This new publication series, Modi Operandi, aims to become an influential platform for a new generation of architects through the presentation and critical examination of innovative ideas on the conception and elaboration of the architectural project. At the basis of the series lies the attempt to understand the contemporary work of architecture and its particular specificity regarding borderline approaches to the architectural project, a project that is nowadays in need of reconsidering many of its instruments and the specific knowledge on which it is ‘constructed’. The intrinsic relation between analysis and design, as it is consistently yet variably embedded in the architectural project, will be investigated via the explicit elaboration of theoretical and historical traces, exploratory techniques and new forms of architectural expression. The emphasis on the ‘modus operandi’ of a project implies a clarification of the embedded methodological or procedural apparatus of an architectural project in close relation to the specific means of expression. Both aspects will be addressed in each publication through a careful examination of the various disciplinary techniques operational within the architectural project.

At the same time, the Modi Operandi want to favor the involvement of the new generation of architects with an academic debate at a time in which the architectural project as a whole, i.e. its research and design approaches, its disciplinary knowledge and, last but not least, its education, are undergoing a radical transformation towards territories that are still unknown in both its extent and intent. On this basis, the Modi Operandi do not intend to address a prescriptive position or a particular tendency towards an architectural style, rather it engages the challenge and the struggle to map a diffuse system of approaches to architectural research and design, the elaboration of their processes, the theoretical reflection it engages and the idea of architecture it implies. Moreover, the graphic design and publishing format will give particular importance to the presentation of images, maps and drawings, herein intended as a privileged field of architectural study.

'Modi Operandi #01; Spaces, Poetics and Voids'