Libri di Elisa C. Cattaneo

This thesis aims to investigate the issue of informality. Specifically, it is analyzed the symbiotic relationship between the informal development and the morphological conformation of the natural context, with the consequent intersection of the inhabited space and the natural one. Studying and intervening in this context, means giving a reading of the informal space, which can not disregard the social and political aspects that characterize the area of development. The spatial interaction between the natural context and the informal advancement is extreme in the Chilean territory. After developing a transdisciplinary theoretical-design platform between the landscape architectural, philosophical and sociological fields, the final objective of the thesis is to apply the defined design method in response to the endemic problems detected in different places. The aim is to show that the natural context becomes an essential dynamic resource in the informal development process; therefore, the strategy of the outlined architectural intervention, which takes into account social interactions and therefore the human factor, must be related and conform to this natural process. “0-n” is a collection of master thesis which I oversaw as supervisor at Politecnico di Milano. These books are a platform of heterogeneity, which find their common field in the theory of weakness, as imperfect and manifold way of knowledge. The aim is to experience an alternative method for contemporary spaces, able to regenerate the stabilized ideas of design. They are more experimental and vital texts/tests than verification procedures: this attitude brings them away from a strictly educational approach. They can be read according to two levels of meaning: in their specific contexts and as open platforms for contemporary researches. Almost all of them are focused on processual values and on project transdisciplinary, in order to promote a cognitive space before a real one. I provided the students with fews thematic lines (a sense of short- circuit, trial, process of meaning), which were underlining an interpretation of knowledge in a horizontal sense, as Gilles Deleuze had defined.These topics have been independently developed by the candidates, so that they can be considered as authors of a new idea. I instructed this learning and researching method, because I belive that the secret of an effective education in to coinvince each student to be able to build his own vision of the world, without stereotyped positions. I am finalising the object of education in the freedom of intelligence, and not in the rules of disciplines, by broading the students’ needs and points of view. To cross the world in new expanded geographical horizons. Carlotta Olivari Graduated from the Polytechnic of Milan in Architecture with honors (2019), during her university career she won the Erasmus scholarship at the FAUL, Lisbon and subsequently won the scholarship "Tesi all’estero" at the PUC, Santiago del Chile. Among her work experiences she takes part in the landscape architecture team in the invitation competition "Budapest Southgate" with Peter Eisenman, DEArchitects and Weakcircus and carries out a research period at MS-Lab Milan on the project "TELL ME". In 2018 she founded Dispace Landscape Architecture, a research platform, with M. Pasquali. Margherita Pasquali Currently PhD Fellow at the University of Trento in "Architecture, Planning and Landscape". Graduated from the Polytechnic of Milan in Architecture with honors (2019), during her university career she won the scholarship "Tesi all’estero" at the PUC, Santiago de Chile. Among her work experiences she takes part in the landscape architecture team in the invitation competition "Budapest Southgate" with Peter Eisenman, DEAarchitects and Weakcircus and carries out a research period at MS-Lab Milan on the project "TELL ME". In 2018 she founded Dispace Landscape Architecture, a research platform, with C. Olivari....

La molteplicità di operazioni prodotte negli ultimi anni a Prato, principalmente attraverso il recente Piano Operativo, è testimonianza di un fenomeno che merita di essere osservato e studiato. Il caso di Prato, attraverso la sua originale visione del tema ambientale, la sua intrinseca vocazione alla trasformazione e al riuso, l'imponente percorso partecipativo e comunicativo, ha messo in luce una nuova modalità di pensare la pianificazione urbanistica, delineando un nuovo approccio teorico/applicativo per la città contemporanea. Inscrivibile nella parentesi disciplinare nordamericana del Landscape Urbanism, il Piano Operativo evidenzia una specifica originalità metodologica, espressa attraverso il corpus degli obiettivi e delle strategie espresse, inquadrati principalmente in una lente transdisciplinare e innovativa, al punto da poter diventare un modello esportabile e virtuoso di pianificazione contemporanea. Già luogo di sperimentazioni urbane d'eccellenza ispirate dalla sua struttura di città fabbrica - tra le quali le tesi di Laurea di Branzi e Morozzi sulla piana tra Prato e Firenze, la celebre No-Stop City, gli studi sulla Città Operaia di Paolo Deganello, il Piano Strutturale di Bernardo Secchi - il nuovo Piano Operativo rinnova Prato come laboratorio urbano permanente, attraverso due strategie: la tecnologia della Natura e il progetto come ologramma del piano. Grazie alla solida esperienza, alle scelte operate dall'Ufficio di Piano e alle consulenze eccellenti - tra le quali quella di Stefano Mancuso sui Green benefit e di Stefano Boeri sulla Forestazione Urbana - Prato formula quindi una città integralmente "resiliente" pur nel suo "sviluppo", e attraverso l'ecologia rispondere alle sfide globali del climate change ma anche a quelle locali del benessere dei cittadini, ripensando le scale, i metodi e gli strumenti dell'urbanistica come tradizionalmente intesa.

