Territory

The Master offers three concentrations: habitat, heritage and territory; in all of them the technology plays the role of a cross axis. Territory centers the focus and the scale of work in the urban project and the strategies of development and transformation of the metropolis.

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The Territory concentration of the MArq formulates three of the radically contemporary challenges that the architecture must respond. Starting from the qualifying ECO (from Greek root oikos = house), Territory develops the knowledge and the practices needed to integrate in the architectural fact a triple approach based on:

• The ECOLOGY (oikos-logos), understood as the relationship of architecture with its context (logos), either spatial or temporal. Urban and architectural interventions are traditionally conceived in a linear design-implementation scheme, too often neglecting the after-implementation effect that they have on the territory they are placed on. However, any newly implemented artifact transforms the set of relations and flows that conform the identity of a given territory. Ecology on site aims to raise awareness of such transformations, seeking to bring to the designing process a more sensitive approach towards the future impact of the proposal.

• The ECONOMY (oikos-nomos, okomos), considering this as the efficient management of material and technical resources needed for construction of the architectural object. At the light of a renewed awareness of environmental values, urbanism should be tackled from different, divergent, approaches. Either preservation of unbuilt landscape, improvement on the existing urban fabric or the readressment of new extensions, are appropriated strategies but not powerful when disconnected. Economy of planning suggests that an integrative urban policy considering the three strategies simultaneously might be the most efficient and rational approach.

• The ECOSYSTEM (oikos-systema, oikos-syn-hístemi), paying special attention to the processes involved in the territorial scale proposal. The urban design project aims to shape a physical, architectural and engineering process that combines land tracing, building construction and infrastructure deploying. The morphology of cities is shaped by plotting + urbanization + construction. But these three processes are not simultaneous, nor are they always connected in the same way. On the contrary, their multiple ways of combining in time and space generate the morphological richness of the city thus being their mutual relationship the object of our focus.