THE EDUCATIONAL ROLE OF LEARNING SPACES FOR SCHOOLS OF ARCHITECTURE. THE CAMPUS BONARDI RENOVATION EXPERIENCE AT POLITECNICO DI MILANO

In recent years the School of Architecture Campus of Politecnico di Milano has undergone a significant renovation, based on an original concept by Renzo Piano. The process has involved the demolition of buildings constructed over the last 30 years to respond to the growing demand of classrooms and educational spaces triggered by the increased number of the enrolled students, the construction of new facilities, and the requalification and greening of the open spaces to be used as outdoor learning environments, enhancing the presence of the Modernist wings designed by Gio Ponti in the Fifties and Vittoriano Viganò in the Seventies. This long-lasting construction site adjacent and visible by the simultaneously lived in educational and research spaces, offered the opportunity to organize special seminars during different steps of the works development, to explain the design process with a special focus on detailed architectural design and the relationship with the building process, having the campus renovation as the main case study. Lectures were thus given by the architects and engineers in charge for the design and the construction supervision, held in the site hut with a direct view on the building site, followed by in field visits to see and touch the different activities carried out. The lectures and visits were recorded and are now part of a diverse range of materials to be used for the design of a MOOC aimed at transferring the problems, issues, and the procedures of the construction process from detailed design to the building site activities. The paper has the aim of reporting the definition of the goals and the methodology especially conceived for the MOOC organization and structuring, which involved the integration of the seminars recordings with, on the one hand, a set of new lectures recordings given by the School academics, focused on selected specific topics, and on the other hand, with the real project drawings and bidding documents as well as with the time lapse shooting of the construction site development, and the creation of bespoke tests and evaluation activities. Finally, the paper draws conclusions on the use and potentials of online tools and instruments in order to draw students to the direct experience of construction, a fundamental understanding for learning architectural design.