The MAA is a visionary master program with an innovative and open structure, mixing diverse disciplines, shaping professionals capable of producing theoretical & practical solutions towards responsive cities, architecture & technology.
X-Urban Design Studio works beyond the conventional scales of territorial design, town planning, building or fabrication in designing a multi-scalar habitat. As in the design of ecosystems, each level has its own rules of interaction and relation, and at the same time must comply with certain parameters that pertain to the system as a whole. The Studio focuses on projects that range in scale from the territory to the neighborhood. The idea of X-Urban Design is related to two issues: on one hand, the understanding of countries and cities around the world with emerging economies and cultures that, by virtue of their regional or economic position, can contribute value to the planet as a whole. In this sense the studio seeks to identify the particular urban and territorial values of these places in order to construct more intelligent territories anywhere in the world, moving on from the western idea that there is a single model of city (be it European or from the United States) to work on the basis of more complex and more open values. The other issue related to X-Urban Design has to do with their creation as intelligent territories that function in a multiscalar way, emphasizing the relationship between nature, networks and nodes and promoting the ‘emergence’ of an urban intelligence through research on the application of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in different aspects of the urban infrastructure and public space.
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A city inside a building; The project articulates an extra-extra large architectural typology that extends beyond the conventional scale of a singular building and aims at becoming a self-enclosed urban form. Mobilizing Buckminster Fuller’s ‘tensegrity’ structural logic, this megastructure accommodates a complexassemblage of typologies, functions, and forms within its differentiated envelope-a geometrically and materially optimized … Read more
Discourses of Verticality: Vignettes on (post)Metropolitan Urbanisms It all started from the Manhattanism proposed by Rem Koolhaas in Delirious New York. The theory explains the product of the verticalization of the city – skyscrapers, which stand neatly and compete with each other. The only thing in common is the small squares extruded by the grid- … Read more
In the field of architecture, verticality is often considered the ultimate achievement, the culmination of various attempts, experiments, conceptual speculations, and styles. Architects such as Yona friedman, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Cook have investigated this concept resulting in questionable outcomes. Our analysis explores their work, examining its pure geometry with speculative experimentation. This concept is exemplified … Read more
