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The program of talks at the second Cortina Design Weekend opened with Dialogues, presented by Dolomiti Contemporanee, an organization that works to identify and restore neglected and abandoned sites in the Dolomites. Founded in 2011 by current director Gianluca D’Incà Levis, Dolomiti Contemporanee breathes new life into sites that have lost their original identity by building collaborative networks of local stakeholders, including government authorities.
It was this idea of collaboration, teamwork, and establishing relationships that shaped the session. Formation environments is a term borrowed from geology that describes the set of conditions in a location that lead to the formation of a particular geological formation. The organizers used the term as a metaphor for everything that triggers imagination, including education, a person’s overall outlook, or even a workgroup. The session also aimed to make people reflect on Edoardo Gellner’s concept of landscape, that is, as a union between the natural environment and human actions within it.
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Discussing the question of building relationships were Simone Sfriso, cofounder of TAMassociati; Daniele Lago, CEO and head of design with LAGO; and Massimo Barbierato, founder of Massimo Barbierato Studio.
The conversation focused on the value of design, beauty, and ethics, and the role of architects and designers in today’s world. Architect Sfriso highlighted how the future has become a place of great uncertainty, and this demands that we make significant changes. Quoting Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, he argued that it’s no longer a place of “magnificent and progressive destinies,” but a place that will involve major shifts and the undermining of the patterns on which we’ve based our previous actions for progress.
Daniele Lago, referring to Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquidity, sees design as a complete system, in which everything – matter, nature, humans, technology – interacts and is in union. This is the key to synergistic growth and being able to face the contemporary world with a view to progress.
Massimo Barbierato also focused on collaboration, pointing out that it arises from awareness of one’s own fragility, which undermines the sense of project and design. Drawing on his teaching experience at IUAV Venice and University of San Marino, the architect proposed new teaching models that, instead of reaffirming beliefs, challenge them. Architects shouldn’t be focusing on humans, according to the typical humancentric approach, but on a project’s entire ecosystem. The new Renaissance is about every living thing’s relationship with nature, itself, animals, and the cosmos. Stones, plants, microbes, adults, and children therefore all occupy the same horizontal line and are all at the same level.
The creation of relationships between everything and everyone should therefore be what architects strive for. Dolomiti Contemporanee, whose work is all about regenerating sites through a dense network of relationships, shares this vision.
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Photography by Teresa De Toni and Chiara Beretta, courtesy of Cortina for Us
