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XXVIII Monte Carasso International Architectural Design Seminar

XXVIII International Design Seminar Monte Carasso 3rd – 16th July 2021

Founder: Luigi Snozzi

Lecturers: Mario Ferrari / Michele Gaggetta / Giacomo Guidotti / Stefano Moor

Guest speakers: Manuel Aires Mateus / Mario Botta / Pierre-Alain Croset / Christian Gilot / Jacques Gubler / Nicola Navone / Werner Oechslin

For twenty-eight years the Monte Carasso International Design Seminar has been an integral part of the planning process initiated by Luigi Snozzi in 1979 for the municipality of the same name, now a district of Bellinzona.

The recent death of Luigi Snozzi, founder and director of the Seminar, provoked an immediate desire and need to give continuity to this experience, a precious cultural legacy. We could not do otherwise, and this is what he would have wanted. This will be a very special and emotionally charged edition in which events will be held to commemorate and pay tribute to the figure of the Master, who has always been the true soul of the Seminary.

In the past, the participants have investigatedtopics of interest for the development of Monte Carasso, while for the past eight editions the Seminar has dealt with a wider area, tackling a highly topical issue: the aggregation of the municipalities of Bellinzona, which took place in 2017. The aim is to raise public and political awareness in order to promote a territorial reorganisation that is attentive to the whole and, at the same time, respectful of the individualities, so that aggregation does not become a simple political-administrative act. It is hoped that the process of aggregating the new Bellinzona will invest sufficient economic, political and social resources in this region to promote shared and aggregated spatial planning. This planning should (re)focus on the spatial issues of architecture. The city is waiting and deserves change.

After the first drafting in 2013 of a master plan with the statement of the fundamental principles that govern it, from year to year the Seminar investigates specific strategic areas of the district, verifying and if necessary modifying the hypotheses that compose it: assuming the mountains, true "vertical parks", as transversal limits of the city; recognising the river park as the central spine that structures, in its autonomy, the entire region; setting clear limits to the longitudinal development of the city to counteract the unlimited occupation of the valley; within the city, balancing voids and solids in the densification process; introducing urban spaces oriented in the narrow sense of the valley to allow the city to live also in the transversal dimension and no longer only in the longitudinal one. From 2014 to 2020, various themes with different public and private contents have been studied: the delimitation of the north and south gates of the city, the redevelopment of some neighbourhoods, the reorganisation of the city centre from Viale Stefano Franscini to Viale Giuseppe Motta, the redefinition of the spaces along the railway axis, the design of one of the interventions for the renaturation of the Ticino River underway.

The desire to develop a theme in the New Bellinzona area has been confirmed once again this year. The intention is to work on the Pratocarasso district, in the northern part of the city, looking both at the confluence of the Gorduno and Arbedo dejection cones and at the relations with the Ticino River and the piedmont landscape characterised by the railway infrastructure. The seminar will take the form of a design workshop and will be supervised by the teachers with the contribution of architects and external experts. At the end of the Seminar the teaching staff, with the help of the invited guests Manuel Aires Mateus and Mario Botta, will discuss the projects developed by the participants in a final public critique.

During the Seminar, emerging professionals give in-house guest lectures, while it is an established tradition during the second week to propose a prominent public lecture with the participation of significant architects who, through their work, participate in the Seminar's spirit of research and resistance. In previous editions, architects Michele Arnaboldi, Raffaele Cavadini, Pierre-Alain Croset, Aurelio Galfetti, Mario Botta, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Livio Vacchini, Esteve Bonell, Gonçalo Byrne, Bernard Huet, Alvaro Siza, Roberto Masiero, Francesco Venezia, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Silvia Gmür, Henri Ciriani have been invited, Pierre Fauroux, Guillermo Vasquez Consuegra, Angelo Bucci, Vittorio Gregotti, Marco Ortalli, Manuel Aires Mateus, João Luis Carrilho da Graça, José María Sánchez García, Gloria Cabral (Gabinete de Arquitectura), José Ignacio Linazasoro, Jan and Pascale Richter, historian Alessandro Fonti and photographer Gabriele Basilico.

This year, for the final public lecture, the Seminar has the honour of welcoming back the Portuguese architect Manuel Aires Mateus. The conference will take place in the evening of Thursday 15 July 2021 and will be held outdoors in the evocative setting of the old Augustinian convent.

Programme of public events

Saturday, 3rd July 2021, 3 p.m.

Commemoration Luigi Snozzi

Saturday, 10th July 2021, 10.00 a.m.

Tribute to Luigi Snozzi

Pierre-Alain Croset / Christian Gilot / Jacques Gubler / Nicola Navone / Werner Oechslin

Thursday 15th July 2021, 9 pm

Manuel Aires Mateus Lecture

Friday 16 July 2021, 10.00 a.m.

Final project critique

Manuel Aires Mateus / Mario Botta

Enrolment conditions