Festival dell'architettura

Sicily and its territory, destination of the Arab travelers and later the Grand Tour travelers between 700 and 800 and the architects of the '20s, always interested in the knowledge of its landscape, has been crossed, in recent years, by the students and teachers who have participated in the numerous workshops and symposia on the knowledge of the places of the town and of the landscape, where were able to present a project of transformation.
The Italian landscape, and even more the Sicilian, with his identity and variety, with big and small cities, historical and contemporary cities, together with agricultural warehouses, remains of buildings without quality, atopic places, urban fragments, has undergone a rapid change of which it is necessary to note the sense, in order to recover its settlement and aesthetic quality, through the look and its description.
The travel, in fact, allows you to read, describe, note and search out the elements of the visible and invisible city as Italo Calvino and Elio Vittorini describe in their books.
The workshops, in fact, as we will see through the various experiences in the places, as well as those performed in Sicily as those in the places of Villard, are a different way of teaching through "the travel between the places" and comparing the different Italian and European experiences.
These activities are an important experience of teaching and research, especially for their meaning and the role that these experiences have had in Italy and especially in Sicily in the last 30 years, in the city of Messina (1985), Trapani (1993), Caltagirone (1994), San Giovanni Gemini (1997), Marsala (1998-2000), Erice (1999), Favara (2003), S.Stefano di Quisquina (2003-2005), Cinisi (2004), Menfi (2005), S. Agata di Militello (2005), Sciacca (2007), Siracusa ( 2011-12 ), Palermo (2014).
The choice of the cities studied is derived from the city administrator proposals together with the proponents of the various workshops.
In particular, the small towns were more receptive to innovations and, in this, the Faculty of Architecture, with its didactics production in the territory, contributed to make these occasions really singular, thanks to the presence of Pasquale Culotta: by emphasizing the architectural design of the importance didactic experimentations, for the places under study.
Will be Pasquale Culotta ,with the young architects of that time, teachers today of the Faculty of Architecture of Palemo, to build opportunities , such as the Architectural Design symposia in Messina (1985), Caltagirone (1994), Geraci Siculo (1996). Activities that unlike workshops that have a limited time, are developed in a longer period of time.
The first International symposium of Architectural Design "L’isolato di Messina " (1984-1985), promoted by Pasquale Culotta and Vincenzo Melluso, was an important opportunity to reflect on the reconstruction of Messina after the earthquake of 1908, through the system of the blocks ¹ constitutive matrix of the urban system of the city.
The symposium allowed an international comparison , thanks to the participation a group composed of thirty architects including eight of the most interesting in the architectural debate of those years, such as Emilio Battisti, Joan Busquet, Michele Cannatà, Fatima Fernandes, Livio Dimitriu, Nicole Elen -Harlè, Giuseppe Leone, Carlo Magnani, Giuseppe Rebecchini, Francesco Venezia, who with others formed a group of thirty architects.
The planners have made a design for Messina city, starting from the Messina’ block, projected in a geographic system of the city-maritime theater with the look toward the Strait.
During the design processing, remarkable was the contribution of Mario Botta, Vittorio Gregotti, Eduardo Souto de Moura ².
Taking up the issues covered in the Symposium of the Strait city of 1985, an "International Stage of Architectural Design" is organized in 1997, coordinated by Prof. Vincenzo Mellusso, who worked on the rivers traces.
The theme of the reconstruction (see theme Messina concerned with the workshop Villard 10 in 2008) after the Belice earthquake of 14 January 1968 has been the focus of a workshop, coordinated by Marcella Aprile Roberto Collovà, Franco Castagnetti e Adriana Bisconti, saw architects like Bruno Minardi, Pierluigi Nicolin , Franco Purini, Laura Thermes, Francesco Venezia, Umberto Riva, Alvaro Siza Vieira, propose solutions for the affected cities, as response to a real problem, that of the disaster. The result, for thirteen municipalities, was remarkable for the proposed ideas, like those for the thirty-five cities in the Val di Noto rebuilt after the earthquake of 1693: a form of reconstruction through a process of modernization.
Of this journey through the ruins, we remember the Francesco Venezia designs for the access to the Segesta temple and that of Siza for the ‘Rocche di Cusa’ ancient calcareous rocks quarries which the material for the construction of Selinunte city was extracted from.
The Symposium of Architectural Design "The public project for the Third Millennium architecture"³ in Geraci Siculo (1996), coordinated by Pasquale Culotta with Joseph Guerrera, Vincenzo Melluso Marcello Panzarella, that developed the interest in public space through the identification of 25 projects in city areas which have been selected in order to enhance the urban and marginal landscape;
The International Symposium of Architectural Design in San Giovanni Gemini (1997) coordinated by Prof. Giovanni Francesco Tuzzolino that dealt strategic points of the city and the landscape.
The workshops, unlike the Symposia, experience a methodology different from the design practice, performed indoors the School of Architecture, in which the project is being prepared with reference to the teaching regulations of those years.
The attendance of the workshops days by the young people appropriately guided by tutors, in following the scientific managers’ directions, produces a remarkable experience and a rich amount of planning results.

