“My firm was involved in waste. We were waste handlers, waste traders, cosmologists of waste. […] Waste is a religious thing. We entomb contaminated waste with a sense of reverence and dread. It is necessary to respect what we discard. […] The Jesuits taught me to examine things for second meanings and deeper connections. Were […]

2009 is the year of The Waterpod Project¹, the year in which Mary Mattingly², thanks to an enormous amount of courage, gave us a concrete example of what it means to live in harmony with nature and to live connected with its inhabitants. –ghhjkl The concept of “will” is too much often underestimated, but yet […]

Emilio Battisti was interviewed as part of a discussion between three architects on the theme of the Milan’s railway yards. Former professor of Architectural Composition at the Polytechnic of Milan as well as founder and former director, in his early years, of the International Relations Centre (CRIFA); visiting professor at the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture, […]

Borders. They are meant to protect any community. A tool necessary for the stability and security to be established in any given country. A deterrent for any individual who wants to cause harm for society. By necessity, something called visa was created. Historically, it was given on the border check, the system evolved over time […]

If compared to the previous Century, nowadays the profession of the architect and the act of practicing architecture seem to be drastically different. Dynamics, values, commissions, the way of living of society have undeniably transformed. In order to better comply with the culture of our time, in history it has been often necessary to rethink […]

City-Society dualism is generally considered one of the most essential and unbreakable bonds of our life. Under a purely pragmatic point of view this need continues to exist, but perhaps in other respects this union proves to be decidedly less solid than we could expect. Sense of community, affection, responsibility and initiative: these are universal […]

Giovanni Galli is an architect that works as a professor at the Department of Architecture and Design (DAD) of the University of Genoa, where he teaches architectonical and urban composition. He has been a Visiting professor at the Penn University School of Design of Philadelphia in 2009, and since 2010 he’s a member of the […]

As history progresses, the cultural identities available to human beings have multiplied, changed, acquired strength and awareness, increased their capacity for expression and have been contaminated by new factors: gender, politics and geographical origin. A continuous and concrete exchange that, thanks to the technology of our time, no longer requires a physical experience. The city […]

Daniele Zerbi from Fuzz Atelier was interviewed as part of a comparison between three architects who took part in the Blueprint competition, organized by the Genoa City Council. “Fuzz Atelier” is a young Milanese studio that defines itself as a research collective, investigating the morphology of space with a multiscale and transdisciplinary approach. The name […]

In this new era intelligence, necessity and efficiency are the ingredients for the recipe of happiness. Stephanie Rothenberg discloses a utopian illusion and proposes a new system for prosperity and wellness. – Today many architects and the world of architecture in general are focusing on a rising phenomenon: Smart cities. Nowadays the city has to […]

Often the art and architecture Dutch scene gives to the world personalities capable to envision new perspectives and interpretations of the world we live. These characters can tell common issues with new eyes, that exasperated and stirred up, describe a different story or just generate new conscience. In the last century and half, from the […]

Over the last year I travelled across the world to see how architects and engineers from different countries are solving the climate crisis we are currently experience. I was shocked, excited and terrified by the varying levels of progress I saw. –ghhjkl During the trip I encountered two reoccurring themes. Firstly I was being told […]

One of the most important student’s challenges, and in general of any individual who finds himself facing professional experience with greater or lesser ambition, is the one concerned developing competent thinking and critical judgment. No small feat, indeed. The architectural matter, partly ambiguous, makes the task much more difficult. Given an architectural building, normally evaluated […]

Much has already been written about the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa, the management of the situation by the Administration, the responsibilities and the culprits, the plans and the timing. Furthermore, I do not have the necessary skills to write something interesting about the technical matter: how was the structure of the Bridge […]

“Taking action through architecture” is the motto of the young Milanese studio ABVM, founded by the architect Bonaventura Visconti di Modrone, who since May last year has installed a covered square in the refugee camp of Ritsona, north of Athens. Sponsored by the International Organization for Migration, Maidan Tent is part of the architectural landscape, […]

