Abstract:

The paper presents the results of the educational activity carried out by the disciplines of Drawing and Technology within the Architecture Master Course, especially in the first years.

Working on folding surfaces stimulates students to create complex surfaces and spaces through simple operations. This didactic experience on the folding surfaces, recalling the technique and the art of origami, offers the opportunity to investigate the properties that the fold determines on a simple paper sheet.

These operations create complex spatial configurations with influences on technical, aesthetic and geometric parameters that stimulate students in the process of space creation through geometric operation. Elemental geometry steers every dividing operations of the plane surface (paper sheet) into equal or different polygons (blocks), and their mutual movements (folds) able to create complex spatial shapes.

The dynamism makes the folding process creative and bracing in the learning method, because the students are in front of infinite design solutions that stimulate their imagination of an architectural element. In particular, students proposed scaled-down models of architectural roofing systems.

Moreover, modelling through folds puts the students in front of a geometrical process that from the plane leads to the three-dimensional spatiality of the object, according to a construction opposite to traditional one. Such as projective approach that synthesise in graphic planar image the three-dimension of real space and objects.

This consideration shows to the students the different possibilities that geometry offers both in the design process and in the project presentation. The educational experiences will be presented, in the different application contexts, by models images and by their planar representations, according to the descriptive geometry methods.

In addition, the experiences gained in the field of Technological Disciplines are the result of specific teaching methods that, taking into account the heterogeneity of the students from the point of view of the previous training, move from a broader framework of content to arrive at an approach more technical-operational. The considerations and the results that will be illustrated concern two focuses of complementary insights, the first of which focuses mainly on the building, the second, on innovative materials.

With regard to the building, the technological approach and the relative written-graphic sheet proposed to the students as an exercise, show how the architectural work is necessarily related to an environment and, therefore, cannot be conceived except in a system of relations that today we call “ecological” in an approach that refers not only to the concept of "place" but also to that of "limit" and "relationship".

For the second exercise, the students were invited to study an innovative material, in particular smart, focussing not only on its composition and applications, but also and especially its environmental characteristics. The end result was the creation of an archive-book that accompanies them in their choice of materials in order to train them from the first year of the study to identify the suitable material for each use, while also broadening the use of smart-innovative materials and considering the environmental compatibility and reduction of their impact on the planet.

Keywords:

3D model, folding, innovative materials, technological building.