student spotlight

• Student: Giorgio Ponzo
• Director of Studies: Dr Doreen Bernath
• Second Supervisor: Dr Mohamad Hafeda
• External Advisor: Dr Teresa Stoppani

The research looks for definitions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘work’ and their relation to life experience through the account of the author’s experience — both as architect (in training, as student, at work, as designer and scholar) and as ordinary man — of a series of architectural works (realized buildings, projects, books, exhibitions, citiescapes, etc.). Using the methodology of an autobiographical narrative, the research aims to challenge the conventional disciplinary boundaries of architectural knowledge construction, looking at architectural history and theory through the lens of life experience, and at cities, buildings, and building typologies as fixed backgrounds for everyday activities. Architecture gives us the possibility to live in someone else’s work, in someone else’s understanding and definition of life and its activities. In the relationship with this constructed nature, we write our own understanding of life: in the space written by another subject, we strive to define our own position against a material artefact that frames our life. The relationship between architecture and (auto)biography questions both the ways in which we construct architectural knowledge and the categories we use to define the work of architecture.

Architectural knowledge emerges as a collection of fragments, memories, pieces of knowledge often belonging to different disciplines (literature, photography, cognitive sciences, philosophy, etc.) that the autobiographical account aims at connecting,  making sense of an otherwise scattered disciplinary compartmentalization, through life experience.