Last week we were lucky enough to have Simone Gheduzzi of Diverserighe Studio, a firm based out of Bologna, Italy, come to give us a lecture on his recent works as well as give us insight into his perspective on the practice. Gheduzzi began the lecture with a series of quotes, one particularly which stood out was describing architecture as “not just moving rocks and stones, moving people, creating order,” he also spoke about the poetic nature of architecture and the importance of having architecture be a form of supporting history. The first project he introduced was one which was never built yet was very important to the firm and set a precedent in the type of projects/ sites the firm would later work with and elements of importance to them. This project was called Staveco and was commissioned, as well as terminated, by the University of Bologna. The project was the remodeling and reprograming go an industrial/military harbor to become part of the school. In it, Gheduzzi and his team studied the site and the standing building and really wanted to engaging the pre-existing structure in their design as well as looking to cathedral design and the emphasis on natural light in the religious architecture and seeing how to apply those concepts within this space, creating “an overlap of the two architecture languages”. Many of these concepts and themes were later realized in the firm’s Opificio Golinelli project which was built in 2015 in Bologna and used as a citadel for knowledge and culture, which used a similar structure type and relationship between strucutre, space, and building as was proposed in Staveco. At the end of his lecture, Gheduzzi briefly went over a competition his team entered into for a community space in Vilnius, Lithuania, for which he proposed a black stone (a local material) building which would focus its design on relating to the city and context rather than the building itself, which interestingly enough one of our classmates, Ece, had worked on at the Turkish firm she worked for over the summer!
