Intentions. This semester Architecture & Experience extends the area of investigation to the Tuscan region to look into the inherent qualities of holiday housing under the angle of climate and context considerations.
Typologies. The studio will approach the subject of living through the angle of holidays, researching and defining an inventory for holiday living typologies. Holiday housing is imagined as a collective cluster for temporary staying in which the surrounding ecosystem plays an essential role. As a matter of fact, context, in holiday housing, becomes the reason for being there and as such is an essential part of design.
Holiday housing differs essentially from standard housing by the fact of being conceived for specific seasons and shorter temporalities; for that reason it addresses a specific climate redefining the limits between inside and outside.
Holiday housing is about habitats, and not about rooms, apartments or houses: the conventions of living are questioned to their very limits.

Holiday. The studio explores architecture within the subjects of tourism, of travel, of discovery, of free time. The world-spread and long lasting popularity of Tuscany demands to redefine the limits of what’s possible in terms of energy and resources consumption and to understand how we can still build today’s spaces for the free time.
Through this studio we investigate the conditions that make it possible to still build today, within the landscape, by bringing attention to ecosystems, environment, resources, climate and energy.

Sites. Six areas of intervention are taken as fragments on the Tuscan territory going from the Appennins to the Tyrrhenian coastline - crossing agriculture, cultural sites, infrastructures and the city. Those six sites exist as unique conditions but are mainly considered as samples for an approach on the entire region. This simplification, by type of ecosystem, allows us to question and measure the impact of holidays on à broader level, on à larger territory.

Holiday house. A hut, a tent, à shelter, à terrace, à piece of land. This is often enough for living our free time. Private holiday houses are most of the time spaces of freedom and experimentation, able to redefine ways of living, foster relations to the context, question the conventions with material, expression and space, in the best cases with very little means.
Twelve holiday houses have been selected as ancestors for the projects to come. They come each one with their own attitude, theoretical universe, idea of space, material and context and suggest possible ways of living. These qualities can be observed, appropriated and transposed into a larger cluster of living units, beyond standard. The holiday house, in a process of back and forth, will be taken as design material. The qualities of an individual house are that way superimposed to collective units, without luxury, with simple means.

Climate and context. Rural architecture exists by necessity. Because of that it is built with an economy of means. It is constructed with local resources, the closer by, the more available. Its simplicity and directness has shaped landscapes and territories through time.
Rural form, expression and tectonics are pragmatic, they come as a solution for minimum protection, looking for a repair from seasons, weather conditions, humidity, and sun. This traditional knowledge gives place to a rich vocabulary made of volts, conic roofs, outdoor stairs and loggias, wooden structures, ventilated stone walls..
Beyond the vernacular form, we would like to take the opportunity to dig into rural architecture, learn from its intelligence to make a renewed inventory of elements for protection.
Rural architecture could be seen in this way as our archetype for an architecture of the climate