Project FEA(S)T

Furthering Experimental Architectures, Strategies and Technologies

Studio Colletti operates at the crossroads of experimental architectural design, innovative building technologies, and contemporary digital and postdigital culture. Project FEA(S)T endeavours to further design strategies and fabrication technologies that promote architecture as a feat – an achievement that requires great courage, skill, and strength – developed and delivered by a team or an individual, and as a feast – beautiful and enjoyable to experience – for the community and the public. Three research agendas lie at the core of our mission statement, embedding old, current and future paradigms within a longer history of architectural design and theory, art and science, technology and philosophy:

1. Digital Poetics and Digital Production (understanding the past): We have lost the ‘r’. The digital revolution is something of the past, but we still believe in digital evolution. Based on two-and-a-half decades of Colletti’s research into digital poetics, the studio explores how established digital thinking can advance the way we design and deliver more intelligent and eco-friendly building. References to past and present cultural phenomena complement a plethora of applied and experimental teaching methodologies. Students and research associates thereby acquire the skills to on the one hand critically reflect on their own production and the on-going discourse in architecture (technologies, aesthetics and environments), and on the other hand to gain a career advantage in leading architectural practices.

2. Postdigital and Neobaroque Practices (probing the present): We are gaining the ‘post’ and the ‘neo’. The challenges of understanding postdigital thinking as a continuation of the digital, and not its rejection, is paramount to the studio´s teaching and research. With a simultaneous interest in the neobaroque Zeitgeist, we investigate architecture as a contemporary cultural practice. We mentor students and research associate how to encompass software and hardware advances in simulation and visualisation, VR and AR, in tandem with bespoke natural and artificial materials and industrial robotic fabrication and in conjunction with often overlooked analogue crafts, to awaken their accountability towards the common good of society and to develop their individuality and originality.

3. Hybrid and Transdiciplinary Enviroments (envisaging the future): We shall ‘trans’form. Architecture carries a huge responsibility in reprogramming the built and the natural habitat. But it must evolve beyond its disciplinary canons and dogmas to respond to the acute problems and challenges of ecology, economy and sustainability. We work transdisciplinarily to prepare for the hyper-hybridity of the 4th Industrial Revolution, help provide adaptive and novel solutions in terms of form, program, materiality, energy, cities and environments, and shape a more inclusive and participatory world, where design and beauty matter. Our students and research associates are mentored in how architecture is interfaced between technology and nature, and how transscalar it is, from micro (materiality, biotechnologies) to meso (prototypes, buildings) to macro (understanding cities, landscapes and ecosystems of Alpine and urban territories but not only).