International Workshop of Heritage Studies – 3rd Edition

June and July 2025

Location: Milano – Leonardo Campus

Expected duration-hours: in presence, 100 hours

Reference Professor: Stefano Della Torre (DABC)

Proposing professor: Arian Heidari Afshari (DAStU), Mehrnaz Rajabi (DABC)

The main question of this workshop is how we, architects, planners, and conservation experts, can offer deeper understandings and more inclusive memories of a cultural heritage site for a variety of spectacles and layers of affection toward it. To pass beyond the Outstanding Universal Values of cultural heritage toward its proper understanding of the sense of place, one should be able to effectively investigate the same built-up environment from different points of view and be open to contradictory interpretations. To imagine a more comprehensive cultural landscape of a heritage site for contemporary society, different layers of history, past events, and people’s involvement in the re/use and re/appreciation of the site should be observed and understood sympathetically.

Various disciplinary approaches can be tracked to the current existence of a cultural heritage site, but also every type of spectacles can see it differently and remember it in their own ways. Today diverse mass-appealing mediums involve our understanding of a site, but also its material culture, shared values (heritage and societal), and its oral history/narratives can be recognized differently if one acts as an international tourist or local user or historian, or ethnographer. History is inevitably tied to the pushes and pulls of the present day. Historical narratives are re/produced, re/generated, re/edited, and actively translated depending on the social

and political forces at any given time and place. They naturally tend to become shorter, more abstract, and symbolic or presented as such by both conventional and new mediums. Yet, the attempt to move beyond the authorships for the heritage site toward the memories associated with it is fundamental in not falling into the trap of oversimplification of the sense of place, where shared memories are shaped and continue to thrive. This workshop is an attempt to explore what the sense of place is and could be in a given case study of a cultural heritage site and investigate the methods and tools with which we can observe, understand, and express/represent it coherently and effectively for the public audience in a frame of different cultures. In this way, the workshop will provide an opportunity to compare how architectural history features also in public life and discourses in different local micro-cultures as well as internationally diverse ones. In particular, this workshop explores and learns from Northern Italian context as sources of cultural richness in understanding cultural heritage while investigating a case study site located in the Lombardy Region. During site visits and public lectures by course and guest professors, students will be exposed to different approaches to identifying the sense of place and diverse layers of historical reading of the case study site. Accordingly, various tools and methodologies for analyzing and presenting will be explored. Participants will then explore the selected case study, focusing on information about, but not only limited to, society, material culture, and its past representations employing different media such as newspapers, magazines, and period films. Finally, they attempt to represent their research in a graphical portfolio using their choice of effective media to communicate the authentic sense of place of the case study.

https://www.auic.polimi.it/en/education/internships-and-workshops/workshops/re-thinking-history-re-imaging-future