Partner Organisations
UNICT: UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI CATANIA
Address: Piazza Universita 2, Catania, Italy
Telephone: 1 +39095311022
Fax: +39095325194
Email: rettorato@unict.it
NTNU: NORGES TEKNISK-NATURVITENSKAPELIGE UNIVERSITET
Address: Hogskoleringen 1, Trondheim, Norway
Telephone: 1 +4773595000
Fax: +4773595310
Email: postmottak@adm.ntnu.no
University of Catania, one of the oldest University in Italy, founded in 1434. It is classified as a Mega Athenaeum, because it has about 1500 professors, grouped in 11 departments, 1000 of employers and more than 65000 students. Its didactic offer is very wide and various. The didactic offer is amplified by the presence of a Special School of Excellence that group a strict number of students (about 60), to give them additional course s and other facilities. It organizes also some special events, that are open to the whole academic community.
Among the most frequented courses there is Engineering, which is divided in two main branches: ICT and Civil Engineering and Architecture. This second branch is carried out by the Department Civil Engineering and Architecture, with seven degree courses. It has gathers competencies in the area of civil engineering and architecture and hosts Master Degree Courses in Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Building Engineering and Architecture. This last one, in particular, has the best performance, because it has the recognition by European Community and also it allows its graduated to write themselves both in the list of engineers and in the list of architects. It has 100 students for each year and the whole didactic offer of the Department meets the request of more than 1500 students, who attend the degree courses.
The Department has also a PH. D. course in Urban risk Assessment and Mitigation. Particularly, programs about Building Construction, History of Architecture and Refurbishment are developed within the MSc courses of “Build Engineering and Architecture” and “Architecture” and the Phd course in “Urban risk Assessment and Mitigation”.
The Department facilities include several laboratories, with teaching and research aims. Particularly, the “Enabling Technologies for Architecture Laboratory” (ETA Lab) runs researches and activities in the field of building techniques, with particular regards for digital architecture, smart elements, sustainability and innovative materials.
UNICT have participated in the last years in hundreds of projects belonging to the main European Research and Cooperation Programmes (i.e. ERASMUS+, FP6, FP7, HORIZON 2020). Among the many research fields are included: sustainable architecture, Net-ZEB, history of construction, Cultural Heritage, planning, integration between planning and transportation systems, biodiversity and ecosystems services, smart cities and energy saving.
To meet needs and requests of the part of the project assigned to UNICT, it has been carried out a selection of the most suitable skills and competences: experts of historical building techniques, experts of building structure and in the field of energy efficiency.
The Faculty of Architecture at NTNU, Norwegian University for Science and Technology, is internationally recognized for its tight connection between teaching and research activities. With an open and curious attitude, the faculty is highly committed in society through education, research, artistic development and innovation. New knowledge is continuously developed with a critical and multidisciplinary approach in the areas of architecture, urban planning, design and visual arts with an emphasis on sustainability, health, aesthetics, ethics, technology and innovative processes and learning methods.
The Faculty is structured in four different institutes - Architecture and technology, Architecture and planning, Industrial design and Fine arts - with more than a hundred employees in total without counting PhD and post-docs.
Form and climate is central to the faculty's commitment to create good environment for human life. Among the others, the faculty hosts the ZEN research center on Zero Emission Neighborhoods with a budget of over 20 million euro over 8 years for the research and development of solutions for a more sustainable built environment. The faculty has been recently awarded a price for quality in education in connection with the LiveStudio project about students' commitment in real life projects and 1:1 building workshops.
All these activities are fundamental ingredients and know-how for the development of the workshop proposed.
NTNU is currently participating in several application for horizon2020. One of them is looking at the rehabilitation of rorbuer (fishing huts) located along the coast of Lofoten as a way to revitalize fishing villages. In this project researchers from different universities will work in the development of technical solutions for the rehabilitation of the building and understanding the decay of materials.
In our teaching laboratory in Lofoten we want to complement the application for H2020 with a multidisciplinary analysis and development of creative ideas for the adaptive reuse that go beyond technical recovery of the buildings to include also society and production activities.