we are stronger because we now understand how we can still grow up for the future, both personally and as group, and if those spans guys didn't join this Europan 11 we could probably win the 1st price but honestly it's better like this (i'm talking as student now because it's clear that the first price is always the best).

After that conference the Europan 11 group moved to TU/e Showroom where the university organized first an exhibition of the winners (we were so proud to see our work exposed) and then a dinner between the groups leads (and me and our friend went to try the KFC in Eindhoven).

It was a great experience guys. This is just a way to start to be an architect maybe because from these little things you begin to understand what's going on out of your university and around europe. it's so useful to meet other architects from other countries and then talk with some developers and understand their point of view as well.

We are just so happy of this

So many thanks again to our group!! Thanks to LAP office, Alina Lippiello, Leonardo Zuccaro Marchi, Filippo Zordan, Fabio de Ciechi, Manuele Mossoni, Annalisa Romani, Pierre Bertrand Guyot de Hardruyere, Fausto Cuzzocrea and Vesna Markovic!! A special thanks to Ivo which was so patience with us and brang us to this awesome trip through holland!

It was  Bella Lezione and a great Experience

See you in Europan 12 maybe :)

Filippo Zordan

Thesis' Abstract

La ricerca della geometria innovativa è stata negli ultimi anni un soggetto interessante per l’architettura. Come il 21 ° secolo ha portato una nuova era per la progettazione architettonica, programmi CAD si sono evoluti insieme con l’idea della ricerca parametrica. Le possibilità attuali di conciliare la ricerca architettonica con gli strumenti di disegno sono possibili anche sotto quegli aspetti che fino a qualche anno fa potevamo solmanete immaginare. Come si può intuire quindi analizzando le possibilità dei mezzi a nostra disposizione si può dire che la procedura della progettazione architettonica può essere semi-automatizzata. Trovare una forma parametrica, cioè eseguire una ricerca che offre soluzioni ai problemi del territorio utilizzando delle variabili modificabili, è il metodo più indicato per poter introdurre una serie di approcci generativi nel flusso di lavoro della progettazione architettonica, introducendo a sua volta una serie di regole per descrivere i vincoli della forma [...]

L’evoluzione tecnologica ha offerto soluzioni innovative per il cambiamento del processo di progettazione. Numerose applicazioni di modellazione tridimensionale hanno sostituito non solo il processo di progettazione della geometria desiderata, ma anche le fasi di progettazione iniziale in cui il progettista schizza su un foglio quella che potrebbe essere la sua idea progettuale. Questo è stato un progresso ragionevole, in quanto la mente umana è in grado di trattare temi a due dimensioni, ma quando si aggiunge la terza dimensione, questa ispirazione è limitata a forme primitive di base.

L’architettura contemporanea è in una continua ricerca di forme diverse a causa delle capacità di sviluppo del processo di design contemporaneo. Sebbene la procedura non differisce dal precedente stato, come la stessa procedura sono applicate per raggiungere la soluzione, le diverse possibilità di iniziare lo sviluppo a crescere come i pacchetti di modellazione 3D utilizzato ampiamente in questi giorni dagli architetti stanno aggiungendo altre funzioni di curare la forma. Un ritrovato linguaggio architettonico è stato sviluppato e sta crescendo in base a questi strumenti. L’architetto ha difficoltà a seguirlo e sta spendendo enormi quantità di tempo solo per provare diverse combinazioni che questo linguaggio offre.

L’esplosione tecnologica del 21 ° secolo, oltre al nuovo modo di trattare la geometria tridimensionale, deve offrire diverse possibilità come la collaborazione dell’architetto con il computer nella risoluzione di vari problemi. Con l’aiuto di linguaggi di programmazione e l’interfaccia di scripting che ogni ambiente di modellazione contemporaneo deve offrire, procedure automatizzate possono essere create per aiutare l’utente a raggiungere la soluzione più veloce e in modo più efficiente. Anche se il computer non è in grado di capire l’estetica, è in grado di eseguire milioni di calcoli al secondo e di visualizzare i risultati. Definendo quindi correttamente un problema, il programma è in grado di gestire i dati e l’esportazione di questi e i risultati che ne trarremo saranno corretti. Tutto questo eseguendo procedure che, per l’uomo, sarebbero state, in termini di tempo, impossibili da sviluppare.

