Learning from Ticino. The Città Ticino as Seen from the Classrooms
Testo in italiano al seguente link
In the late 1990s, Aurelio Galfetti argued that the Città Ticino already existed, with an identity of its own, stretching from Milan Cathedral to the Gotthard.1 Since then, schools of architecture have made it a subject of research, extending its boundaries into the side valleys and, across the border, towards the lakes region. At the time, the debate was about whether it existed at all. Today, with much of the infrastructure in place, the question is what is needed to live in it. In 1968, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour took a group of Yale students to Las Vegas. From that studio came a way of working – observing what exists before passing judgement – later set out in Learning from Las Vegas. A similar approach runs through the studios that three architects have brought to Ticino in recent years. We interviewed them separately, asking the same questions, to understand what this work can teach us about living in the Città Ticino.
Elli Mosayebi is professor of architecture and design at ETH Zurich and co-founder of the practice EMI. Between 2022 and 2023, she devoted three semesters to Ticino: Ticino Tempesta, Ticino Circolare and Ticino Permanente, each concerned with a different timescale in architecture.
Martino Pedrozzi practises in Mendrisio and is a titular professor at the Academy of Architecture, where he leads Studio Territorio Ticino. Since 2003 he has also directed WISH, the summer course on social housing. This year he led the diploma «Ticino. Sguardi laterali», devoted to sixteen valleys in the canton.
Rina Rolli, an architect from Ticino, runs the practice OFREIA between Zurich and Ticino. With StudioSer, founded with Tiziano Schürch, she designed the public spaces in Monte, in the Muggio Valley. She teaches at Bern University of Applied Sciences and led an EPFL semester devoted to Aurigeno, in the Maggia Valley.
Between exercise and reality
A university design studio has no paying client, no budget to keep to and no political approval process to navigate. Yet every project must still engage with a place and its physical, social and economic conditions. We asked the three tutors how they teach students to hold these dimensions together without turning design into an abstract exercise.
«I wouldn’t use the word reduce when talking about abstract exercises,» Martino Pedrozzi replied. The principal purpose of an architecture studio is teaching. An exercise with no connection to an actual place can therefore still be very valuable, even if it forgoes what Pedrozzi calls the university’s «third mission»: serving the territory. For Elli Mosayebi, too, academic work need not tackle everything at once: «It’s enough if you take one of those, a social question, an economic question, or maybe a material question, and then really have the possibility to think it through».
Pedrozzi nevertheless always works with real situations in Ticino. His themes emerge from discussions with mayors, municipal technicians and planning officials, and each project concludes with an exhibition open to the authorities and local people. Rina Rolli starts from public space, where «the client is the population as a whole, you might say». But she wants her students to understand that a client is not always necessary: an architect able to recognise a place’s
potential can take the initiative and set a project in motion.
Coming from outside
Like the Yale students in Las Vegas, those working in Ticino often discover the territory on their first site visit. We discussed this encounter with the three tutors, and what is owed to the people who live in these places.
Martino Pedrozzi has seen this for years among WISH’s international students. Many of them experience «a feeling of earthly paradise» here, he says. «The valley floor that we consider compromised […] is not actually perceived that way.» This idealised view simplifies a situation in which there is still plenty of scope for improvement. Yet those arriving from elsewhere are also free from the stereotypes of people who grew up here, and can offer observations that are both surprising and useful to the design process. Elli Mosayebi, whose Ticino studios included few local students, identifies two difficulties: working with unfamiliar conditions and questioning the image one brings to them, since «maybe you have a certain image and this is wrong».
At Aurigeno, Rina Rolli worked with her students at the request of local residents. The village has partly become a dormitory for people working in Locarno, with an intact historic core and a fringe of detached houses close to it yet somehow distant. «They came away from that site visit no longer thinking of a place made up of buildings and spaces alone, but also of people, memories and expectations».
The students returned from their meetings with local residents «almost intimidated», wondering what right they had, as outsiders, to intervene in a place where people lived. «We came to the conclusion that [...] this apprehension should not turn into a fear of intervening, but rather into a sense of responsibility and empathy, and ultimately a certain care for the territory and for those who inhabit it».
«To be frank, I don’t like talking about responsibility,» says Pedrozzi, who believes it should remain implicit, «provided it doesn’t become an obligation, a duty». What is owed to residents – a group that includes architects themselves – is, rather, honesty: projects that can be explained, that are concrete, that have a real and lasting effect over time, and that leave storytelling to literature. Mosayebi puts teaching first and returns to residents when the work has developed enough to allow for a discussion, as happened with the exhibition of projects at i2a in Lugano.
What remains of the Città Ticino
With the Ceneri Base Tunnel, the TiLo rail network now connects Lugano to Bellinzona in fifteen minutes and to Locarno in half an hour. We asked the three architects what remains useful in the vision of the Città Ticino for design today, and what needs rethinking.
For Martino Pedrozzi, with the Lugano–Locarno connection and the Ceneri tunnel, all the conditions for the Città Ticino to become reality «are already there». «It’s really a question of mindset.» What needs rethinking is the time it takes for the vision to become lived reality: the shift towards an urban way of inhabiting the territory. In a city, people readily walk for fifteen minutes; in Ticino, they take a bus or car for the same journey.