Now in its 16th year, the Venice Architecture Biennale boasts a new entry in the list of exhibition pavilions. The Vatican, which only in recent years has begun to attend the environments of the Venice Biennale of Art, this year has decided to participate also in the Architecture Biennale. Ten architects from all over the […]

Stile (Style): it is configured as a bearer of precise qualities that have a specific meaning in themselves, capable of defining social, moral and economic values, becoming a sign of belonging to a canon, of judgment, taste or manner. Libero (Free): liberalism, economic theory that supports free initiative and the free market as the sole […]

“There are still many battles to be won and many frontiers that still need to be expanded in order to improve the quality of the built environment and, consequently, the quality of life. More and more people on the planet are looking for a decent place to live in, and the conditions for achieving this […]

Matteo Orlandi, born in Genoa in 1977. He completes his architecture training between Genoa and Vienna where he begins his apprenticeship in various studies following projects in Europe and Africa. He starts a long collaboration with the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in 2008. He carries out teaching, research and dissemination activities at the universities of […]

Massimo Colombo, collaborator of the Fondazione Giovanni Michelucci and head of the Social Housing, Self-construction and Cohousing area of interest, deals with the issues of the variable city with particular attention to the issues of housing and social inclusion. – “The inclusive city is the place where anyone, regardless of economic condition, gender, age, race […]

It is clear that the socio-economic system in which we live is showing us its inadequacy for the global battles, as it is equally clear that the current ruling class is not ready to be up against the emergencies of this historical moment, if not by implementing a real twisting of our system, in which, […]

Whenever I come across Vincenzo Latina, I notice silence. That precious and singular silence that identifies a man full of values. Simplicity, culture, depth, humility. These are those first values it is possible to perceive when dealing with him; the same values that this Man, before being an Architect, can translate in truth through his […]

Today the figure of the architect lives a strange sort of bewilderment, where ethical and moral principles have been lost. The unanimous and disintegrated-repressed acceptance of any object passed off as architecture seems to have become the rule. Criticism is dead and has brought with it those ideals and that sense of stance that should […]

Accompanied by thirty years of experience in the academic, curatorial, editorial and research fields, in 2015 Luca Molinari founded his independent office supported by a team of professionals coming from the architectural context and the sectors of exhibit design, graphic, advertising, copyediting and project management.Luca Molinari Studio offers tailored and integrated services concerning content design, […]

For the Number 06 issue of AGORÀ magazine, it was decided to deal with a topic that I personally find difficult to argue: climate change related to Architectural discipline. A matter of undoubtedly major importance, especially in the latest period, but on which I am personally very skeptical. Being a topic that – without mincing […]

The Great Mosque of Rome by Paolo Portoghesi today is certainly the most important place of prayer for the Muslim population of the city of Rome. It is the seat of the Islamic Cultural Centre of Italy, it acts as a monumental mosque and, alongside the other numerous centers of worship in the city, meets […]

Luca Mazzari was born in Genoa in 1961 where he graduated and founded, with Liliana Leone, the Archifax Architetti Associati studio. He designs buildings and home furnishings with Italian design companies. He teaches “Theory of Perception” applied to the project at the European Institute of Design in Florence. – The contemporary artist and political activist […]

Ponte Parodi is an urban wound in the heart of the city of Genoa, it bleeds and does not heal. Located in the center of the “Porto Antico”, the ancient port of the city, it is an incredible opportunity in defining the new Genoese waterfront, it is also home to an exceptional building: the Hennebique. […]

Do you know the phrases addressed to anyone with a minimum of common sense, which in a defiant tone are being thrown up on the social networks or, even more worryingly, declared by some representatives of the current government? Phrases referring to migrants as: “Take them at your home!”, or even, “Welcome refugees at your […]

