Research and projects: a talk by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara

In this lecture, we explore the relationship between research and design through two projects that exemplify our approach to architecture. Rather than treating research and design as separate activities, we understand them as complementary modes of inquiry through which a limited number of architectural themes are investigated simultaneously.

The first part of the lecture presents a series of design proposals for public spaces centred on the architectural archetype of the platform. Alongside these projects, we discuss a comparative study of historical precedents that reveals the enduring organizational capacity of the platform as an architectural form.

The second part focuses on our recent research into the urban villa, a medium-scale, multi-family housing type that emerged in the nineteenth century and has since become a recurrent residential typology across many European cities and beyond. Through a selection of historical examples, we reconstruct the genealogy of this elusive type and present a series of design projects in which the urban villa is reinterpreted—against its speculative origins—as an architectural model for affordable, public, and cooperative housing.

Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara have been awarded the 2026 Robert Garland Treseder Fellows at the Faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning. This Fellowship enables artists, business innovators, designers, policy leaders, start-ups, architects, and scholars dedicated to the development and promotion of design-based innovation to visit Melbourne. Pier Vittorio and Martino will also participate as panelists in the 2026 Future Suburb Symposium on Friday 2 October. We are grateful for the generous ongoing support of the Robert Garland Treseder Fellowship.

Brief biography

Dogma was founded in 2002 by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara. From the beginning of its activities, Dogma has worked on the relationship between architecture and the city by focusing mostly on urban design and large-scale projects. In the last years, Dogma has been working on a research by design trajectory that focuses on domestic space and its potential for transformation. This work, made of multiple studies and projects, has been exhibited at different venues. The office has published several books, includig The room of one’s own (Black Square, 2017), Loveless (Black Square, 2020), Platforms (Black Square, 2020) and Living and working (The MIT Press, 2022) while the design work of the practice has been featured by El Croquis (issue 208/2021). The practice received the Iakov Chernikhov Prize in 2006 and the RIBA Charles Jencks Award in 2023.

Pier Vittorio Aureli teaches at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) where he directs the laboratory ‘Theory and Project of Domestic Space’.

Martino Tattara is a professor at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, where he leads the Institute of Design and Housing.