Back cover
This book talks, in the form of ‘site notes’, about the incubation of an idea: experimenting new ways of teaching architectural design in ‘real conditions’, taking teaching out of the lecture hall and onto the building site, offering students the chance to come up against ‘actual’ operating conditions: a place, a function, a budget, a building technique, a material, a client.
The Dome experimental on-site teaching project revives a teaching method that has already been used with commendable results from the subject matter point of view by major design technology personalities (Edoardo Vittoria, Pierluigi Spadolini, Marco Zanuso). Dome aims to follow on from this tradition, in a historical moment in which overcoming the distance between training and profession has become an urgent necessity.
To respond to this need, even more than to a personal need to constantly deal with the ‘how’, I have ‘built’ a course in which the students of the Design Workshop II at the Faculty of Architecture of Catania and the construction workers at the Scuola Edile (Vocational School for Construction Workers) in Siracusa worked side by side and created a low-tech residential system in 1:1 scale.
Brickwork arches, vaults and domes were the items of the constructive lexicon with which the students experimented the potentials for innovative use of materials and technologies typical of the Mediterranean tradition, without however confining themselves to consolidated figurative schemes, but opening themselves up to new and innovative experimentation, both with regard to procedures adopted for parametric processing of the project and with regard to management of the site and the available resources. The building technique that we chose is based on the use of the ‘compass’, an instrument and a method which the architect Fabrizio Carola has been using for over thirty years in Africa.
A generative principle which we have inherited and developed with regard to the figurative results, optimisation of the environmental performance of the system and more contemporary usage conditions.
This site is also a homage to Fabrizio, “to the stone man” as the Dogon in Mali call him, the man who has shown us with his example that it is possible to rediscover a more balanced relationship between architecture and place.