The need to produce a work in limited time, forces the student to define their own project, through numerous drawings, that given the timing, by hand and made drawings useful fact to describe the places and to express their design sensibility.
During the elaboration period, the places, where the projects are processed, continuously are crossed by visiting critics and by administrators that try to contribute to the better solutions success through the exchange and the comparison, a practice which is very different from the design practice that sees the designer in his own studio or in the university environments.

The seminar activities are accompanied by a series of conferences and exhibitions that allow us to describe a case study of contemporary architectural project actuality.
Through workshops opportunities, the Faculty of Architecture of Palermo triggered and strengthened national reports, with Alberto Ferlenga, that besides having made a significant contribution to the numerous seminars, has played a key role in the creation of the Itinerant Seminar of Villard⁴ d’Honnecourt (1999), now in its 15th edition.
The relationship between landscape and architecture has been the basis of the International Seminars of Design coordinated with Marcello Panzarella in Marsala ⁵ from 1998 to 2000, in Menfi in 2005 and in Sciacca in 2007: the intent was to describe the relation between city, landscape and productive activities.

In the city of Marsala, through the three seminars has been studied, with particular attention to the relationship between the city and the “Stagnone", the city waterfront, the landscape from the illegal buildings and seasonal spaces for bathing.
The first seminar ⁶ explored the area of the Marsala ‘Stagnone’ ⁷ as a landscape inside the landscape; the second, the coast stretch of the city, between archeology and city settlements and the last, the squatter settlements and the spaces for bathing, places which have increasingly reduced and destroyed a portion of the coastal landscape, one of the most beautiful in Sicily.
The Menfi’s Seminar ⁸ has tried to give value to the settlement fabric and to the vineyard landscape and its architecture through the study of 15 areas of the city affecting the historic city, the recovery of obsolete and old beams wineries, caves and disused railway tracks.

