In February 2016 the ISI Florence – Marywood University architecture program organized the fourth Spring Semester collaborative design workshop with the Department of Heritage and Architecture from TU Delft. On this occasion, students and faculty from DidA (Dipartimento di Architettura – Università di Firenze) joined the workshop for the first time. The Spring 2016 iteration of the workshop was titled: “Shaping the Void. Ideas and proposals for the urban retraining of Piazza del Carmine.” The students (who worked for one week in groups of fives) came from the following institutions: 15 from the Marywood University School of Architecture, under the guidance of Prof. Franco Pisani (ISI Florence); 10 from TU Delft, under the guidance of Prof. Marie Therese van Thoor and Prof. Wouter Willers; 19 from the Laboratorio di Progettazione III (DidA) led by Prof. Stefano Lambardi.

 

Kindly assisted by a team of Italian architects (Simone Barbi, Alberto Becherini, Andrea Borghi, Stefano Corazzini, and Giulia Giuntini), faculties from these three schools worked with the students to develop nine different designs for a new layout of the Piazza del Carmine. To work on their projects, students visited not only this site but other Florentine piazzas as well. Also, at 6:00 pm on each day of the workshop they attended a lecture by one of the professors involved in this program.

 

All of the students’ projects for the retraining of Piazza del Carmine are now collected in “Il Quaderno. The ISI Florence Architectural Journal.” This first issue also features short articles on the 2016 Spring Semester workshop written by Stefano U. Baldassarri (Director, ISI Florence), Simone Barbi (Università di Venezia), Stefano Corazzini (ISI Florence), Stefano Lambardi (Università di Firenze), Giulia Giuntini (Università di Firenze), and the general editor of this new journal Arch. Franco Pisani (ISI Florence).