Lecture #1

“The Art and Politics of the Plan"

Tuesday, March 28, 9:30 - 11:30, Aula Magna Pacinotti - Polo A. 

The first lecture in the series by professor Joseph Bedford, “The Art and Politics of the Plan,” will address architecture’s status as an art versus as a service profession and will argue that, as an art, architecture contributes to culture more broadly. While as art, architecture might appear more distant from politics, the lecture will argue that the possibility of reflecting on form and the political ideas that form can contain, especially, in the planometric dimensions of form, architecture can constitute a politics of another kind, one rooted in traditions of intellectual and artistic critique. To illustrate this argument the lecture will offer an analysis of three phases in the recent history of the form of architectural plans, from the postmodern to the neomodern to the neopostmodern, as well as three case studies that illustrate each phase, of John Hejduk, SANAA and Sean Canty. 

Lecture #2

“The Art and Politics of the House"

Wednesday, March 29, 14:30 - 15:30, Polo Le Benedettine 

Professor Bedford’s second lecture, “The Art and Politics of the House,” will offer a specific account of the politics of the plan as it is related to the program of domestic architecture. Through a reading of the architectural theorist Robin Evans, and the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, the lecture will explain how the house today is a site of alienation, and as a result a site of greater social and political significance, with psychological and environmental implications. By exploring a wide range of examples in both art and architecture, the lecture will offer a set of strategies by which the conditions of alienation in the contemporary house can be challenged, and how a critical intellectual form of artistic critique in architecture can be advanced today. It will conclude with a critique of Pier Vittorio Aureli’s conception of politics and form, and suggest an alternative account in which intermediary scale of formal composition can play an active role in this critical intellectual project.

Lecture #3

“A Catalogue of Plan Types”

Thursday, March 30, 8:30 - 9:30 am, PN9 - Polo Porta Nuova

Professor Bedford’s third lecture, “A Catalogue of Plan Types,” which will be a shorter lecture given in the context of his studio design workshop with students in the school, will explore a number of contemporary plan forms today and will argue that in these plans, a set of common compositional strategies can clearly be detected. It will, on the one hand, describe what the political implications of these strategies might be, yet on the other hand, will problematize the question of how architects today might use them, and how the very act of typologically categorizing form in this way, which is evermore common as a result of the internet, makes it increasingly difficult to develop the kind of authored work which critical intellectual architecture requires. 

Lecture #4

“Concerning One Possible Set of Strategies for Diagrammatic Plans that might Challenge the Norms of Privacy in Domestic Architecture” 

Friday March 31, 15:45 - 16.30, Polo Le Benedettine

Professor Bedford’s final lecture, “Concerning One Possible Set of Strategies for Diagrammatic Plans that might Challenge the Norms of Privacy in Domestic Architecture,” which will also be a shorter lecture given in the context of his design studio workshop, will conclude his series by offering a brief glimpse of a body of his own in-progress design work to develop a plan-based critical formal project on domestic architecture.

Lina Malfona

Lucia Giorgetti

Andrea Crudeli

Cecilia Marcheschi

Lina Malfona

Luca Lanini

Valerio Cutini

Marco Giorgio Bevilacqua

Renato Iannelli

Elisa Dainese

Luben Dimcheff

Alicia Imperiale