The Seminar in Sciacca has sought to give attention to the settlement system of the city in its relationship with the sea: it is worked into the edge of the historical city where 14 areas useful to describe the multiplicity and mutability of the landscape, and reconstruct a new urban sense.
In the numerous laboratories in different time periods, as well as young architects in the projects execution, also took part international architects that with their lessons have enabled a comparison extended to issues of international value.
We recall, in fact, the presence of Sergio Braz Antao (Porto), Michele Cannatà and Fatima Fernandes (Porto), Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo (Vittoria), Guillermo Vazquez Consuegra, Vittorio De Feo, Mauro Galantino, Elías Torres Tur, Vincenzo Melluso, Markus Scherer, Roberto Spagnolo, Yorgos Simeoforidis, Nikos Ktenas (Mendrisio), Juan Manuel Salazar Palerm (Las Palmas), Jaume Bach Nunez (Barcelona), Silles Perraudin (Montpellier), Ignacio Quemada Saenz-Badillos (Madrid), Najet Hedhly (Tunis).
The Seminar of Architectural Design "Marine Punctuations", held in Trapani (1993) and coordinated by Vito Corte, drew attention to the coastal landscape for waterways, through the identification a system of moorings along the coast of Trapani (salt marshes, beaches, lagoon spaces and city center places).
There are also many International Seminars of Architectural Design conducted by Faculty of Engineering together with the Faculty of Architecture and coordinated by Antonino Margagliotta and Giovanni Francesco Tuzzolino, in Sicilian cities.
The seminars "Environment / Nature / Architecture" (2003), "Architectures for the reception” (2005) and "City spaces, nature spaces"(2006) held at S. Stefano di Quisquina (Ag) have studied the mixture of the urban and natural environments; differently, the seminar "Architectures and Infrastructures" (2005) investigates the coastal territory starting from the presence of the railway route.
The establishment of other Faculties of Architecture as that of Syracuse (1996), directed by the Dean of that time Ugo Cantone resulted in the organization of other seminars which saw as the manager Prof. Bruno Messina and have addressed the themes of landscape and archeology.
The first of these "The landmark project, new urban landscapes, Syracuse, the Talete’s promenade" (2001), coordinated by Gianfranco Grianfriddo, with Emanuele Fidone, Vincenzo Latina, Bruno Messina, Louis Pellegrino, had the participation as tutors of Francesco Cellini, Francesco and Manuel Aries Mateus and Luigi Snozzi who have studied an area used for a parking lot along the historic center of Ortigia.
The International Seminar of Architectural Design "The archeology landscape: three opportunities to make the city" in (Siracusa 2012) coordinated by Bruno Messina has developed the theme of landscape and archeology and saw as visiting João Carrilho De Garcia, Elias Torres and Jean Pierre Crousse.
In Cinisi the International Seminar on Architectural Design "Airports and surroundings" coordinated by Prof. Giuseppe Marsala with the collaboration of the teachers of the seminar Villard, dealt with the issue of the airport infrastructure in relationship with the landscape: 14 projects that answer to the transformation of a territory full of natural systems ‘atropizzati’, in which the presence of airport infrastructure that interrupted the relationship between the coast and the city.
Palermo was present in many workshops. First in "The city and the water" (1997) coordinated by prof. Roberto Collovà, and then in the international workshop "Wohnexperimente Kassel" (2010), coordinated by prof. Gaetano Licata and in the seminar "Palermo: urbanize the sack. The building of the north expansion of the 70s in Palermo" (2011) coordinated by Profs. Collovà and Licata attended by students from Kassel and Dessau.
Recently, also, was held an International Seminar of Architectural Design "PCA Palermo Coast Actions" (2014) coordinated by the architects Floriana Marotta, Oriol Capdevilla and João Gomes da Silva: on this occasion we have studied the old fishing villages of the north coast of city of Palermo.
Even Villard has turned his attention to Palermo, in the Itinerant Seminars of Architectural Design.
The travel through the cities ⁹, in fact, is the fundamental principle of the Itinerant Seminar Villard d'Honnecourt with a year-long journey through the Italian cities (Palermo, Lecce, Roma, Venezia, Genova, Ancona, Verona, Benevento, Bologna, Cagliari, Vittorio Veneto and Montefeltro.
The experience started in 1998/99 in Palermo , born from the idea to bring together teachers and students from several universities, then from eight Faculties ( Venezia, Torino, Genova, Ascoli Piceno, Pescara, Roma 3, Napoli, Palermo) with different teaching experiences to elaborate a joint project developed in the different stages¹⁰, with meetings with various tutors.
The topics were varied and included different landscapes present in the cities investigated: the coastline, the ports, the airports, quarries, suburbs, abandoned spaces, open spaces, places of historical stratifications, up to the places of the battlefields of the wars which in recent years it is working on.
The first Villard takes place in Palermo along the south-east coast outside the historical city, where along this line has been made by the participants a site inspection by boat to allow the view of the coast from the sea, as described by the many historic views of the city between the '700 and '800 and by the beautiful photos of Nunzio Battaglia, wich has been reference material for the project.
Even in the Villard 2012, workshop edited by Adriana Sarro e Luigi Pintacuda, Palermo is object of attention with the seminar " Urban Mutations: a project for the city of Palermo"¹¹ although with different themes than those of 1999 working on disused spaces of the city (Mediterranean Exhibition, Fruit and Vegetable Market), opportunity to reconstruct the latent characters of the urban landscape (Bourbonic Arsenal and the eighteenth-century villas) along with the productive structures.
Villard, as mentioned, is a remarkable experience for having crossed the Italian landscape consisting of historicized places and atopic places. Remarkably different are the themes dealt in the last Villard in the city of Vittorio Veneto and today in the Villard 15 in the new city of Montefeltro, where the projects try to get interpreters of places full of history and memory.
Both the results of the workshops and symposia in Sicily that those of the seminars Villard are notable as it is documented in the many publications that collect projects, lessons, conferences and exhibitions held in different locations of which we recall that set in Messina for the ten years of Villard , " Ten" that set in Messina for the ten years of Villard curated by Marco D' Annuntiis.
The exhibition, in fact, expresses the sense of the students' work as well as the book of Villard 10 titled "Messina 08-08 reconstructions" treated with great sensitivity by Rita Simone with the theme of Messina who returns still very topical.
Must be attributed due merit to these results for the huge participation of teachers and students who, at his own expense, and only for the desire to know and to confront allowed to donate to the city administration, important results.
As a natural continuation of the establishment of the Doctorate of Architecture VDH, within the doctoral school of Venezia, has enabled the training of new generations who for various reasons have been able to elaborate on the topic of European identity.
The material produced, taken as a whole, result of numerous travels, constitutes a sort of project reconnaissance in the contemporary city, through places and themes that, despite the diversity of approaches, can be used to make some reflections on the construction of successive travels that, I hope, can always take more account of human needs.