“I apologize to the readers, and to all those who (maybe) will lose their time by reading the following short text. This essay doesn’t want to be the truth, but rather something that tends to incorporate fragments of this truth. Fragments that are placed in an insane and disorganized stream of consciousness, that revolves around […]

Michele Bonino was born in Turin in 1974. After completing his studies in his hometown, he moves to Barcelona. Despite he’s continuing to travel, he keeps on using Italy as his base, where currently works as Architectural and Urban Composition Professor and as Rector’s Delegate for Relationships with China at the Polytechnic of Turin. He […]

The grains of sand evaporate in the whirlwind of variation and the concatenations of matter melt as if touched by the rays of the sun. – In physics the second law of thermodynamics states that everything in nature tends towards entropy, therefore chaos orders the world and outlines its shape; completely absorbed by this inescapable […]

Let’s consider two types of space: the physical one and the virtual one. The first one is well-known, well-studied and used by us on a daily basis, while the second has upset our lives over the past 15 years and, even if it seems an established and inherent reality in our habits, we are not […]

Many are the ideas for the “Ex-Fiera del Mare” of Genoa, less the projects realized. Today this part of the city, which until a few decades ago was a source of pride for the Ligurian capital, lies in a state of almost complete abandonment. Only few small passing boats allow this place not to die. […]

In these last years, many architectural theories and urbanistic studies focused on the concept of “Smart city”. But before analyzing that and its historical and contextual declinations, I think that it’s important to understand the needs that brought to the definition of this planning strategy.We live in an age profoundly marked by social, environmental and […]

The climate is changing and the whole world with it. But what effects will this have on the most fragile communities? We asked it to Marìa del Carmen Mendoza Arroyo, Professor at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya and co-director of the Master of International Cooperation in Sustainable Emergency Architecture. – 1 – In which way, […]

Climate change, migrations, architecture, and energy issues. How is the world changing? Considering the recent events, it is inevitable to wonder which will be the future of the planet and how the society will be structured in function of ongoing changes. The interview has been carried on with Luca Mercalli, a meteorologist, a climatologist, and […]

Culture: from the latin language colĕre, literally «to cultivate». The total amount of intellectual knowledge that a person has acquired through study and experience, all re-examined with a deep and personal rethinking in order to convert the notions from simple erudition to constitutive elements of personal moral, of spirituality and of esthetical taste. Thus, in […]

Giorgio Goggi was interviewed as part of a discussion between three architects on the theme of the Milan’s railway yards. Giorgio Goggi graduated in Architecture at the Polytechnic of Milano in 1970, with 100/100 cum laude. Member of the Order of Architects of Milan, since 1972 he has been working as a freelancer with his […]

Cities are what makes our world run the way it does. They are incubators for new thoughts, ideologies, innovations, etc. In a simple analogy, if the world is a car, cities are its running engine. And cities have been in the center of attention when it comes to thoughts of the future. This kind of […]

During the PhD, Giampiero Cama, dealt with the processes of primary democratization in Western Europe. In recent years he has developed his activity as Associate Professor of the Department of Political and Social Science at the University of Genoa, which is divided into two main strands. One concerning the theory of democratic regimes. The second […]

In the last decades Milan is living an exponential development that is bringing to a mutation of its skyline. Starting from the fast development of Porta Garibaldi up to the CityLife quartier still under construction, new districts of the metropolitan city are taking over through glazed towers. In this architectural context a new project was […]

Style is not dead. It is simply an outdated concept. Nowadays, if many people worry about its loss, the reason is that the attempt to introduce the concept of method as a substitution of style has not produced positive results. After all, despite the creative process wants to avoid this phenomenon, the disappearance of codified […]

Marco Biraghi is Professor; he teaches “History of Contemporary Architecture” at the School of Architecture and Society of the Polytechnic of Milan and “History of Contemporary Architecture and Design” at the Faculty of Arts, Tourism and Markets of the IULM University.He has published several essays on the most important Italian and foreign architecture magazines and […]

