The 2019 edition, in continuity with themes discussed in the previous editions, focuses attention on the multiple and complementary forms of integration between project, landscape and society, in a historical phase that requires a continuous redefinition of its own paradigms as a result of the fragility that seems to govern our environments. In particular the projects will be the occasion for a wide-ranging reflection on the solicited questions. On this background, the direction and coordination of the workshop identify some paradigmatic places in the enlarged territory of Piacenza, taking the city and the territory as an exemplary case-study of contemporary conditions. The places and environments that are proposed to students as a basis for discussion and interdisciplinary comparison - and as an object of design experimentation - spring from a thematic matrix capable of reinterpreting the relationship architecture-city-landscape in the contemporary world. In this perspective a wide repertoire of case studies will be activated and made available, considering them potential factors in terms of regeneration, reuse and recovery of an urban quality of living.
Part of the intensive design experience will be the activation of one or more areas in order to build a common and shared vision, also capable of involving new inhabitants. The project will be communicated, during mid-term and final presentations, with the traditional instruments of design discipline (drawings and above all models, in line with the formative approach of Piacenza Campus of the Politecnico di Milano) but also through a form of story-telling (on all, videos) up to a final installation capable of being contaminated with the methods of scenography. The complementary landscapes towards which the Summer School will direct the gaze coincide then on the one hand with the architectural fact itself, rooted in the local context, on the other they are strongly integrated with the urban and territorial dynamics (
“the city is the landscape and the landscape is the city").