Now at its fifth edition, the Masters in Landscape Architecture held in Milan by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Barcelona) and ACMA Centre of Architecture (Milan) is considered one of the major European training experiences. Thanks to the innovative teaching structure based on modules of 50 hours and multiples thereof, it is possible to complete this training within eighteen months only (750 lecture hours). The planning laboratories, seminars and workshops organised in Milan as well as in other European regions, are led by interpreters of the most relevant international experiences. They deal with current issues in landscape architecture (environmental sustainability, renewable energy, public space, etc.), identified in collaboration with local and national administrations, in addition to prominent international bodies in charge of landscape protection and valorisation. After attendance of the second level university Masters (2250 hours of which 750 face-to-face, 90 ECTS credits) or of the single modules, equivalent to those organised from 1983 in Catalonia, the UPC Foundation of Barcelona will award a title which is recognised by EFLA. For the current year, ACMA has activated scholarships for enrolments to the Masters and the Continuing Education Courses of the UPC Foundation. Since the master offers a character of exclusiveness, the teaching staff is highly selected among the exponents of the most meaningful international experiences. The teachers of the workshops besides developing theoretical lessons will be responsible for the practical activities. A person of the staff and a tutor will follow the participants in every didactic phase, from the design laboratory to the presentation of the thesis and they will maintain contacts with the teachers.
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Focus on landscape. Comparison of international experiences. Open lectures. Milan 2013
Landscape is becoming ever more a key topic in the contemporary world. Not only because the European Landscape Convention signed over ten years ago in Florence triggered a series of protection and valorisation norms in our country, on behalf of the public bodies but also because it obliged universities and professional associations to programme new figures and revise the planning culture. Yet the very culture of a country which boasts an envied density of cultural assets on its territory as well as a long history of norms for their protection, turns out to be paralysed, frozen before the challenge of modernity, the proposal of development and the relative infrastructurisation of the territory, which the current globalisation processes are imposing. The initiative includes a series of meetings with some landscapists, lecturers from the Masters in Landscape Architecture UPC-ACMA and interpreters of the main international experiences, which are open to the public. These meetings will be a moment of exchange and comparison on themes which are becoming increasingly topical, not merely for technicians and professionals in the sector but also for stimulating a widespread awareness in the people who must necessarily share the collective landscape assets. [go to page]
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Alternative / Milano. Comparisons, proposals, images and projects for the possible faces of the city. Milan 2013Milan is experiencing a moment of decisive choices for the construction of its future image. The big building projects triggered off by the estate groups are rapidly changing the face of entire parts of the city, whose skyline is ever more connoted by the most varied and original skyscrapers. However, these interventions as a whole appear to be the result of disjointed estate evaluations rather than articulate urban redesigning. Nonetheless, large spaces are still available for the characterisation of new areas of the future city. From resolving environmental emergencies to designing new infrastructures, from creating the network of bicycle tracks to valorising the extraordinary heritage of the Southern Agricultural Park, from designing public spaces in the recently built residential neighbourhoods to creating new urban parks and betting on Expo: experts and local technicians, protagonists of the most significant international experiences, young landscapists and representatives from local institutions will discuss proposals and concrete planning formulations with the aim of involving the citizens in these choices offering a better future for the city of Milan. [go to page]
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New uses for ancient territories: turism. Design laboratory. 02 Module [150 hours]. Milan, april-june 2013Tourism represents the second biggest world industry, placing itself after oil extraction and processing. A phenomenon in full growth if one considers that almost half the population of the world moves away from their home territory for touristic reasons, of which one sixth away from the country they live in. On the one hand this has given rise to a specific new economy, analyzed, programmed and managed by the important tourist operators, whilst on the other it has become a synonym for free use of the territories, for contact between the different cultures of the world. The flow of this true and proper widespread migratory phenomenon finds the main art cities and naturalistic destinations unprepared, thus triggering anthropological, environmental, urban and infrastructural issues. Entire territories are re-interpreted offering their availability to new functionalities which must take into account the valorization and respect of the local culture and landscape. [go to page]
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Anouk Vogel. Temporary Garden. Between public space and private garden. Design workshop. Milan, 20-24 March 2013Transience is accepted today by the culture of design as an intrinsic quality of contemporary urban space. For the ancient consolidated European city, public space is no longer static but is the physical representation of the dynamism of interpersonal relationships and the rapid economical changes, of a society enveloped in the consumption of immaterial goods and the unstoppable construction of constantly new images. In a world dominated by “experiential marketing”, the figure of the designer is becoming closer and closer to that if the “set-designer”, called to design real urban scenographies, installations capable of updating the image of the city by changing it’s nature, albeit just for a few days a year. Public spaces see the multiplication of cultural events, expos and large meetings which require the temporary transformation of the spaces through the use of mobile and ephimeral structures, artistic installations, gardens/vegetable gardens which only have an evocative value of the natural dimension of the city, which today is completely artificialized. This transformation extends itself to the typology which changes from urban courtyard and closed boundary to a space of activity and public relations. A clear example is represented by the evolution of the Fuori Salone which has transformed parts of Milan into an enormous living room with temporary events capable of changing the nature of the districts hosting the initiatives, even in a longer lasting terms, contributing in sustaining a new identity. The proposals designed during the workshop, which will study the specific realities of the built interstitial spaces of the Zona Lambrate, will be part of an exhibition in Zona Ventura during the Salone del Mobile 2013. [go to page]