Lorenzo Degli Esposti was interviewed as part of a discussion between three architects on the theme of the Milan’s railway yards. Degli Esposti Architetti is a leading partnership in the design of architecture, urban planning and infrastructure. Founded in 2006 by Lorenzo Degli Esposti and Paolo Lazza, based in Milan. Degli Esposti Architetti’s exclusive approach […]

In an era like the one we live in, where the formal sterility of architecture has been in force for some time, the invention by a collective of artists and architects of a new style may perhaps overturn the situation of bewilderment in which the current architectural panorama lives. – “… for powerful, famous cities,which […]

The architecture and the contemporary city are living an “eternal present”, without innovations and substantial renewals, now enslaved by past beliefs that do not allow a real revolution. One of these beliefs turns out to be the idea of Permanence. Through two temporary cities – kumbh Mela and Burning Man Festival – a process of […]

Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist and philosopher who died in 2017, starting from the late 90s defined the current society as “Liquid Modernity”¹. The paradigm focused on the absence of axioms at the base of the contemporary culture. Indeed, he mentioned a sense of disorientation, generated by the loss of reference points, where the individual, […]

In the context of a comparison between three architects who participated in the Blueprint competition, organized by the City of Genova, Paolo Brescia of OBR Studio was interviewed. Paolo Brescia graduated from the Polytechnic of Milan, after he studied at the Architectural Association in London. He worked from 1998 to 2000 with Renzo Piano, after […]

The monograph, edited by VERLAG SCHEIDEGGER & SPIESS, is a complete compendium that goes through all the phases of evolution of Peter Zumthor, paying special attention to the projects that have consecrated the Genius, accurately illustrating over 40 buildings entirely designed by the Swiss Architect. – Peter Zumthor is, to date, one of the most […]

Sardinia: a land of experimentation, uncertain balances and hopeful solutions. The 2020s opened with a general context of climate and environmental crisis, but not only. If you look exclusively at the italian context, the picture of climatic consequences and environmental damage is configured in extreme situations and damage from hydrogeological instability more and more frequent, […]

Andrea Anselmo grew up in the Ligurian province and began his promising career at the Polytechnic School of Genoa. Gradually he developed the will to know different realities from the Italian one and so he started the Erasmus in France. It is precisely during this moment of his life that he increasingly understood the importance […]

In an era in which the issue of immigration is a constant in the national and international debate, Giulio Piscitelli, a young Italian photojournalist, wanted to give the world his contribution by experiencing firsthand the harrowing fate to which all those who decide to migrate to Europe are subjected, documenting the routes of human trafficking […]

“In architecture, Style plays a very peculiar role that it does not have in other arts. In the other arts the style simply depends on the artist, it’s something for themselves in front of themselves, but in architecture this cannot happen, as the architect has a different relationship with their profession from that of the […]

It has been long, since people started talking about sustainability, intended as changing our habits, how we eat, how we travel, or which products we buy. However, that of modifying our daily life’s choices represents a strategy of safeguarding the planet which revealed itself too weak to deal with this problem. Could changing the way […]

Franco Purini was interviewed as part of a comparison between three architects who took part in the Blueprint competition, organized by the Municipality of Genoa. Franco Purini: architect and theorist of architecture, is Professor Emeritus at the University La Sapienza in Rome, and a member of the Accademia di San Luca. Through his writings he […]

STYLE << A particular way of literary expression, in so far as constant aspects are recognizable in it (in the way of addressing the subject, of expressing thought, in lexical, grammatical and syntactic choices, in the articulation of the period, etc.)characteristic of an era, a tradition, a literary genre, a single author […] >> << […]

“In the center of Fedora, that gray stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms of the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become […]

Today Milan is experiencing a new phase of development which is leading to crucial transformations from an architectural and urban point of view. Within an extremely changing scenario, the succession of historical phases, linked to the progression and socio-economic change of the city, has led to the inevitable transformation of the territory. Areas that in […]

