The MIAW-Milan International Architecture Workshop, an international intensive programme at the School of Architettura e Società, provides an international design forum for schools, teachers and students, but it is also an informal platform to discuss issues and share ambitions that education implies.

Its aim is to stimulate cross-over thinking between researches and practitioners in the design field, involving different scales and encouraging an interdisciplinary approach towards design problems. Each class has an International Guest Professor of high profile whose activity and interests are related to the different Study Courses and Disciplinary areas characterising all our school.
The general framework of all MIAW2015 workshops is “Reforming Milan”, a joint initiative taken by the School of Architettura e Società and the Municipality of Milan to foster/strengthen the collaboration between the school and the city aiming at improving the quality of its environment. Within this framework, the specific subject or theme exploited by the workshop will be defined by each Guest Professor in charge.
The initiative follows the path of the commitment of the School of Architettura e Società to be a place of preparation and experimental design on the issues of the city of Milan and its metropolitan area. Selected areas and buildings have been reported by the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies and represent a majority of cases recently surveyed because they are in very poor conditions. They are therefore representative of a phenomena of sale, underuse, abandonment of buildings and areas, whether public or private owned, of different size, texture, type. The phenomena affects the city of Milan with a strong negative impact on the quality of life of the urban areas in which they are located and this is of one the main reasons to devote our design energy on these topics.

Prof. Achim Menges

Professor Achim Menges, born 1975, is a registered architect and professor at the University of Stuttgart, where he is the founding director of the Institute for Computational Design since 2008. He also is Visiting Professor in Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design since 2009. He graduated with honors from the AA School of Architecture in London where he subsequently taught as Studio Master of the Emergent Technologies and Design Graduate Program from 2002 to 2009, as visiting professor from 2009 to 2012 and as Unit Master of Diploma Unit 4 from 2003 to 2006. From 2005 to 2008 he was Professor for Form Generation and Materialisation at the HfG Offenbach University for Art and Design in Germany. In addition he has held visiting professorships in Europe and the United States. Achim Menges practice and research focuses on the development of integral design processes at the intersection of morphogenetic design computation, biomimetic engineering and computer aided manufacturing that enables a highly articulated, performative built environment.

Karola Dierichs

Karola Dierichs is an architect, doctoral candidate and tutor at the Institute for Computational Design (ICD) with Professor Achim Menges, University of Stuttgart. She has been educated at the Technical University of Braunschweig, the ETH Zurich and the Architectural Association (AA) in London and has graduated from the Emergent Technologies and Design Program with Distinction in 2009. She has been teaching at the Architectural Association/London, the Städelschule Architecture Class/Frankfurt and the Institute for Computational Design/Stuttgart. Her recent work has been recognized with the Holcim Acknowledgement Award Europe 2014. At the Institute for Computational Design (ICD) Karola Dierichs is leading the research field of Aggregate Architectures, where she is developing performance-oriented computational manufacturing and construction techniques for designed granular matter.

AGGREGATE ARCHITECTURE

Aggregates are extremely large numbers of individual elements that are lying in frictional contact with each other. Natural examples include sand, gravel, rocks or even snow. Especially if the individual grain is geometrically designed, the behaviour of the overall system can be tuned to perform as an independent architectural material system. Aggregate systems are relevant both due to their ability to form both liquid and solid states as well as their capacity to form functionally graded systems.

As opposed to conventional assembly systems, where local and global geometries are exactly defined, in an aggregate system only the individual part is developed by the designer – the overall aggregation however emerges as a results of the system’s behaviour under given boundary conditions. Computation – especially in this context – can be understood as information processing. It can happen both in the physical realm of experiments and the numerical realm of simulations. For the architect, who is working with designed aggregates, computation becomes both the observatory and the tool-box through which he interacts with the evolving granular formations.

MIAW 2015 – GRANULAR SPACE

The MIAW 2015 Workshop will research Granular Space. Vertical cylinders – solid or hollow columns – will be the starting point for these spatial explorations. Cylinders being compression-structures only are the most basic and reliable structural types to be realized with designed aggregates. They thus allow for fast and vast exploration of possible morphological variations on local and global scales.

The workshop is split in two parts each culminating in a review. During Part 1 three teams will work to rapidly explore morphological variations of the cylinder and their effects, such as variants in height, thickness or aggregate combinations. Results from all groups are to be combined into three proposals for a final prototype.Part 2 of the workshop will focus on the realization of one selected prototype by the entire group that is to be presented and exhibited at the Final Review on March 6. A one-day workshop on numerical modelling of aggregates in cooperation with ITASCA Consulting, Inc. will give first-hand insights into modelling granular structures with the Distinct-Element Method.

WORKSHOP TEAM:

Guest Professors: Achim Menges & Karola Dierichs
Host Professor: Ingrid Paoletti
Tutor: Roberto Naboni

Cooperation Partners: ITASCA Consulting, Inc

ICD, University of Stuttgart

PROGRAM

The studio will focus on the zone 2.1 “Ex-Piazza d’Armi, Caserma Santa Barbara” as one of the “Ambiti di trasformazione urbana” in the program “Ripensare Milano“.

During the work, students have to focus on the place features and its relationship to the city of Milan, and its urban structure, ad different scales in order to create new urban strategies to improving the existing city. For this reason, they have to take in account all those elements (constraints and suitability of transformation; urban catalysis, land uses, connectivity; nature in the city (Parks?); urban mobility; mixed uses and architecture; urban interactions and livability, public life and planning tools) that influence contemporary regeneration programs. On the first week and in parallel with common and group sessions, discussions and forum, some brief lessons will provide to students conceptual bases of Urban Design (How to increase urban sustainability by design?, Which is the relationship between city planning and nature?) and some debates about specific aspects (public space treatment, urban density or hybrid typologies, etc.).