Wish

WISH, acronym of workshop on international social housing, is a design course of the Accademia di architettura of Mendrisio, conceived with the specific intention to face and investigate the collective and social housing topic. The students are called to develop projects in areas that are truly studied by the local authorities as potential sites for new residential neighborhoods and critically face the rules and the laws in force, suggesting their positive reinterpretation. The investigation, focused on these parts of the city, leads WISH to collaborate with the local authorities, the city administrations and the universities of the country, in a mutual profitable exchange of thoughts and proposals. The workshop wants to be a research and critical analysis opportunity on the topic of the housing and on the social sense of collective living. A research that tries to combine the design desires with the principles of repetitiveness and cost-effectiveness, that are emblematic in large scale architectural projects, with the conviction that, through a coherent and sensitive drawing of a neighborhood or of part of it, it is possible to enrich and to increase the city itself. In collaboration with the Tokyo Institute of Technology WISH will concentrate its research on the redevelopment of the “Danchi”, the social housing neighborhoods built in Japan starting from the fifties.