The Final Synthesis Laboratory in Architectural Design, during the bachelor of Scienze dell’Architettura, is developing since some years didactical experimentations carrying out the architectural design included in a more complex urban ambit.
The urban design and its various theories, for architecture undergraduates, generally remains unexplored, unless with the exception of sporadic forays on individual teachers initiative.
The opportunity to introduce students to the urban design theories occurred during this laboratory, particularly suitable to use the project as a tool for understanding urban features.
From one hand the urban design is seen as part of a connecting element between plan and architectural design, the place where “the scales mix and where the architect acquires a reasonable authority on the city shape”. On the other hand, as the disciplinary literature makes clear, this theme operation uses the proper tools of the urban analysis and acquires a normative nature for the architectural project. The normative nature that the urban project expresses, is somehow inherent to its constitution. It is in fact born from the knowledge of the settlement principles of a given site and interprets the transformation rules, establishing at the same time new settlement rules.
The choice has been that of summarising the two instances as much as possible in order to make students aware that the architecture project always draws its compositive principles from the context study. If the context is a city with all its world of contradictions, is important to use codified disciplinary tools typical of the urban analysis. We will start from the historical stratification mapping, then the morphological-type analysis, to get to the definition of the project themes so to have a clear and distinguished idea of the complexity in order to be able to make the right choices which will guide the architecture project.

Theme
It will be a study area located in the urban area of the consolidated city, in which you specify the themes of the project, based on the reading of a urban area, conducted by the teachers and communicated to the students at the beginning of the course. The themes will be defined at the scale of the architectural project, to be drawn up according to the rules drawn from the reading and the urban functional program offered by the courses.

Articulation of lessons
The course is divided into: lectures held by the teachers, lectures by guest lecturers, laboratory dedicated to the development of the project.
The guest teachers will be selected from among those who have studied, even from different angles and disciplinary points of view, the theme of the project. The events dedicated to the work on the project is planned the simultaneous presence in the classroom of some of the lecturers involved, so that, the Laboratory remains the place of confrontation and enrichment.
It is expected a jury intermediate during which the students will present their projects to the committee, consisting of the teachers of the Laboratory, with the involvement of the other teachers of the department and/or external guests, so you can check the progress of the everybody's work and to share reflections and arrangements.
A key objective of the Laboratory is what all the students (who are required to attend mandatory and compliance with the intermediate deliveries) pass the examination at the end of the course in one sitting and collective before the committee/jury consists of all the teachers of the course.

Supplementary teaching
Supplementary teaching is in the form of Technology of Architecture Workshop, held by prof. Marina Rigillo. The presence of this discipline is strategic because it allows students to simulate a concrete experience of design that includes issues related to the construction and choice of technological components. The teacher of the module will hold a series of lectures and follow all groups of students.

Documents required
The documents to be drawn up for the exam will consist of: A1 drawing that illustrate and document the choices at the urban scale, model 1:500 of the study area ; A1 drawing that describe the architectural project in a timely manner defined in scale 1:200, 1 model 1: 200 single building; A1 drawing to illustrate the details, referred by choices made in relation to the teaching of technology of architecture.