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How long have you been the director of the MA in Urban Management and Architectural Design? And how do you like it?

I’ve been working in the master as tutor and project leader since a long time, and I became director more recently, during the academic year 2007/2008. If I look backward I have to say that it has been an extraordinary experience for my professional career. I had the opportunity of matching the daily architectural practice of my studio with the open field of the research on the contemporary city. Through this experience in Domus Academy I enriched and inspired a lot my professional activity.

Which projects have you been developing with students this year?

We concentrated on Milan and on its transforming dynamics. We focused on how the city can produce today, by itself, a renovated network of collective spaces which are always more necessary.
As an example, we worked on the aquatic resources as a new collective infrastructure, on the urban woods as a potential environmental machine and on the spaces around the railway stations as re-discovered urban gates.

In parallel with this main topic, students had the opportunity to work on a town planning exercise in the Chinese context – the design of a village for 5000 workers near Shanghai, coordinated by Aldo Cibic – and on an architectural design experience in the Mediterranean area – the development of the headquarters for CMC, one of the main Italian building companies. I would add that the master maintains a strong interest towards the urban marketing themes and the Mediterranean scenario of the port-cities.

As an architect and partner of the Boeri Studio, what do you think would be the next challenges in terms of urban architecture?

I think that our future task will mainly concern on the transformation of the existing city, instead of extending it through new suburbanization. I mean urban redevelopment and regeneration. In this sense architecture has to be imagined always less as a self-standing “beautiful box”, and always more as a transforming device injected in the body of the city.
The environmental emergencies and the scarcity of natural ground tend to stop urban sprawling and oblige us to think new modalities to live together within the actual urban boundaries. Architecture has to accept this challenge and developing new interstitial strategies and density typologies, imagining new residential standards, new public services and new collective spaces.

Why do you think that Milan is an interesting place to study architecture and urban design? And why studying in Domus Academy?

Milan is a sort of baricenter between the Continental and the Mediterranean Europe. In the next years – as Barcelona did during the ‘90 and London during the early 2000 - it will turn into an unique laboratory for urban policies and projects.
The renovation of its decreasing industrial heritage and the promotion of new international urban projects, the raising of a diffused cultural system related to design, contemporary art and young creativity - but also the persistence of environmental and social problems – will make out of Milan an exceptional observatory on the contemporary metropolitan condition. Even more, Milan is attracting a lot of investors after having being named venue for the World Exhibition of 2015.
We will have to work througout this complex flow of people, information and nature catching its energy and translating it into a positive collective dimension.
I think this gives an unique background for the students that choose Domus Academy as the place for their MA in urban studies.