USI Accademia di architettura Mendrisio

Startseite
Schweiz
Mendrisio
USI Accademia di architettura Mendrisio

Anrufen Wegbeschreibung Website Kontaktieren Sie die Universität

An architectural faculty which boasts an innovative, interdisciplinary, humanistic and generalist te

02/10/2026

Susumu Shingu / Il Cosmo
Monday 5 October 2026, 6:30 pm
Palazzo Canavée, Agorà Lio Galfetti

Susumu Shingu was born in Osaka in 1937. He began his artistic training as a painter and moved to Italy in 1960 on a scholarship from the Italian government. In Rome, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under Franco Gentilini. During these formative years, his artistic practice gradually evolved from painting towards sculpture.
His discovery of movement came almost by chance, when he observed one of his shaped canvases moving gently in the wind. This experience marked the beginning of a line of research that would become the defining feature of his work: the interaction between sculpture and natural forces. Wind, water and gravity are not simply external elements, but become integral parts of his works, setting them in motion and, in some cases, producing sound.
For Expo ’70 in Osaka, Shingu was commissioned to create a work for the plaza, which already incorporated many of the elements that would characterise his later practice. Often large-scale, colourful and made from contemporary materials, his sculptures respond to their surroundings, following the rhythms and variations of nature. His work thus explores the subtle boundary between the artificial and the natural, seeking not so much to control natural forces as to make them visible through movement.
Shingu has maintained a deep and lasting connection with Italy, where he has created numerous public works over the years, including Il vento di Colombo (Columbus’ Wind) in the port of Genoa, Il luogo della pioggia (The Place of Rain) at the Lingotto in Turin, and Dialogo con le nuvole (Dialogue with the Clouds) in Lecco.
Over a career spanning more than six decades, Susumu Shingu has developed a distinctive sculptural language in which art, movement and nature are in constant dialogue, transforming invisible phenomena such as the wind into visual and poetic experiences.

13/08/2026

One more cool-down: a flashback to our Winter School «marblewood».

In the 2026 workshop, students explored how found natural stone and reclaimed wood can be combined into new hybrid structures – between circular construction, digital design, augmented-reality fabrication and hands-on building.

«marblewood» was organised by the ZHAW Institute of Building Technology and Process and USI Accademia di architettura di Mendrisio, in collaboration with Cave di Arzo.

Workshop leads: David Jenny (ZHAW) and Prof. Dr. Ena Lloret-Fritschi (USI)
Collaborators: Edurne Morales (ZHAW), Evgenia Spyridonos (USI), Jana Sedláčková (USI)
Industry partner: Cave di Arzo, Aldo Allio, Nathan Bätscher

With students from ZHAW and USI.
Supported by a generous donation from a Swiss foundation.

Video: Alberto Canepa, USI

11/08/2026

Antoine Challandes / Atelier Grafton
For rest For rest Val Mara
Diploma 2026. Ticino Side Views

A Pilgrimage through the landscape
Above Rovio, following the Sovaglia stream, the project offers a path of withdrawal through the forests of Monte Sant’Agata. Conceived as a pilgrimage of rest, it explores the contemporary need for silence, contemplation, and inner transformation within a world of constant acceleration.
Scattered interventions link the mountain’s hidden places, from the cave and the clearing to the waterfall or the summit. It aims to weave together hikers, pilgrims, and wandering bodies through a shared journey of ascent and retreat.
Architecture emerges in two languages. Inside the mountain, spaces are excavated from the limestone: cool, silent, and heavy, shaped by geology itself. Above ground, lightweight timber structures inhabit the ecotone between forest and clearing. Suspended within the canopy and open to wind and light, it evolves through seasons, inviting biodiversity and migratory life.
Together, they form an architecture of passage, where rest becomes both bodily and spiritual.

photo model:

07/08/2026

Hellen Boje / Atelier Geers
The Modern Mill, Valle del Gaggiolo. Stabio

Today, the Gaggiolo Valley appears as a discontinuous landscape, where production, village life, and community exist as separate realities. The project envisions a utopian scenario capable of reactivating the original memory of the villages, when these dimensions formed a system of reciprocity. Starting from the historical example of mills, understood as productive, energetic, and social devices, the project reinterprets their principle through a series of modular architectural archetypes. Embedded within the morphology of the settlements, these plug-ins recompose the relationship between production and collective life, integrating new energy technologies in support of an autonomous food chain. What emerges is a utopian valley: where the production of food and energy becomes once again local, distributed, and inscribed within the village. The settlements thus become productive, social, and energetic devices, capable of transforming the valley into a self-sufficient and shared organism.

02/08/2026

Ekaterina Kolesova / Atelier Bonnet
Small Anchors, Valle del Cassarate. Sonvico, Lugano
Diploma 2026 Ticino Side Views

USI Università della Svizzera italiana (Official Page)

The project works with the historical centres of villages that are now part of Lugano. They have a strong identity and spatial character, yet remain mainly residential, with low intensity of use and many abandoned buildings.
Rather than inventing new functions first, the project starts with the search for available spaces: empty ground floors and points for small architectural additions. To work with them, it develops a catalogue in the form of a kit of parts. Each element is designed as a small space in-itself. Through precise position, material, and use, these delicate interventions can change the space around them. The catalogue becomes a tool for these historical centres, while each intervention is adapted to its exact place.
In Sonvico, this tool is tested on one selected square through a sequence of interventions. The kit of parts connects vacant interior spaces with the square and gives buildings flexibility of use. Residents can adapt these spaces as their needs change over time.

