Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

This project was realized in collaboration with the students of the Advanced School of Architecture during our master class at the Politecnico di Milano. Beyond any humanitarian rhetoric, the process proposes a paradigmatic response to the critical conditions of Italian prisons. Therefore, the approach aimed at shaping alternative pedagogical agenda addressing the question of restorative justice and the potential role of architects bridging social design strategies with ecological construction and digital manufacturing techniques. Such agenda aims at empowering the prison community to improve their spaces and have access to professional training facilitating their employability outside the prison. Therefore, with a very multicultural group made up of detainees of the Bollate’s women prison (Milan) and postgraduate students of the Politecnico, we have developed a first co-design session to map the needs of the prison and the available spaces to improve the wellbeing of the community. With this premise, we have realized with the whole group a scale 1 to 1 prototype of an open-air gym for the detainees’ courtyard. The timber light structure was digitally manufactured to protect it from solar radiation in summer and from rain in winter. The gym is conceived as an open system, a fast deployment device that provides ergonomic variations according to the different users’ exercise needs. The whole project was validated by the prison community and presented to the former Italian Ministry of justice with aim to discuss further developments of such a collaborative approach to eventually adapt this to other Italian prisons.