This Time for Africa

Diagram of Exteriority

Writing this narrative text of the diagramming process is a retrospective act. It takes a process that did not have an inner trajectory and forces it to obey such a narrative structure. The first diagrams in my Ph.D. thesis were never intended as the beginning of such a process. Rather, that work intended to distinguish my idea of the formal from other interpretations of the time. It proposed a relationship of built work to an interiority of architecture, something that seemed to be absent from other formal discourses. Most formal studies at the time concerned an analysis and explanation of buildings. My use of the diagram, therefor, was fairly innocent. It was a way of opening up the relationship between an interiority and individual buildings. As the idea of interiority began to develop in my own work, the diagram also beacme more implicated: it was not only explanatory but also generative. however, when the diagram became a generative device – when it was not merely used to explain the relationship between a building and interiority – it introduced other concerns. It suggested an alternative relationship between the subject/author and the work. Such an alternative suggested a movement away from classical composition and personal expressionism toward a more autonomous process. Diagrams became a means to uncover something outside of my own authorial prejudices. In this sense, diagramming was was potentially a more rational and quasiobjective means to understand what I was doing. It was also a means to move away from a subjective consciousness to an unconscious diagramming apparatus. Second the process suggested that the built work could manifest the traces of the diagramming process as a means of relating built work to the interiority of its discourse.
As the diagrams progressed through the houses, two issues concerning interiority became clear: (1) the diagrams assumed that interiority was an “a priori” condition of value, that is, a stable set of geometric icons, and (2) in transforming the geometry of the diagram into architecture, it was realized that geometry does not merely transform itself from a diagram to become architecture. Architecture is something more than geometry; walls have thickness, and space has density. Thus the value placed on any geometry – euclidean or topological – as a prior condition of interiority would always be contingent on some architectural interiority. Thus, as the diagrams shifted from Euclidean to topological geometry, it was seen that this substitution of one geometry for another merely displaced the value given to Euclidean geometry without displacing geometry itself. This raised other questions: Why did the diagram necessarily evolve form some preexistent geometry? Why did the diagram begin from an architectural interiority that was not seen as a stable condition of essences? If interiority was unstable, was it possible that some other process other than transformation was appropriate to diagramming? As an initial answer to these questions, the idea of a process of decomposition suggested that the interiority of architecture could be seen as a complex phenomenon from which a less complex condition of the object could be distilled. Interiority in this sense was no longer seen as either pure and stable or necessarily geometric. But because architecture is always based in geometry, the value of a formal universe as an embodiment of architecture was still present. In order to displace these embodied values, a series of other diagrams was introduced into the diagrammatic process that were not based in geometry, which could be seen in some way to relate to, but at the same time be distanced from, an interiority as it had been previously defined. Thus, a series of external texts was introduced in an attempt to displace that which seemed embodied, immanent, and ultimately motivated in architecture’s interiority. [...]
(P. Eisenman)

A thought

Sometimes a moment, sometimes all life long you need to understand who you are facing.
Sometimes we live with illusions and just when that mirrow is broken we can see things that we should discover time ago..

It seems that sometimes the world revolves around us and at a certain moment everything which was "past" become just a memory with the world ...
Other times we wake up and realize that we live in a world that we never would have expected.

We can be strong, capable, clever or good magicians,
but we will never cheat our fate
because it is smarter than us.
Not others.

... Sometimes we need just a little gesture to discover a smile can change your day ...
... The touch of a child, a hug and other small gestures with their delicacy convey strong emotions.

Sometimes we fall asleep so happy that we desire that morning again.
Other times we are afraid to wake up.
Not everything always goes as it sounds.
The important thing is knowing that every day we grow
and this is the greatest gift that we have granted.
Only then we can realize how beautiful and great is the simplicity.

House

Sometimes I think if I really feel for being an architect.
It is not a reflection granted. Just think of what you meet with a client who, in his ignorance, tries to convey the connotations that its future home will have and the Architect, interpreter between what is the idea and what is done is in the process , able to sum up with a line that investors want.

A desire which is much deeper than mere beauty driven by fashion, beauty define a popular word used improperly by people who think they can baptize with this sneaky word-objects, a desire that is much deeper to see and appreciate desire realized.

What a buyer wants is to feel at home. He wants to love because he knows that he's the owner and no one else has access to it. The beauty he wants to go beyond the global aesthetic connotations. The house will be the object of desire that every day, at any time, you can transmit what it is and nothing else. Your home.

The house is the life of a man, a view material of a desire made moves in every moment, but can deliver the best in moments of silence, which comes into direct contact with what's around you. Being in a home means to feel feelings of safety and gentleness that only you can try them.

It's not nice having a room designed and ordered the best, but he is loving the feeling of having a residence such as your deepest desire and he wanted to. It is in that moment when you realize that you live to be home.
Like when you open the door to enter. "I'm home!"

The architect must make clients feel at home in their home. It 'a perceptive work of synthesis that only a great designer can do.


"The architect, artist, when he builds a house does not seek praise for formal values, aesthetic or style, or taste these values after a few years are" outdated. " The highest praise to which he must draw is that the inhabitants say: Architect, this house that you have done for us... we live in it (or have lived) with our happiness: we love it. It is a happy event of our lives. But this is more mind you need the architect to the inhabitants that aesthetics, and aesthetic values reach only so sure, cast by the right format, aesthetic forms indisputable, true: human. [...]



The architect, the artist, to interpret the character is curious men and women: love them and love: the true architect should fall in love, for every house that makes or furnishes, clothes (and housing). "

Hey guys. Good morning. What's up? Here in Milan it's a sunny day and I'm going to take my bicycle visit some monument around here and probably take some photos.
Anyway I have a lot of things to do for uniniversity... I need to focus on my exams and my thesis which is going on quite well! :)
I show you a link that i really appreciate. It's a boy who's commenting videos found on the web. Vicente showed me that! and that's amazing :) you will laugh a lot I promise!!! :)

Ray William Johnson