“Now, if you’ll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I’ll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there’s the room you can see through the glass that’s just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way.  I can see all of it when I get upon a chair all but the bit behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit ...Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way; I know that, because I’ve held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room. “How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they’d give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink. But oh, Kitty! Now we come to the passage.  You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty! How nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through”. She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist. L. Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass, 1871   “This book is like an assemblage of experimental scientific results. A collection of outcomes of a procedure achieved in vitro during the intensive course of Landscape Design I taught at the Politecnico di Milano in the 2015-2016 academic year. The attempt has been to propose a renewal of the discipline that arises primarily from a conceptual experiment, and afterward as a formal result. So that an elemental process in science (observation of the object, scanning it in the laboratory, processing the outcome of the scan) will result in a new spatial modeling”. Elisa C. Cattaneo Graham Foundation Grant Recipient in 2014, She is Adjunct Professor of Landscape Design and Architectural and Urban Design at the Politecnico  di  Milano. She researches experimental ecological urbanism and its theoretical implications. In 2015 she is selected and invited candidate for the WheelWright Prize, award of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, the research grant that is awarded annually to early-career architects who have demonstrated exceptional design talent, produced work of scholarly and professional merit, and who show promise for continued creative work inside the international panorama of Design. In 2004, after a degree cum laude in Architecture and Urban Planning, she attended the European Master in Strategic Planning for the Architectural, Urban and Environmental Resources. In 2009, she completed a PhD with Merit in Architectural and Urban Design, defending the thesis Void Density:  a Relational Approach for Urban Design. In 2010, she was Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developing the research project: Space, Place, Context, Landscape: the Hermeneutical Circle US-Europe since 1956. In 2011-2012, she was Visiting Scholar at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, developing the research project: WeakCity: Notes on Landscape Urbanism. She is founder and director of an independent research agency Weakcircus, active in studies, research, and project development in contemporary urbanism within the Theory of Weakness. She is co-founder and co-director of B.L.U.E. (Building Ecological and Landscape Urbanism), platform of research on landscape as new strategy for contemporary cities. Since 2002, she has been the principal of her firm, active in public...

1956.  Falling Modernism and Arising Landscape Urbanism. The selected essays are related to the hermeneutical circle established between Europe and the U.S. after World War II. Radically changing the “geography” of architecture, this circle critically acts in the crisis of the Modern Movement. The year 1956 in particular sees the concurrence of specific conditions (Waldheim, 2009), which open up a Pandora's box in the research on the city: the “Urban Design Conference” at Harvard University; the CIAM of Dubrovnik; the exhibition This is Tomorrow; the Alba Congress; and Hilberseimer’s projects in Detroit. These analytical lines mark a first step in the deformation process of the dominant systems activated in architecture from the beginning of the century. Landscape Urbanism is the latest step. Very promising, it reverses the circle’s direction, introducing North American research into European knowledge. The book considers Theory as the new Practice. To take power away from reality in order to introduce a new modality in knowledge, prior to a new shape: this is the first aim of the texts collected in this theoretical anthology. In order to create infinite platforms of research about the city. Elisa Cristiana Cattaneo Graham Foundation Grant Recipient in 2014, She is Adjunct Professor in Landscape Design at the Politecnico di Milano. She researches experimental ecological urbanism and its theoretical implications. In 2004, after a degree cum laude in Architecture and Urban Planning, she attended the European Master in Strategic Planning for the Architectural, Urban and Environmental Resources. In 2009, she completed a PhD with Merit in Architectural and Urban Design, defending the thesis Void Density: a Relational Approach for Urban Design. In 2010, she was Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developing the research project: Space, Place, Context, Landscape: the Hermeneutical Circle US-Europe since 1956. In 2011-2012, she was Visiting Scholar at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, developing the research project: WeakCity: Notes on Landscape Urbanism (List Publisher, 2015). She is founder and director of an independent research agency Weakcircus, active in studies, research, and project development in contemporary urbanism within the Theory of Weakness. She is co-founder and co-director of B.L.U.E. (Building Ecological and Landscape Urbanism), platform of research on landscape as new strategy for contemporary cities. Since 2002, she has been the principal of her firm, active in public projects and international competitions.  Mirko Andolina  Mirko Andolina is an architect working on the relationship between ecology and contemporary cities, in particular in emerging and crisis territories. He holds a Master of Architecture degree from Politecnico di Milano, with the thesis Hologramatic Territory-Ecological Strategies in West Bank Territories, partnership with Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He is currently an architect at Topotek1, Berlin. developed in Since 2012, he has been a part of the independent research agency WeakCircus.  Giacomo Ardesio  Giacomo Ardesio is a graduate of the Politecnico di Milano in Architecture with the thesis A Swarming City, Patterns of Interference, a body of research on the urban dynamics acting within the informal settlements in Mumbai developed with URBZ. Since 2014, he has been a part of Fosbury Architecture, a collective of architectural research and design based in Milan and Rotterdam.