For over twenty years Villard has been not only a travelling seminar of architectural design but a mobile laboratory and a critical observatory of the transformations of the European landscape. Its approach is based on travel as a form of knowledge, the intertwining of knowledge and immersion into territories, chosen each year for their strategic, political or cultural relevance. Marco D’Annuntiis, Full Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the University of Camerino and scientific coordinator of the project, explains, underlining how “travel is the first step of design, used not only to produce solutions but also trigger questions.” And it is precisely this tension between observation and suggestion, pedagogy and commitment, that the work of the Villard lies, presented at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition at the Biennale in Venice: A.M.A.R.E. – Atlante delle Migrazioni. Attraversamenti e Radicamenti Europei.
The research, carried out by twelve Italian architecture schools, starts from an assumption that it as simple as it is radical: migration is not a parenthesis, but a structural driver of urban and territorial transformation. Crossing a border, settling in a new place, building relations and living practices: every human movement redefines space, it stratifies and leads it into crisis. And it is precisely in this crisis that architecture is called on to intervene. A.M.A.R.E. is a multi-scale, hypertextual, three-dimensional atlas and above all a large system of meaning. It maps the coasts, landing and sorting points, infrastructures, liminal spaces, sea and land routes followed by incoming human flows and the movements in the continent, the physical and symbolic walls being built in Europe, analysed in their spatial and political dimensions. It reads the landscapes of migration not only as areas of emergency but as generative spaces: places where new identities, economies, forms of living are sedimented.
The project considers migration as both crossing and taking root: not simply escapes but also presences that transform space, redefining bonds and generating new forms of co-existence. Far from an abstract representation, the Atlas offers a concrete and stratified reading of the contemporary geographies of migration, in which every piece evokes the many screens that cut and break down the European continent into the migrants’ itineraries. Every map fragment is also an opportunity for design, as Marco D’Annuntiis writes: “The migratory phenomenon is a design enzyme. It is inside the city, it changes its rhythms, revealing contradictions and suggesting future scenarios”.
One example are the prior experiences in the field that were fed into the atlas. In Pozzallo (Ragusa) – a place of emergency “par excellence” –, Villard worked with the local administration to imagine hospitality spaces that could also work on urban regeneration. In Naples, a multi-ethnic city by vocation, new urban centres emerging from the widespread presence of migrant communities were investigated, focusing on hybrid architecture and forms of spontaneous cohabitation. In Palermo, the project focused on the city stadium, thinking of the collective space as a symbolic arena for new civil narrations. But one of the most emblematic cases is the Hotel House in Porto Recanati (Macerata), explored in the projects Casa Mondo and Challenge 2.0. Built as a tourist residence in the Seventies, over time the building has become a multi-ethnic social condenser, often stigmatised as a dilapidated “non-place”. The research coordinated by the University of Camerino produced a more complex image: not a ghetto to be demolished but a living, stratified body to be regenerated through analyses, design and participatory governance.
“Our viewpoint is not ideological nor sociological,” D’Annuntiis explains. It is architectural. We are interested in the spatial response to change, the form that cohabitation takes on.” It is in this perspective that the metaphor of the Urban Salad Bowl is defined: a city made of different ingredients, each with its own identity and qualities, but which co-exist in an open and fertile whole, enhancing its potential. An alternative vision to the overused melting pot metaphor, and more respectful of differences, more attentive to the relational dimension of the urban space.
Today, while the Mediterranean remains an open wound and a disputed border, the A.M.A.R.E. Atlas sets out to be a tool for both reading and design. A united attempt to build a grammar of the migrant landscape, where architecture does not respond to the crisis with walls and barriers but with connections, openings and devices for listening.