Adriana Sarro is an Associate Professor of Architectural Design at the Polytechnic School of the University of Palermo, and conducts research at the Department of Architecture, d’Arch

Captions:
1 - "And this is obviously a myth, because the nineteenth-century city is instead the city where born the contradictions of the modern, where born the conflicts , it is the city in which great homogenizations of the building fabric are realized , accepted just with the nineteenth-century structure of the city. It is above all a city that destroys the ancient city."

Gregotti,V. (1986). Introduction. In AA.VV; The block of Messina. Cefalù: Medina, 22.
2 - "My first impression is that Messina has a clear plan because it was drawn over the sign of the disaster."
Souto de Moura, E. (1986). Introduction. In AA.VV; The block of Messina. Cefalù: Medina, 31.
3 - "Right the architecture and the beginning of the third millennium them we think synergistically as factors of a new Renaissance of the Italian city, strong of the deep roots that they have in the vast Italian heritage of "extremely hig" experiences."
Culotta, P. (1996). The public project for the architecture of the third millennium. In Atlas of the new architecture of Geraci Siculo (curated by. Guerrera G.) Cefalù: Medina, 11.
4 - "what Villard?
Villard is a traveling seminar design, on an annual basis, which involves 14 faculty Italian and foreign companies, and some prestigious cultural institutions: The Faculty of Architecture of Alghero, Ancona, Ascoli Piceno, Ljubljana, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Paris Malaquais, Patras, Pescara, Reggio Calabria, Rome, Venice and the Order of Architects of drills. The seminar is open to about 10 students in each faculty participant enrolled in the last years of the courses. The program involves the development of a project on a topic, usually proposed by the municipal administration. The theme of the seminar is presented at the beginning and developed during the year. The journey is the backbone of the seminar as a means of knowledge of the city "
5 - "Seminar after seminar , in Trapani, Geraci, Messina, Marsala, the projects carefully followed by the tutors and always more expert students show that the freedom and personal skills can coexist with the forming of a common attitude facing the problems ... "
Ferlenga, A. (1999). Quality hidden. In The sea and the city, projects and architectures for the Stagnone of Marsala (curated by Panzarella, M., Sarro, A.) Marsala: Centro Stampa Rubino, 127.
6 - " I like to think my intervention as an interview with the designers..On the understanding that every intelligible opportunity is useful for our experience, it seems to me that through the ways of the interview, I could better highlight a character of the our design which to me is more and more evident, that is to say a particular sensitivity in the to read but also in the to modify, in the to confirm but also in the to introduce in a place some new situations. "
Culotta, P. (1999). An interview with the designers. In The sea and the city, projects and architectures for the Stagnone of Marsala (curated by Panzarella, M., Sarro, A.) Marsala: Centro Stampa Rubino, 125.
7 - "This kind of work , which has seen many architects here concentrates more or less young , has created a working atmosphere of generous interest , which are gained from the design assumptions clearly confortable and which often give convincing answers”.
Cappiello, V. (1999). The places and the measure. In The sea and the city, projects and architectures for the Stagnone of Marsala (curated by Panzarella, M., Sarro, A.) Marsala: Centro Stampa Rubino, 128.
8 - "If the wine economy can be an important opportunity to revive areas where the traditional economy and the physical appearance of the city and countryside have suffered , over time, a process of degradation , it should not run out in the proposals of theme parks but constitute the starting point for a territorial restoration work..."
Ferlenga, A. (2005). In the wine lands. In Wine Architectures (curated by Sarro, A.) Palermo: Grafill, Palermo, 8.
9 - "The Travel. It is in the travel that the various components that form "the Villard project", find their recomposition, or, rather, in the various travel that usually intertwine, during the academic year, in which the experience develops.
Ferlenga, A. (2006). The spirit of Villard. In Villard 7 Verona - Stratifications and connections (curated by Palazzolo, C., Basso M., Diodato, M.) Verona: ed. CIERRE, 17.
10 - "Villard in recent years has therefore made a complex trip through issues and places, trying to recompose the ungraspable image of the Italian landscape in constant evolution and to represent beauty and misery through the project tools"
Cirri, P. (2006). Seven stations for a landscape. In Villard Verona 7 – Stratification and connections (curated by Palazzolo, C., Basso M., Diodato, M.) Verona: ed. CIERRE, 13.
11 - The result of Villard 12, published in the book "Urban Mutations. Villard 12 a project for the city of Palermo" ( curated by Pintacuda, L., Sarro. A,) was presented by M. Panzarella during the Degrees LM4 of the Faculty of Architecture of Palermo (2013), where he clearly points the role played by Villard starting by the numerous projects.
The outcomes of the workshops are published in :
Cagnardi, A. (1981) Belice 1980, Places, problems, projects. Twelve years after the earthquake, Venezia: collection Polis / Marsilio.
Croset, P.A., The block of Messina, in Casabella N.523, April 1986 , p.16 -27.
The block of Messina (curated by Guerrera G.) Cefalù: Medina, 1986.
Atlas of new architecture of Geraci Siculo (curated by Guerrera G.) Cefalù: Medina, 1996.
The sea and the city, architecture projects for the Stagnone of Marsala, (curated by Panzarella, M., Sarro, A.) Marsala: Centro Stampa Rubino, 1999.
The sea and the city, maritime landscape and urban archeology, houses and suburban landscapes (curated by Panzarella, M., Sarro, A) Palermo: Priulla, 2002.
The landmark project, new urban landscapes. Siracusa: the Talete’s promenade (curated by Guardo, A.) Cannitello (RC): ed. Library of Cenide, 2002

