| PRESENTS PhD Yearbook | 2011 Director of the PhD School: Prof. Barbara Pernici The 2011 PhD YearBook contains a short description of the PhD programmes at Politecnico di Milano and an abstract of each of the PhD theses defended and awarded this year. Within School of Doctoral Programmes of Politecnico di Milano (www.polimi.it/phd), high-quality programmes in engineering, architecture, and design offer the possibility of studying and performing research in qualified laboratories and research groups. Therefore, the description of the research work at PhD level provides a broad overview of research being developed at Politecnico di Milano and in particular of the original contributions developed by PhD candidates, who, with their strenuous and dedicated work contribute to the advancement of knowledge in their research areas. In presenting this book, I would like to congratulate the 2011 Doctors for their achievements and I wish them all the best for their future professional life as researchers and innovators both in academic and in other organizations and companies. RADIATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY | Rotary Wing Aircraft | SANITARY - ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING | STRUCTURAL SEISMIC AND GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING | TECHNOLOGY AND DESIGN FOR ENVIRONMENT and BUILDING | TECHNOLOGY AND DESIGN FOR ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY IN BUILDINGS AND URBAN CONTEXT | TERRITORIAL DESIGN AND GOVERNMENT | URBAN AND ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN | WATER ENGINEERING | AEROSPACE ENGINEERING | ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION | ARCHITECTURE, URBAN DESIGN, CONSERVATION OF HOUSING AND LANDSCAPE | BIOENGINEERING | BUILDING ENGINEERING | Design and Product Development Methods | DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGIES FOR CULTURAL HERITAGES | ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING | ENERGY | GEOMATICS AND INFRASTRUCTURES | INDUSTRIAL CHEMISTRY AND CHEMICAL ENGINEERING | INDUSTRIAL DESIGN AND MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATION | INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY | INTERIOR DESIGN | MANAGEMENT, ECONOMICS AND INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING | MANUFACTURING AND PRODUCTION SYSTEMS | MATERIALS ENGINEERING | MATHEMATICAL MODELS AND METHODS IN ENGINEERING | MECHANICAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING | PHYSICS | PRESERVATION OF ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE PhD Yearbook | 2011 36

landscapes and architectural expression. of the first semester, in consultation with the DOCTORAL PROGRAM The second and third phase involve training supervisor. During the following five semesters, experience abroad, with participation in seminars the thesis is developed as other studies are carried IN ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION and research with which the doctoral candidate out, taking on a progressively more important role. is establishing relationships. The thesis is understood as research and must be characterised by cultural and scientific originality.

Doctoral thesis It may or may not have a design aspect. The | 2011 PhD Yearbook Maximum importance is given to the doctoral doctoral candidate is required to report regularly thesis. It constitutes the core and the conclusion on the progress of the thesis and to attend open of the doctoral candidate’s study and is attributed sessions, held in the presence of the teaching staff 37 The doctoral program is understood as advanced learning, rooted in a very large number of credits. The theme and and the other doctoral candidates, at which the Chair: the history of the architect’s craft, of the profession and of the wealth the formulation must be defined before the end thesis is discussed. Prof. Daniele Vitale of architectural techniques. The objective is to train architects who are capable professionals from a general point of view, with solid historical/humanistic training and a strong theoretical base, but who Doctoral Program Board also have extensive knowledge of town planning and construction techniques and who are able to carry out architectural design. The Marco Biraghi Marco Dezzi Bardeschi Attilio Pracchi training consists of the imparting of organised contents, the sharing Salvatore Bisogni Carolina Di Biase Marco Prusicki of research, and participation in cultural debate. As is the case in the other arts, composition is understood as an ensemble of conceptual Pellegrino Bonaretti Mario Fosso Gianpaolo Semino and technical fundamentals that precede the design project and to Enrico Bordogna Alberto Franchi Angelo Torricelli

which it refers. The faculty is composed of professors in the field of Giovanni Cislaghi Jacques Gubler Daniele Vitale ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION architectural composition, history of architecture, restoration and construction. Adalberto Del Bo Vincenzo Petrini Stanislaus von Moos

Contents The course is based on a meeting between members of the teaching staff and external professionals from among those Advisory Board at the forefront of international debate. This dialectic serves as a reference and as a source for research. The course is divided Klaus Theo Brenner Maria Patrizia Grieco into integrated phases. (Architectural School of Postdam, Berlin) (Italtel) The first phase consists of a redefinition of positions and Jean-Louis Cohen (Université de Paris) Rafael Moneo responsibilities with respect to transformation of the territory (Graduate School of Design, Harvard University) and to evolution in the profession, in which the doctoral candidate Elio Franzini (Università Statale di Milano) Carlo Olmo is required to participate through research and contributions. (I Facoltà di Architettura, Politecnico di Torino) It consists, in addition to participation in optional Polytechnic courses and in addition to a two-semester seminar in architectural design, Paolo Gavazzi (Banco di Desio e della Brianza) Boris Podrecca (Fakultät für Architektur, Stuttgart) of two specific courses given by several lecturers during Franz Graf (Accademia di Architettura di Bruno Reichlin two semesters («Architectural History and Design» and «Criticism Mendrisio, Università della Svizzera italiana) (Università della Svizzera Italiana, Mendrisio) and architectural theories»). The second phase consists of a more specific, in-depth undertaking and deals with the problems of composition in relationship to architectural design, on one hand through two courses («Figures Scholarship Sponsors of architecture and forms of construction» and «Conservation and design»), and on the other hand by means of a second architectural EuroMilano S.p.A. - via Eritrea, 48/8 - 20157 Milano design seminar. These courses will also involve several lecturers and New agreements and protocols are going to be made with other enterprises are divided into two semesters. The third phase consists of increased involvement of the doctoral candidates in more specific research and themes, ranging from the theoretical debate in Europe and in Italy to the question of the old/ new relationship, to the question of settlement- and founded-city structures, to research into the cultural and figurative identities of 40

