The core of Ferrara is celebrated as one of the most attractive and well-preserved historical centre in Italy. Visiting it, you will be surprised by the compact image of the old city. Brick walls, saddle roofs, narrow streets… anywhere rises up a sort of romantic impression of an ancient city that really never existed, at least not in this form! Tourists appreciate the picturesque landscape and remember the good old times… but citizens prefer to abandon it and go to the country.

We want to invert the actual tendency for depopulation of the old city by filling it up with housing for young students, old people and young families with(out) children. They will live together in different ways and levels of sociality. We offer them unconventional architecture for an unconventional way of life.

We are interested in renovation of -in spite of their central position- derelict areas, urban empties, disused buildings that still show potential for transformation.

In their projects students had to deal with the complexity of concepts such as context, memory and tradition. Handling with different materials, surfaces and textures, studying light and colours they used every possibility to outline a new presence in the historic city.

They have experimented different forms of social housing in the traditional context through untypical typologies and borderline solutions.

A lot of punctual, restricted interventions have been inserted in the body of the old city. So dots and dashes in a literary text as these small projects define a new meaning and a new rhythm for an old story.


FAF, University of Ferrara, Faculty of Architecture