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Maria Goula. Urban rurality: new agricoltural models for the contemporary metropoly. Design workshop. Milan, 17-21 April 2013The exodus from the countryside after the world war was not only a epochal social phenomenon: the abandonment of the least accessible land by farming produced a progressive impoverishment of the landscape, paving the way to phenomena until now know as desertification and erosion of land which now also undermine the hydrological safety of our country. However, the resistance of farms, often of a family or artisanal character, to the adaptation to the intensive industrial production system is giving its first results. Important stronghold for the landscape, these represent, especially those closer to the large urban centres, a source of civic awareness of the “rural presence”: enterprises that are able to offer a vast and rich user base not only products of a rediscovered local production chain , but also community services, cultural events, tourism and social activities supporting the metropolitan area. Conditions are emerging for the formation of new landscapes characterized by a hybrid nature, both rural and urban, of these contexts. The strengthening of the accomodation facility system in prospect for the EXPO 2015, and its consequent impact on the territory, induce the regeneration of the system of farms, contemporarily introducing the theme of the use of the productive cluster which originated the agricultural landscape of the Lombardy region, adding new and unexplored purposes. [go to page]
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Gilles Vexlard. La dolce vita. The pleasure of living the landscape. Design workshop. Milan, 29 May-2 June 2013Ever too often we are used to associate the landscape with a vision which is binding and limiting of individual freedom. This vision derives from a conservative culture which, although it has the merit of having contributed to the safeguard of aesthetic and cultural values that it carries, represents an extreme reaction to the complete insensibility that has often in the past, and often still does, characterized large scale projects. Furthermore we have the predominance of a technical-scientific approach of the territorial analysis tools and the connected language, through which the subject “landscape” is being protected and planned in a rigid cage made of rules and territorial policies accumulated through time by the regulatory system. The landscape category however is vast. Fortunately, it also contains the intentionality of its own unstoppable transformation. This is connected to the mode in which the local communities auto-organize themselves using, with more or less awareness, their own territorial resources to create adequate models of development, to nurture economical expectations, to produce work and richness in balance with the environment, to host and offer a real faces towards the exterior, to plan its own future with awareness, to live the landscape responsibly, but also freely, with joy and pleasure. [go to page]
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Sicily. Architecture and landscape. Cultural trip. 12-16 June 2013
It is well known that Sicily is one of the richest regions of the world in quantity and variety of examples of cultural heritage. The reason for this strong presence is connected to its particular geographic location and its decisive role in the History of the Mediterranean. Little is known on the other hand, about the presence in the area of relevant projects which have marked the history of architecture and contemporary art, such as the collection of works by leading authors who participated in the reconstruction of Gibellina, the interventions on the Cefalù waterfront, the vast open-air gallery of Fiumara d’Arte, the small architectures built by the School of Palermo, and more recently, of Siracusa. These outstanding features are not only due to the examples left on the Island by the greatest masters of Modern Architecture such as Samonà, Scarpa, Pollini and Gregotti, but also to a fabric of small professional practices which , not without some difficulty, managed to produce a group of works of quality in line with the Modern Movement, though sensitive to the environment and the landscape, which today, can be considered a consolidated part of the cultural heritage.[go to page]
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Remaking Landscapes. International Design SeminarLisbon, July 23rd – August 1st 2013
The gradual process of bringing the City of Lisbon and the Tago River closer to each other, which started with the first interventions of the 90′s, such as the project for the Expo in the Eastern area, has undergone a sensitive acceleration thanks to recent agreements between the Municipality and the Port Authorities for the progressive assignment of the areas distributed along the 19 km of the coastline. This way large areas have been incorporated into the urban fabric and made available for new facilities and strategic services for city life: a new cruise port, cultural centres and foundations, car parks and infrastructural nodes, parks and bicycle lanes. The real bet is however the reconnection of the enormous linear platform of the industrial pier to the fragmented popular neighbourhoods which developed in the hills behind, thanks to its nautical, commercial and productive vocation: the ancient pulsing heart of the Atlantic capital. The requalification of such boundary, represented ideally by Rua da Janqueira, which through its monuments, gardens and public spaces follows the topographical outline of the ancient coastline between the urban centre and the neighbourhood of Belèm in the direction of the ocean, involves an intervention on the revitalization and the connection of a substantial part of the Western part of the historical centre of Lisbon. [go to page]
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System for green areas: from urban to natural. Design laboratory. 01 Module [150 hours]. Milan, september-october 2013Cases of Modern Movement plans which do not strictly concern the architectural construction are rare. In the functionalist plans, “urban green spaces” were considered a mono-functional area, with facilities and services, which could be constructed according to consolidated models, in exactly the same way as the residential, industrial areas, etc. Nevertheless, throughout the building of contemporary cities, from Fredrick Olmsted to Ebenezer Howard, many episodes witness the assignment of a precise value to open space design. As from the environmental movement of the 60s, but especially thanks to the fact that landscape architecture has progressed to a wide-scale discipline, what was considered merely as an indistinct green net by planning, has now become something concrete for the planner: an environmental pre-existence, a complex system of relationships between hydrogeological and botanical structures, to be understood and interpreted with the most advanced scientific disciplines, as well as to be re-planned on the basis of its valorization with respect to human settlements too. [go to page]
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