Abstract:

The paper presents some first results of a research developed within the didactic experimentation activities (through Workshops and Internships) of the School of AUIC - Architecture, Urban Planning, Construction Engineering in collaboration with DICA - Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the Politecnico di Milano.

The recent collapse phenomena, concerning works in the Architectural and Civil Engineering field, have triggered a series of reflections on the design strategies to be developed in order to mitigate the risk of collapse.

The research takes as its central theme the training of future designers with the aim of developing a greater awareness of the causes and the reasons for structural failures. The paper has as a starting point the investigation of past mistakes.

The work introduces the different achieved didactic experiences and brings out the methodological approach used. This approach is based on the rereading of the history of science considered not as an orderly and logical sequence of successes, but as episodes of survey of errors and attempts made to (re) elaborate "new" solutions. The educational course aims to consider the experiences of the past as laboratory objects to be investigated (even with contemporary tools) in order to identify paradigms capable of guiding future design choices.

The paper is organized into four parts.
- Part One: "A problem is not an exercise: the history of science as a place of experimentation"
The chapter introduces the sense of the research starting from some problems of the past and understanding the relationships between formulation - conception - solution.
- Part Two: "Six Meta Construction Design Paradigms”
The chapter presents the synthetic formulation of six paradigms for a successful design and construction that emerge from various structural failures occurred in the past. For each case, some synthetic documents are presented in order to support the multidisciplinary and multicriteria analysis developed.
- Part Three: "Investigations by Paradigms"
The chapter highlights an experimentation made through the application of paradigms to cases of structural failure, with the purpose of testing the methodological effectiveness in reading situations of structural criticalities.
- Part Four: "(re) design: lines of development".

The final chapter presents the educational effects of both the methodological approach introduced and the operational tools used. What emerged in relation to the possible ways of bringing out the set of problems, starting from an anecdotal formulation appears significant. By presenting examples, possible lines of research development are identified.

Keywords:

Structural design process, learning from failure, methodological approach.