The Ecology of Coexistence in Groundscapes

The adoption of the Architectural Ethnographic approach suggests first of all a confrontation with the experience of architecture, the necessity of an immersion in the everydayness of places. The starting point is “all that has happened after a project has been finalised”, it is the “learning from practice”, it is “exploration that drives thinking”. Design becomes a question to investigate the inclusivity of groundscapes, the potential of their resources and systems, and constitutes an occasion to formulate other questions to be addressed to other related disciplines. Basing the research on the effectiveness of sited projects (their life, their “relation between construction and occupation”), the process traces major implications, not necessarily universal or absolute, and possibly reiterates the site-specificity and relativity of space.

The analysis of the design aspects of projects (the concept phase, the physical production and the consequent transformations), from a Typo-Morphological perspective, comes to be the tool to test the relation between architecture and everyday practices, representing the mediation between architecture and ethnography. In this sense, architectural transcriptions (through drawings, models, photographs, video) constitutes a shared tool between the two disciplines, offering an occasion of debate and experimentation with different audiences (scholars, students and inhabitants). It helps as well to build a platform to communicate with various publics, unlocking transversal levels of research.