| PRESENTS

PhD Yearbook | 2011

The 2011 PhD YearBook contains a short description

of the PhD programmes at Politecnico di Milano and

an abstract of each of the PhD theses defended and

awarded this year.

Within School of Doctoral Programmes of Politecnico

di Milano (www.polimi.it/phd), high-quality

programmes in engineering, architecture, and design

offer the possibility of studying and performing

research in qualified laboratories and research groups.

Therefore, the description of the research work at

PhD level provides a broad overview of research being

developed at Politecnico di Milano and in particular

of the original contributions developed by PhD

candidates, who, with their strenuous and dedicated

work contribute to the advancement of knowledge in

their research areas.

In presenting this book, I would like to congratulate

the 2011 Doctors for their achievements and I wish

them all the best for their future professional life as

researchers and innovators both in academic and in

other organizations and companies.

Director of the PhD School:Prof. Barbara Pernici

RADIATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY | ROTARY WING AIRCRAFT | SANITARY - ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING | STRUCTURAL SEISMIC ANDGEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING | TECHNOLOGYAND DESIGN FOR ENVIRONMENT ANDBUILDING | TECHNOLOGY AND DESIGN FOR ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY IN BUILDINGS AND URBAN CONTEXT | TERRITORIAL DESIGN AND GOVERNMENT | URBAN AND ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN | WATER ENGINEERING | AEROSPACE ENGINEERING | ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION | ARCHITECTURE, URBAN DESIGN, CONSERVATION OF HOUSING AND LANDSCAPE | BIOENGINEERING | BUILDING ENGINEERING | DESIGN AND PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT METHODS | DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGIES FOR CULTURAL HERITAGES | ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING | ENERGY | GEOMATICS AND INFRASTRUCTURES | INDUSTRIAL CHEMISTRY AND CHEMICAL ENGINEERING | INDUSTRIAL DESIGN AND MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATION | INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY | INTERIOR DESIGN | MANAGEMENT, ECONOMICS AND INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING | MANUFACTURING AND PRODUCTION SYSTEMS | MATERIALS ENGINEERING | MATHEMATICAL MODELS AND METHODS IN ENGINEERING | MECHANICAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING | PHYSICS | PRESERVATION OF ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE PhD Yearbook | 2011

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Chair:Prof. Daniele Vitale

DOCTORAL PROGRAM IN ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION

The doctoral program is understood as advanced learning, rooted in the history of the architect’s craft, of the profession and of the wealth of architectural techniques. The objective is to train architects who are capable professionals from a general point of view, with solid historical/humanistic training and a strong theoretical base, but who also have extensive knowledge of town planning and construction techniques and who are able to carry out architectural design. The training consists of the imparting of organised contents, the sharing of research, and participation in cultural debate. As is the case in the other arts, composition is understood as an ensemble of conceptual and technical fundamentals that precede the design project and to which it refers. The faculty is composed of professors in the field of architectural composition, history of architecture, restoration and construction.

Contents The course is based on a meeting between members of the teaching staff and external professionals from among those at the forefront of international debate. This dialectic serves as a reference and as a source for research. The course is divided into integrated phases.The first phase consists of a redefinition of positions and responsibilities with respect to transformation of the territory and to evolution in the profession, in which the doctoral candidate is required to participate through research and contributions. It consists, in addition to participation in optional Polytechnic courses and in addition to a two-semester seminar in architectural design, of two specific courses given by several lecturers during two semesters («Architectural History and Design» and «Criticism and architectural theories»). The second phase consists of a more specific, in-depth undertaking and deals with the problems of composition in relationship to architectural design, on one hand through two courses («Figures of architecture and forms of construction» and «Conservation and design»), and on the other hand by means of a second architectural design seminar. These courses will also involve several lecturers and are divided into two semesters.The third phase consists of increased involvement of the doctoral candidates in more specific research and themes, ranging from the theoretical debate in Europe and in Italy to the question of the old/new relationship, to the question of settlement- and founded-city structures, to research into the cultural and figurative identities of

landscapes and architectural expression. The second and third phase involve training experience abroad, with participation in seminars and research with which the doctoral candidate is establishing relationships.

Doctoral thesis Maximum importance is given to the doctoral thesis. It constitutes the core and the conclusion of the doctoral candidate’s study and is attributed a very large number of credits. The theme and the formulation must be defined before the end

of the first semester, in consultation with the supervisor. During the following five semesters, the thesis is developed as other studies are carried out, taking on a progressively more important role. The thesis is understood as research and must be characterised by cultural and scientific originality. It may or may not have a design aspect. The doctoral candidate is required to report regularly on the progress of the thesis and to attend open sessions, held in the presence of the teaching staff and the other doctoral candidates, at which the thesis is discussed.

