Academy of Architecture, USI
2018-2019 Bachelor II design studio
Visiting professor: Martino Pedrozzi
Assistants: Matthew Bailey, Lukas Hüsser, Valentina Merz
(...) The abandonment of the alpine pastures in the Malvaglia Valley since the 1950s has not only had an impact on the built heritage on which the students worked in the previous semesters. The landscape itself, also due to climate change, has undergone a continuous transformation characterised by the advance of the forest over the clearings (...).
The atelier work is part of this context: we will go to the Sceru alp, where we will begin a work of landscape restoration by removing the vegetation, consisting mainly of larch trees, developed during the last half century. The wood obtained will be partly taken to the valley, processed in the sawmill and used to make a raft collectively. The aim of the work is twofold: on the one hand to transform the landscape of Sceru, restoring its anthropized character, and on the other hand to offer the students the possibility to follow personally all the steps of the realization of a wooden artefact, from the extraction of the raw material, to its processing, up to the construction in scale one-to-one (...)