Joseph Grima (1977) is an architect, curator and essayist.Since 2017 he is Creative Director of the Eindhoven Design Academy.In 2014 he was appointed Artistic Director of Matera European Capital of Culture 2019.He is the founder and partner of the Space Caviar studio, which deals with architecture and research by investigating the relationships between design, technology, […]

˂˂It sounds absolutely logical to think that if the same person plays both roles – the inhabitant and the builder –, no problem would need to be solved. Unfortunately, today’s situation is so absurd… that in practice the direct opposite is true: rarely an architectonic object satisfies the inhabitant, and the builder prevails over him. […]

CityLife is the new urban redevelopment project that occupies the historic “Fiera Campionaria” district of Milan, following the transfer of the fairgrounds to the new “Fiera Milano” hub in Rho-Pero. The project is an economic opportunity for the city and will offer work to more than a thousand people, will be home to major Italian […]

Full Professor at the Polytechnic of Milan from 1980 to 2012, architect Fabrizio Schiaffonati held various institutional roles: director of departments, president of architecture degree courses, coordinator of research doctorates, member of the Board of Directors and the Academic Senate, director of the Permanent Training Centre and the University Quality Centre. Visiting professor at the […]

Asylums are conceived between the 19th and 20th centuries as a result of psychiatric research. They are the evolution of the so-called sanatorium, that is the structure in which social outcasts, madmen and infectious patients were imprisoned and controlled, in ways similar to those in prison. To date, psychiatric hospitals are officially closed; nevertheless they […]

A simple premise for a decidedly more complex goal: to make Milan attractive again, not only for future investors, but for new citizens, ready to live in a city suited to their needs and not necessarily bent to the financial market. This is where Laura Montedoro, associate professor of Urban Planning at the Polytechnic of […]

Carlo Ratti graduated from the Polytechnic of Turin and the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris. Subsequently, he obtained his Masters in Philosophy and PhD in architecture from the Martin Center of the University of Cambridge, UK. Since 2000 he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a researcher, to work […]

Limiting wastage, reducing consumption and a reasoning resource use are the cornerstones of an economic development model of our days that lead us to the only possible future: the one that might be sustainable and innovative. Climate change issue linked with the unsustainability of the economic model, through which our contemporary society is based, will […]

One of the most significant phenomena that is identifying this first part of the century, is certainly that of migration. The migratory phenomenon, a recurring condition in history, has seen in recent years, in Italy, a sort of clash and confrontation between ethnic groups with radically different cultures and lifestyles. This condition recalls the need […]

Today the architect’s craft seems to have taken on a different connotation than that of a few decades ago. Theoretical research in architecture, although present, seems to be something separate from actual practice. A phenomenon of approval in today’s architectural production is rampant in the world, returning to society buildings from the form that prevails […]

The panorama of Milan is full, in each corner of the city, of architectures that in centuries helped the development of the autonomous character of the city. A kind of characteristic that is simply defined with the word “Milanesità”. One of the architects of this peculiarity is an architect who in the first decades of […]

Carlo Devillanova graduated in Economics and Social Sciences at Bocconi University, then obtained his Master’s degree and completed his doctorate at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. After a period as assistant at Pompeu Fabra University and the University of Trieste, in 2002, Carlo Devillanova became Professor of Economics at Bocconi University. Among the many working […]

Piero Pelizzaro has 10 years of experience in climate change policies and urban resilience planning. Currently he is the Milan Chief Resilience Officer and the City Lead for the H2020 Lighthouse project Sharing Cities at the Municipality of Milan. He is an advisor of the Italian Ministry of Environment Land and Sea on Urban Adaptation […]

A Smart City is a place where the networks and traditional services are made more efficient with the use of digital and telecommunication technologies, which its residents and activities benefit from. But all this how will it change the face of our cities? Cover by Stanza , Body 01000010011011110110010001111001, 2018. –ghhjkl That of smart cities […]