28/07/2026

Natalia Rajchel / Atelier Bearth
"Welcome on Board" Valle Verzasca. Gerra Verzasca
Diploma 2026. Ticino side views

The new maintenance workshop in Gerra, Verzasca, explores a possible coexistence between human activity and the force of water. Located within a river corridor listed in the Federal Inventory of Floodplains of National Importance and in an area exposed to flooding, the building rises above the ground on a pile-supported structure.
This elevation ensures the safe operation of the workshop, while the surrounding landscape is restored as a floodplain, enabling native flora and fauna to retain excess water. The platform accommodates a recycling centre, a materials depot, a fire station, a maintenance garage and a workshop. Above, suspended mezzanines contain communal spaces and offices.
The structure integrates reused beams from a catalogue of salvaged elements and follows a crane-like logic, reducing the number of supports and leaving the platform as open as possible. A solar-panel roof running along the length of the building allows the building to be energy self-sufficient.

@

24/07/2026

Saturday 25 July 2026, 20:30
Osteria Vignetta Mendrisio
Final presentation of ARCHICAMP 2026 students work
Save the date and Join us!

23/07/2026

Ludovica Pianalto, Atelier Aires Mateus
Performative Art School
Val d'Isone

pianalto
atelier

Located on a plateau between the villages of Medeglia and Isone, the project hosts a new center for the performing arts, dedicated to movement, dance, and music. At the center of the intervention is the desire to connect performance art with the landscape, using the natural scenic qualities of the Ticino valleys.
Rather than imposing itself on the site, the building follows the natural topography of the terrain, integrating gently into the birch forest that defines the area. Connected to the existing network of natural paths, the project develops as a building-path: an architectural promenade connecting a series of stages that open toward the surrounding nature.
The exposed timber structure reinforces this relationship with the landscape, creating a visual and material dialogue with the birch trees. In this way, the project preserves the original character of the site while creating a quiet connection between architecture, performance, and nature.

20/07/2026

We are here because someone envisaged this school -
we are a community made up of former pupils who have now become accomplished architects, and of young students
who still have their whole future ahead of them.
We are a body; a body made up of parts, and whilst the parts can function separately, there are moments when the body asserts its strength and its presence.
And this school has the ability to be a body.
The body is that thing from which you can remove parts, yet which, on their own, lose their meaning.
The body has that ability and that structure in which the parts form a relationship with one another, interconnect and become something.
We are here together, as a body, to thank Lio Galfetti and dedicate a monument to him.
It is a monument to life and encounter, to ensure the formation of doubts, which Lio continually extolled as one of the great,
essential qualities we must possess in order to be human beings and architects of the contemporary world.

Noi siamo qui perché qualcuno ha immaginato questa scuola siamo un corpo fatto di parti di ex allievi diventati ormai grandi architetti. Di giovani studenti che hanno davanti tutto ancora da fare.
Siamo un corpo, un corpo è fatto di parti, però le parti possono lavorare separate, ma ci sono dei momenti in cui corpo
prende la sua forza, la sua presenza.
E questa scuola e la capacità di essere corpo.
Il corpo è quella cosa per cui tu puoi togliere delle parti che però da sole perdono di senso.
Il corpo è quella capacità e quella costruzione in cui le parti prendono una relazione tra di loro, si articolano e diventano qualcosa.
Siamo qui assieme come corpo per ringraziare appunto Lio Galfetti e dedicargli un monumento.
È un monumento di vita e di incontro per garantire quella formazione dei dubbi che l'io continuava a declamare come una delle grandi, necessarie
capacità che dobbiamo avere per essere uomini e architetti del contemporaneo.

14/07/2026

Gabriele Sciaresa / Atelier Miller
Sotto Onsernone. Valle Onsernone

In the twentieth century, the Ticino valleys were rewritten by infrastructure. Dams, conduits and power plants redesigned the landscape according to a logic of control and concentration, leaving deep traces in the memory of places.
The Onsernone Valley carries within itself a second legacy, sedimented in a community distributed along a single road that connects the settlements at mid-slope. Paved and travelled by cars, it has lost its nature as public space and place of encounter.
The project emerges from the convergence of both conditions. Along the river, a sequence of micro-hydroelectric towers intercepts the energy of the water following its seasonal rhythm, intense in spring, stable in summer, quiet in winter. Variability becomes the measure of the project and production reflects local needs.
The towers open paths at altitude and thresholds between technology and nature, reintroducing a slow mobility that discovers the valley floor. The infrastructure returns to the community an inhabited energy field, in which the rhythm of the river becomes form and measure of daily life.

Adresse

Largo Bernasconi 2
Mendrisio
6850

Telefon

+41586665000

Website

https://www.arc.usi.ch/

Benachrichtigungen

Erfahren Sie als Erste/r von Neuigkeiten und Aktionen: Wir schicken Ihnen eine E-Mail, wenn USI Accademia di architettura Mendrisio etwas veröffentlicht. Ihre E-Mail-Adresse wird für keinen anderen Zweck verwendet, und Sie können sich jederzeit abmelden.