Ecoparadigm: Towards ecological transition through education, research and design at the University of Trento

In the social, climatic and ecological emergency the world faces, it is essential to support a profound restructuring of how research and teaching of design disciplines are proposed. Architecture can prove to be a resilient discipline - despite the decrease, especially in Italy, in the number of students enrolled in university courses that teach it - by exploring and experimenting with design devices for adapting to and mitigating the social and environmental crises that are affecting people and their habitats. The crises we are about to face represent the significant challenges of humanity, but, at the same time, they may prove to be opportunities to increase the relevance of teaching to both professional practice and experimental research. Investigating the opportunities for architectural, urban and landscape design in the context of significant environmental changes is a compulsory and innovative choice, even if these are issues hitherto been considered extraneous or supplementary to the disciplines of design. This is essential and strategic research because either architecture proves to be a resilient discipline - even when school enrollments are decreasing in most of the western world and especially in Italy - and finds a decisive, sustainable and convenient role in improving the conditions of contemporary living, or it will not be able to stop its decline in the presumption of the superfluous. We live in a historical phase that calls for new paradigms and a new design idea for physical space. This is a challenge for architecture. In enhancing the existing will have to use conceptual devices capable of operating simultaneously on the slippage of meaning and the new life cycles of living spaces. A challenge that considers the context as a project, the landscape as ecological infrastructure, and the city’s future as a collective project and not just an authorial one. The ecoparadigm cluster (1) of the University of Trento develops these themes by carrying out real design experiences at different scales both in research and teaching to explore the decisive, sustainable and convenient role of the architect-designer for the improvement of contemporary urban life and to try to teach something beneficial to future professionals and scholars.