Abstract:

“Neither it is concrete, nor timber, nor stone, nor steel, nor glass, the strongest material for buildings. It is art.” (Giò Ponti)

The paper presents an experience combined with didactic and research, developed at the Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Politecnico di Milano, aiming the study of the relationships between shape and structure in contemporary architecture. Starting from meta-design results coming from three educational experiences (Workshop “Architecture and Structure MetaDesign – ASMeD”, Summer School “New forms of continuity in the historical urban fabric”, Design Course “Structures and earthquake resistance criteria”), the work goes through the didactic phases in order to show the conceptual approach for a project of structures that can be combined with architectural design at the very beginning of the process.

The paper is organized into five parts:
- Part I: Case Studies
From a brief review of relevant case studies related to the art of building, this part presents some basic thoughts linked to the conceptual phase of structural design, introducing the theme of “typology” as a useful way to recognize static principles.

- Part II: Heuristic Concept of the Project
This part of the work proposes a compared reading of some drawings produced during the very first phases of the designing process, in which it is already possible to recognize the fundamental strokes of the future technical, constructive and structural solutions.

- Part III: Case Analysis
A relevant moment of the educational paths is characterised by the interpretative experience (hermeneutics). In particular, the third part is focused on the analysis developed by students about buildings from which it is possible to define some structural solutions. A synoptic overview of the results (formalized through scaled maquettes, numerical modelling, sketches, drawings and schemes) allows one to catch potential and problematic aspect of the proposed solutions.

- Part IV: Structural Solutions
From the data collected throughout the previous parts, the work highlights some designing orientations towards structural solutions able to be applied in recurring cases. The aim here is to provide some basic operational tools for the evaluation of the structural pre-computing.

- Part V: Meta-Design
At the end of the work, the fifth part collects the most relevant outcomes from the design experiences developed by the students of the courses. The compared overview of the results will show some potentialities of the “structural design approach”, firstly in terms of the development of a creative capability for the definition of the project choices and then in terms of a critic analysis oriented to the research of a coherence between the multidisciplinary aspects of architectural design process.

Keywords:

Structure Design, Architecture, Methodological approach.