The schools of architecture of four Spanish and Italian universities organised in Florence an international workshop of projects on social housing to be developed in this Tuscan city. The mixed format of the workshop encouraged a series of reflections about the question of contemporary social housing from different theoretical approaches in parallel with the analytical work of the proposed site and the project development of the specific program. This publication collects the summaries of the lectures given and the projects carried out by the groups of students.

CENTRE: 2. m. Place from where information, decisions and so on, start or converge. / 9. m. Place or situation where someone or something has its natural seat and comfortable position.

TANGENT: 1. adj. In immediate physical contact, touching. / 2. Geom. Said about two or more lines or surfaces: They touch or have common points without cutting.

Geometry has always been an essential tool for the architect, helping him to discover and describe space. Also, in a subconscious way, defining his own position in that space and society.

Arquitangentes wants to show movement from the centre –geometrical place historically cultivated through the profession and received education- towards the peripheries, the tangents of the disciplines that touch it and enrich it.

There is a huge saucepan hanging over the burner. They tell me that all good ideas need to cook, with the knowledge and command of a technique that ends up becoming the best architecture. The light given off lights up new spaces and places. From that fire, after an inner journey crossing gaps and through windows like one who discovers the hall, arises a new exterior. A new place, perhaps a new secret garden. A search for nature as the origin and framework of that good architecture. It is no surprise, architecture without a place is not architecture. On this inner journey from the burner to nature, there is an owl. Its mysterious look challenges us to discover things that others are not capable of seeing.

In the foreground, on top of a large table, I discover a collection of materials brought from those routes running around the world. Cooking a good project requires knowing about the world, which is just waiting to be discovered. Behind that table, and almost in front of the kitchen door, there is a young couple of architects. He is wearing an untidy black camisole and she is wearing a simple white shawl. They don’t have much time for a better attire. It doesn’t  matter, their temperance is elegant. Both look at me with pride. They seem sure of themselves, and proud of what they do and how they do it. They cook the architecture of coming days, their time, in the most hidden away room in the house. But they know that the origin is there, the home in a house that is permanently used as a room for a world of inevitable change.

This book is the result of a workshop, a collaboration between the Interior Architecture branch of HEAD and the Geneva Museum of Art and History. Students are invited here to work on the architectural foreshadowing of the transformation and extension of the Museum, which will be the subject of an architectural competition next year. The work will help define the program for the museum’s competition and will allow reflection on the invention of a new museum model for the 21st century.

Today there is a conflict between the heritage and tourist value of an architecture, and its ecological and climatic value. Indeed, the end of the 20th century in Europe had valorized the visual, cultural, aesthetic aspect of the buildings, within the framework of a post-industrial economic development linked mainly to tourism. But when in the 21st century the imperatives of thermal insulation arrived, in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a conflict arose between the historical image that the facade had to give in the public domain, and the need to cover it from the outside with a wool as thermal insulation.

It is here that interior decoration takes on its full meaning, that of the carpets and tapestries of yesteryear, of chandeliers and mirrors, of gilding and curtains, as ancient strategies for improving the thermal conditions of pre-modern interiors, and whose ambition we must revalorize and renew the means in the age of global warming.

Thus, by working on real climatic phenomena, the interior architecture students of the HEAD in Geneva, under the direction of Philippe Rahm and Phi Nguyen, sought to respond to today's ecological imperatives, to bring the former tower of the Swiss Institute of Rome up to energy standards, by inventing the decorative style characteristic of the 21st century.