The work was focused on the city of Turin and involved sixteen students of both universities.

Starting from a typo-morphological analysis on the architectures of the city, from its Roman past until the most recent times, it concluded with sixteen individual designs developed from each single student’s research question, in which the outcomes of the first analysis were also taken into account.

The researches carried out in the first semester of work led to the publication of Gran Torino Atlas, which provides a complete overview on the city development, together with those architectural changes that accompanied it along the centuries.

The first months of work were mainly dedicated to the above mentioned publication: each of the teams, made up of an Italian student and a Dutch one, dealt with one among the different chapters that the Atlas consists of.

Within the Program the Italian students were given the chance to spend five months in Eindhoven working on their individual thesis, collaborating with Dutch students and learning from the Dutch method.

With those inputs and background information in mind, the sixteen individual designs proceeded.

Being the “19th century Bourgeoise Turin” the field that I personally analyzed more in depth within tfee above mentioned Atlas, it almost automatically led to deal with one of the most representative typologies of the century, that of the Urban Block.

The resiliency of the nineteenth century European urban fabric is notable, and Turin makes no exception: most of the intervention carried out in those years still represent valuables examples of architecture in the city fabric.

The analysis presented in the Atlas, whose outcomes will be shown in the first chapter, focused on the area of Porta Nuova. This part of Turin was marked by one of the most remarkable intervention in the city during the 19th century thanks to the realization of the train station in 1861-64 and the consequent growth of the city. However, for the last and most important step of the work, the individual design, Vanchiglia district has been chosen, an area which basically developed in the same years and in a similar way to Porta Nuova’s one.

The research allowed to point out both values and weaknesses of Turin’s traditional urban block, together with the awareness of those transformations that the type went through along the decades and that also form today part of it.

Building upon this, the second chapter deals more in depth with the urban block, apart from Turin’s specificities. It summarizes first of all the main points of the debate arisen on the topic over the twentieth century and then it carries on providing an overview on the most important features of the block and its social values. The urban block implies a particular social structure and works better when it hosts economical activity, not only residence.

From this forward follow the contents of chapter three, with which I intend to hand the reader over with examples of various models of block from different cities, both traditional and contemporary.

The fourth chapter then drives again the attention of the reader on Turin, providing an overview on the contemporary situation in the city as far as it concerns the latest architectural and urban intervention realized.

The attention would be then moved on the district of Vanchiglia, with the aim of proving the rationality of intervening in its tissue with blocks, conceived as urban tools able to restore a valuable compact tissue where it got damaged.

In this part of the city the regular grid conceived by Alessandro Antonelli on the eastern side of Piazza Vittorio Veneto was never fully turned into reality because of the settlement of many factories in the same area a few years later.

The fifth chapter eventually focuses on this district of Turin and introduces to the last part of the work, in which the project is finally described.

My intention is not herein to state that my design proposal represents the best solution that could ever be thought for the city and for its area; what I would like to underline is the importance of the method that led to it.

The work is to be seen as an “academic exercise” which put together theory and design.

As far as it concerns my work, it all started from the will to try to test the possibility to intervene in Turin - not in its periphery yet in a crucial point of the 19th century city which did not developed as expected-with one of its historical urban components, the urban block, or if there is no other option instead for the designer but to give up to the “architecture of objects”. To put that into practice, the design started from the hypothesis of a tabula rasa on the picked up area to rethink it in accordance with the typical layout of Turin, the urban grid with blocks.

Both the knowledge of the place- with its tradition and identity- as well as that of the typology studied and of the range of alternative models that derive from it, result therefore prerequisites of fundamental importance for such ambition.