Elli Mosayebi describes Ticino as «a city of many centres» and supports strengthening its polycentric character. Yet today’s valley floor is heavily peri-urbanised and dominated by detached houses. What this fabric lacks, in her view, is a public dimension. «I think you still have to go back to the importance of public infrastructures, and that’s the only way to maybe bring change along, or maybe give a sense of order to this place.» She envisages a network of such facilities: schools open to the community even when children are absent, parks, libraries and public transport, including local bus services.
Rina Rolli values the Città Ticino as a way of reading a complex territory in which built landscape, natural landscape and public spaces overlap along the infrastructure that forms its backbone. Yet in the dispersed suburbs, that «in-between territory that is hard to define», public space is still young and almost always conceived in technical terms, primarily around mobility. She has also proposed studios «in the valleys, which have been somewhat overlooked by the Città Ticino project». For the 2026 diploma, Pedrozzi too moved every studio into the side valleys, after three editions focused on the main valley floor, in 2008, 2014 and 2020. Each of these valleys has a railway station at its entrance.
Working with, not against
Summer water shortages alternate with floods; some valleys lose residents while others fill with tourists; the population is ageing. We asked the three architects where design could really make a difference, and what they would choose to do if given a free hand.
Martino Pedrozzi often works as though he already had a free hand, especially on small projects: minimal interventions in remote mountain locations intended to have an impact at territorial scale. He wants those moving through them to feel «an awareness that the territory has no limits, only thresholds, and is in itself a continuous reality». He cannot say what he would build, but he knows where: on the Monte Ceneri pass, the place that best embodies the canton’s geography. Rina Rolli envisages a municipality that takes the opportunity offered by the renewal of underground infrastructure to create new public gathering spaces at ground level, with only a modest additional investment. She would like to overlay a «quantitative infrastructure» with a «qualitative infrastructure, no less fundamental for that». Through small interventions in the in-between territory, she seeks to create new points of attraction: «perhaps not only the new meeting places Galfetti spoke of – sports centres, gyms and shopping centres – but places that, firstly, are outdoors and, secondly, carry no expectation that the people using them should consume anything».
Elli Mosayebi focuses on climate. Floods, landslides and fires, she notes, have long been met with ever thicker concrete walls that merely pass the problem on to the next generation. Instead, she proposes accepting such changes and exploring their potential: allowing a flood to occur during certain months in areas prepared to accommodate it, for instance, or giving water reservoirs used by firefighting helicopters a second purpose for tourists and residents. It is an approach that, she says, «tries to find a way with it, not against it».
New generations
The Ticino architects brought together in the 1975 «Tendenzen» exhibition at ETH Zurich engaged with the identity of places and landscapes and, as Claudio Ferrata recalls, «believed deeply in the social role of architecture».2 We asked the three tutors whether they recognise anything of that outlook in today’s students.
For Rina Rolli, attention to context remains relevant, as does Luigi Snozzi’s idea of designing Monte Carasso’s public spaces before deciding what would grow around them. Today, however, architects work within an existing built environment, with a stable or declining population, «so the question is what context means to us today when we propose something». For the Tendenza, context was chiefly physical: topography, morphology, sun, shade and climate. Her students broaden it to global phenomena, such as climate change and material resources, and to a more immediate, less tangible context of social relationships and care. They are less interested in putting their signature on a place than in allowing a design to emerge from what they discover there. Martino Pedrozzi likewise sees the figure of the individual author receding. For him, collectives offer a way to share responsibility when dealing with questions that admit only partial solutions.
Pedrozzi believes students experience climate and sustainability issues personally, sometimes as a burden, because architecture, he says, «could almost be regarded as anti-ecological by definition». He nevertheless finds it troubling at times when these concerns «replace, rather than add to – actually replace – the themes at the heart of our discipline»: space, light and construction.
Elli Mosayebi recalls that in the 1980s architecture was one of the ways Ticino presented itself to tourists, and she still sees considerable talent and interest in the discipline today. Yet while working with the canton on the Trevano campus project, she gained the impression that institutions remain very cautious about more innovative architecture and younger architects.
The framework of the Città Ticino has been built, but its design remains open, because what is missing belongs to the scale of everyday life. All three tutors begin with what exists. Like Venturi and Scott Brown, they teach students to observe the territory before judging it, and to listen to those who live there. Conceived to think rather than to build, their students’ projects eventually return to the places from which they began, sometimes giving residents a way of seeing their surroundings anew. If this generation is given the opportunity to put itself to the test, the value of what
it builds will be measured over time, which, according to Pedrozzi, is «the only possible jury».
Notes
- Aurelio Galfetti, La città Ticino, in «GEA Paesaggi Territori Geografie», 7/1999, p. 4 citato in|quoted in Claudio Ferrata, Fare la Città Ticino. Una metafora geografica per il territorio, GEA associazione dei geografi, Bellinzona 2022, p. 6.
- Ferrata, Fare la Città Ticino, op. cit., pp. 24–25.