Aspiring architects grow at D’Ascanio

MONTESILVANO. Young architects are growing. There are 65 students from the D’Ascanio scientific high school who have chosen to attend the contemporary architecture course “Dedalo, the profession of the architect,” promoted by the institute since last year. The initiative, which is enjoying a success that even its promoters had not imagined, was born from the idea of two architects and art history teachers: the late Pierluigi Natalucci, who passed away prematurely last summer, and Tiziana Pezzella.
The teacher herself recounts how the project was born: “We had the idea for a while,” she recalls. “We said to ourselves, let’s try; we’ll manage to gather a class of about twenty students. And then it will be a pilot course, a field experiment to see if our intuition can take shape.” Instead, in 2017, eighty students enrolled, while this year, with participation reserved only for final-year students, there are 65. Now that Natalucci is no longer here, Professor Pezzella carries on that dream, shared with her colleague, of offering students “hours of discovering beauty” dedicated to Daedalus, the ingenious architect who turned his dream into reality.
“Now we are continuing to celebrate him with the second cycle of Dedalo which, far from being nostalgic or celebratory, is a hymn to beauty expressed through architecture. The ‘masters of ceremonies’ of this cycle of six theoretical lessons—alternating with six design workshops—are people who have been and are spokespeople for that beauty: university and high school teachers, together with architects.” The common thread of the course is the relationship between nature and architecture: starting from the way architecture learns its forms from nature, continuing with a reflection on light, and moving on to architecture in relation to lightness. And also: natural spaces inserted within the city, the ecological vision of the human habitat, and the house in the earth. The aim of the workshops will also be to transform and make functional the currently unused spaces of the school. At the end of the course, a jury of experts will select the winning project for the scholarship established by the Pierluigi Natalucci association. Joining Pezzella at the lectern are the architects and/or teachers: Sara Tarricone, Michele Lepore, Alessia Amura, Michela Palermo, Raffaella Radoccia, Claudia Comencini, Gino Lozzi, Gianfranco Conti, Silvia Donatelli, Dante Castellano, Lino Pezzella (set designer) and Chiara Di Sabatino (student).

Original article:https://www.ilcentro.it/pescara/aspiranti-architetti-crescono-al-d-ascanio-1.1822990