Architecture and rural settlement design in the Jewish colonisation of Palestine under the British Mandate

Axel Fisher

The Jewish colonisation The thesis is organized in three rural colonisation aimed at land of Palestine at the end of the parts. Part 1 begins with the reclamation and improvement. 19th century and afterwards historical roots of the great with the creation of the State Jewish migrations and the Part 3 considers two critical of in 1948 is a central spread of “agrarianism” moments in the definition event of modern history as well in the later 19th and early 20th of the Zionist “Nation Space”. as a source of ongoing friction centuries. It introduces some Its first chapter is a in world politics. Among other other campaigns for rural reconsideration of the Zionist things, it involved the most colonisation – alternatives to rural villages designed by ambitious and conscious attempt Palestine, promoted by European Kauffmann in the 1920s, to formulate a positive response governments or Jewish placing them on the map to the Jewish migrations of philanthropic organisations together with other coeval modern times. Turning its back based in Europe and America projects by the same architect on Europe, Zionism offered a – in Tsarist Russia, Argentina, for the Bay and the self-emancipation project which North Africa and the Soviet agrocity of . The was at once a social project Union. comparison reveals an early and a settlement project. experiment in pre-state regional In the Zionist “grand narrative”, Part 2 reviews the experience planning; a new system of the construction of a new of rural colonisation in what settlements hierarchically landscape was coextensive was first Ottoman and then organised and functionally with the nation-building process; British-mandated Palestine, integrated along ancient trade and so this landscape of concentrating on the routes and new transport emancipation and of conquest contributions made by several infrastructure in the Jezreel is riddled with paradoxical generations of agronomists, Valley, an expression on the features whose ambivalences sociologists, architects and territorial scale of the attempt to demand to be recognized: planners to the emerging give a new destiny to the future the values of liberation and features and forms of the Jewish nation in the regional land-grab coexisted under agricultural village: for that context of the Middle East. the nationalist banner like topos was assigned primary During this period architectural two opposing Messianic importance in the rebuilding design and town planning fires: the universal claims of new individual and collective both played their parts in the of world revolution and the identities. This part examines construction of a truly voluntary exceptionalist character in depth the invention of the geography. Term is borrowed of Zionist redemption. (collectivist village) from French “géographie and the (cooperative volontaire” in the sense of Our question now is how to village) through the work of intentional and not of free- resolve the ambiguities implicit the architect Richard Kauffmann willing, laying the foundations in the overlaps between modern (1887-1958). This was a for the conquest of new architecture and the process balancing-point between two economic and geopolitical roles, of nation-building which traditions: the experience of the founded on agriculture and characterised the Modernist German Garden City movement setting up original and structural project in such a context? and the European tradition of relationships with history, PhD Yearbook | 2011 PhD Yearbook

41 ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION 1. Richard Kauffmann, Bird’ s eye view 2. Forms of rural micropolycentrism: plan of the Eastern Kishon block, including of a co-operative agricultural village: moshav , kibbutz , kibbutz , Kibbutz , moshav , 1921 moshav , Agricultural experimental station, 1927 geography and nature. successes and failures within Part 3’s second chapter – the the paradoxes and historic last in the thesis – shows how ambiguities of these projects, the 1930s were for the Zionist including some that involved project a period of closing in on “roads not taken”. itself: in the dominant ideology, the figurative arts, settlement This makes it possible to recover strategies and in architecture the truly original content we see a gradual abandonment of Jewish rural colonisation: of radical aims to “return to the the search for alternatives soil” in favour of the “cult of to the European industrial city, the nation”. The autonomy the involvement of the natural and self-sufficiency of the future landscape and vegetation 3. Richard Kauffmann (drawing by Jewish nation is asserted, and in architectural composition, Kurt Reinsch), View of the planned even the use of force is called the role played by typological “City at the heart of the Valley” in the into play. articulation and by figuration , 1925 in defining collective identities, The comparison between these and the importance of settlement projects shows the considering architecture role played by architecture – in relation to the broader as a means of symbolic and “geographic setting” collective representation, on a national scale. and as an instrument for the organisation of new patterns of activity and social behaviour – and enables us to distinguish various possibilities, Milan, September 2011

Thanks to: Scuola di Dottorato di Ricerca Chairs and Secretaries of the Doctoral Programs The Doctors of the Graduating Class of 2011

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For further information: www.polimi.it/phd [email protected]