La Partecipanza

The project is inspired by a typical dwelling of Emilian Agrarian area, “La Partecipanza”, an ancient form of collective ownership of land, still in use in Emilia area. “La Partecipanza” is a fascinating and unusual term as it substantiates, in a singular way, the verb to participate. It identifies the will for a collective action, for as long as it takes to carry it out. In fact, if the terms participant and participating enhance the single action, on the contrary “La Partecipanza” underlines the potential of many coordinated gestures, combining the same terms participant and participanting. “La Partecipanza” is therefore the stimulus to imagine new dynamics and uses of spaces, generating a new sense of daily community.

For design point of view, reflecting on the meaning of term participation means evaluating how simple daily actions coexist and potentials in combining them together, it means evaluating degrees of flexibility concerning privacy of the same elements of architectural composition like measures and proportions, directions and positions, limits and thresholds. By acting in this way, for example, the connection system, often considered only for movement, can be rethought as a participant element in social activities of the house and, on the contrary, the living rooms, used for social and static functions, can be imagined as participating in the dynamics of internal distribution. The design challenge becomes defining a new collective participation of places, users, activities and times investigating opportunity in relationship given by vertical space.