Villard 3 Itinerant Seminar of design, attached to Casabella N.705, November 2002.
Villard 4 Small Airports, (curated by Tchou, D.M.), Roma: Edilstampa, 2004.

Villard 5 Genova between city and port, (curated by Dall'Olio, L, Tchou, D.M.), Roma Edilstampa, 2005.
Villard 6/6 The projects of the Faculty of Pescara in the seminar Villard (curated by. Cicchitti, M.), Pescara: Publish, 2005.
Villard 6 Urban Scenarios, projects for Ancona (curated by Ciorra P. with Coppari R., Ferrara, C.M., Marco Tullio, E., Valeri M.), Roma: Edilstampa, 2006.
Villard 7 Verona - Stratifications and connections (curated by Palazzolo, C. Basso, M. Diodato, M.),Verona: ed.CIERRE, 2006.
Margagliotta, A., Tuzzolino, G.F., City spaces ,nature spaces (curated by Saitta, I.), Palermo: Abadir, 2007.
Airports and surroundings, infrastructure, landscape, architecture (curated by Marsala, G.), Palermo: Caracol, 2007.

Wine architectures, a design for the agricultural land (curated by Sarro, A.), Palermo: Grafill, 2008.
Villard 8 Benevento Collimation, (curated by Pagano, L., Serino, R., Galante, P., Facone, D.), Benevento: Graphic Mellusi, 2009.
Metropolitan agents, projects for Bologna, (curated by Coppari, R., Perugini, A., Prospero, A.), Bologna: Editrice Compositori, 2009.  
Margagliotta, A., Tuzzolino, G.F., Architectures for the reception, ed. Regional Department of State Forests Authority, supplement to the territorial magazine "Sicily Forests", Palermo, 2009.
The city of the thermae and the sea, On board projects for Sciacca (curated by Sarro, A.), Palermo: ed.Caracol, 2010.
Urban mutations, Villard 12, a project for the city of Palermo (curated by Pintacuda, L., Sarro, A.) Palermo: Ila Palma, 2012.
Houses + Villard 11 (curated by Burrascano, M., L. dall'Olio, L., Tchou, D. M.), Roma: Edilstampa, 2012.
Messina 08-08 Reconstructions (curated by R. Simone), Roma: ed. Aracne, 2012.