DOCTORAL PROGRAM BOARD

Marco Biraghi Marco Dezzi Bardeschi Attilio Pracchi

Salvatore Bisogni Carolina Di Biase Marco Prusicki

Pellegrino Bonaretti Mario Fosso Gianpaolo Semino

Enrico Bordogna Alberto Franchi Angelo Torricelli

Giovanni Cislaghi Jacques Gubler Daniele Vitale

Adalberto Del Bo Vincenzo Petrini Stanislaus von Moos

ADVISORY BOARD

Klaus Theo Brenner (Architectural School of Postdam, Berlin)

Maria Patrizia Grieco (Italtel)

Jean-Louis Cohen (Université de Paris) Rafael Moneo (Graduate School of Design, Harvard University)

Elio Franzini (Università Statale di Milano) Carlo Olmo (I Facoltà di Architettura, Politecnico di Torino)

Paolo Gavazzi (Banco di Desio e della Brianza) Boris Podrecca (Fakultät für Architektur, Stuttgart)

Franz Graf (Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, Università della Svizzera italiana)

Bruno Reichlin (Università della Svizzera Italiana, Mendrisio)

SCHOLARSHIP SPONSORS

EuroMilano S.p.A. - via Eritrea, 48/8 - 20157 Milano

New agreements and protocols are going to be made with other enterprises

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The Jewish colonisation of Palestine at the end of the 19th century and afterwards with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 is a central event of modern history as well as a source of ongoing friction in world politics. Among other things, it involved the most ambitious and conscious attempt to formulate a positive response to the Jewish migrations of modern times. Turning its back on Europe, Zionism offered a self-emancipation project which was at once a social project and a settlement project. In the Zionist “grand narrative”, the construction of a new landscape was coextensive with the nation-building process; and so this landscape of emancipation and of conquest is riddled with paradoxical features whose ambivalences demand to be recognized: the values of liberation and land-grab coexisted under the nationalist banner like two opposing Messianic fires: the universal claims of world revolution and the exceptionalist character of Zionist redemption.

Our question now is how to resolve the ambiguities implicit in the overlaps between modern architecture and the process of nation-building which characterised the Modernist project in such a context?

The thesis is organized in three parts. Part 1 begins with the historical roots of the great Jewish migrations and the spread of “agrarianism” in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. It introduces some other campaigns for rural colonisation – alternatives to Palestine, promoted by European governments or Jewish philanthropic organisations based in Europe and America – in Tsarist Russia, Argentina, North Africa and the Soviet Union.

Part 2 reviews the experience of rural colonisation in what was first Ottoman and then British-mandated Palestine, concentrating on the contributions made by several generations of agronomists, sociologists, architects and planners to the emerging features and forms of the agricultural village: for that topos was assigned primary importance in the rebuilding of new individual and collective identities. This part examines in depth the invention of the kibbutz (collectivist village) and the moshav (cooperative village) through the work of the architect Richard Kauffmann (1887-1958). This was a balancing-point between two traditions: the experience of the German Garden City movement and the European tradition of

Axel Fisher

ARCHITECTURE AND RURAL SETTLEMENT DESIGN IN THE JEwISH COLONISATION Of PALESTINE UNDER THE BRITISH MANDATE

rural colonisation aimed at land reclamation and improvement.

Part 3 considers two critical moments in the definition of the Zionist “Nation Space”. Its first chapter is a reconsideration of the Zionist rural villages designed by Kauffmann in the 1920s, placing them on the map together with other coeval projects by the same architect for the Haifa Bay and the agrocity of Afula. The comparison reveals an early experiment in pre-state regional planning; a new system of settlements hierarchically organised and functionally integrated along ancient trade routes and new transport infrastructure in the Jezreel Valley, an expression on the territorial scale of the attempt to give a new destiny to the future Jewish nation in the regional context of the Middle East. During this period architectural design and town planning both played their parts in the construction of a truly voluntary geography. Term is borrowed from French “géographie volontaire” in the sense of intentional and not of free-willing, laying the foundations for the conquest of new economic and geopolitical roles, founded on agriculture and setting up original and structural relationships with history,

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successes and failures within the paradoxes and historic ambiguities of these projects, including some that involved “roads not taken”.

This makes it possible to recover the truly original content of Jewish rural colonisation: the search for alternatives to the European industrial city, the involvement of the natural landscape and vegetation in architectural composition, the role played by typological articulation and by figuration in defining collective identities, and the importance of considering architecture in relation to the broader “geographic setting” on a national scale.

geography and nature.Part 3’s second chapter – the last in the thesis – shows how the 1930s were for the Zionist project a period of closing in on itself: in the dominant ideology, the figurative arts, settlement strategies and in architecture we see a gradual abandonment of radical aims to “return to the soil” in favour of the “cult of the nation”. The autonomy and self-sufficiency of the future Jewish nation is asserted, and even the use of force is called into play.

The comparison between these settlement projects shows the role played by architecture – as a means of symbolic and collective representation, and as an instrument for the organisation of new patterns of activity and social behaviour – and enables us to distinguish various possibilities,

2. Forms of rural micropolycentrism: plan of the Eastern Kishon block, including moshav Kfar Yehoshua, kibbutz Ramat David, kibbutz Sarid, Kibbutz Gvat, moshav Kfar Baruch, Agricultural experimental station, 1927

1. Richard Kauffmann, Bird’ s eye view of a co-operative agricultural village: moshav Nahalal, 1921

3. Richard Kauffmann (drawing by Kurt Reinsch), View of the planned “City at the heart of the Valley” in the Jezreel Valley, 1925

Milan, September 2011

Thanks to:Scuola di Dottorato di Ricerca Chairs and Secretaries of the Doctoral ProgramsThe Doctors of the Graduating Class of 2011

Graphic design and layout:Bottega dei segniwww.bottegadeisegni.it

Printed by:Arti Grafiche Fiorinwww.agfiorin.it

For further information:www.polimi.it/phddottorato.ricerca@polimi.it