PhD [italian version] > Courses > Environmental Design

PhD: Progettazione Ambientale [Environmental Design]

Contact person: Marina Cocci (+39) 06 4991 9083
Email: marina.cocci@uniroma1.it





Objectives
Sapienza University of Rome is the only Italian university to offer a PhD in Environmental Design, and therefore the Programme represents a unique scientific offer. The PhD Programme is well established with a long history and renowned quality and aims to form expert researchers in environmental issues associated with the technology of architecture. It separations research projects into specific areas like planning, environmental conservation, reclamation and rehabilitation according to objectives set by university research, and public and private research institutions at the national and international level (EU, MIUR, CNR, Ministry of Public Works, Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, local governments, environmental programming and control organisations, etc.).
The primary objective of the PhD Programme is to prepare researchers with expertise in the various environmental fields, such as defining adequate principles, methods and strategies to control environmental transformation processes, environmental reclamation and rehabilitation, and sustainable urban settlement.
Within these topics, discoveries and improvements are still being made from theoretical research, such as practical verification of design tools and optimisation of results through analytical evaluation.
Research in the field is necessary to identify new methods, consistent with sustainable development, of creating new structures and eco-efficient physical-spatial configurations. In this sense, it is technological innovation and environmental quality that drive the evolution and transformation of inhabited spaces, both in new building design and restoration/renovation of existing buildings. Furthermore, in today's world it is necessary to define critical proposals that address the significance and centrality issues, from a technological-morphological perspective, of architecture and landscapes.

This leads to associating urban environmental design with an open system of material, energy and information exchange, and eco-efficiency with a central idea for a systematic approach to environmentally friendly product design and development.
In this framework and considering the complex artificial-natural relationship, design research establishes a new environmental balance between manmade transformations and ecosystems. It identifies and defines methods and tools that address and control human settlement planning and form and define the landscape.