Aerial image: Airbus, CNES / Airbus, Maxar Technologies, Maps 2026 (edited); photo: Google Street View (edited)
Commercial areas are commonly understood as spaces of production, trade, and logistics. In reality, however, they have long fulfilled many additional functions. Between industrial sheds, storage yards, and retail facilities, uses have emerged that are an integral part of everyday life for many people: places not only of work and shopping, but also of sports, leisure, social interaction, and entertainment. Yet their social significance often remains invisible, as the spatial organization of these areas is still shaped almost exclusively by functional requirements.
This condition can also be observed along the Adige River north of Verona. Between vineyards, transport infrastructures, and commercial zones, a wide range of everyday practices has developed that are central to life in the region but find little spatial expression. Here it becomes evident that commercial areas are neither village nor city. Their understated attractiveness points to qualities and modes of use that have so far been only partially understood and rarely addressed through design.
Climate Change as a Catalyst for Spatial Transformation
Climate change lends new urgency to the search for alternative futures for these areas. Limiting land consumption requires future growth and transformation to be accommodated increasingly within existing commercial sites. At the same time, periods of extreme heat alternating with heavy rainfall demand new forms of climate adaptation. Commercial areas possess considerable spatial potential in this regard. The key question, however, is not how climate adaptation can be inserted into these areas as a standardized set of measures, but how it can contribute to the further development of their specific spatial and social qualities.
This presents a particular opportunity: the climate-oriented transformation of commercial areas can become the starting point for a broader spatial transformation. Such a process offers the possibility of making the significance of these places for their users visible. How can commercial areas, where open spaces are redesigned, surfaces de-sealed, vegetation established, or stormwater retained, become multifunctional places without losing their rough character and complexity? How can shared open spaces emerge as COMMONS?
Cultural Landscape as a Spatial Strategy
The project capannoniCOMMONS does not regard commercial areas as the opposite of landscape, but as part of the cultural landscape. Landscape is not understood as a backdrop, but as a framework for the transformation of the sites themselves. This opens up the possibility of rethinking commercial areas as new urban or landscape building blocks whose social qualities become visible and spatially articulated. Retention, shading, vegetation, and public open space are understood as means of establishing new relationships between work, everyday life, and landscape while enabling additional forms of use.
Aerial imagery: Google. Areas and linework: OpenStreetMap.
The Adige Valley
The study area is located along the Adige River northwest of Verona. It connects the wine-growing landscapes of Valpolicella with the moraine hills at the transition to Lake Garda and the Veronese Plain. At the same time, it concentrates the region’s most important infrastructures: the railway line, the Brenner motorway, and major transportation corridors all follow the Adige Valley.
Local Products
While viticulture shapes the cultural landscape of Valpolicella, the valley floor is also home to the marble industry as well as numerous commercial and service-based enterprises. Both sectors depend on logistics, distribution, and retail. Around these production systems, commercial areas have emerged that today accommodate far more than industrial and storage facilities.
Leisure Activities
Alongside commerce and services, these areas host leisure and entertainment facilities, sports venues, restaurants, and a variety of uses that either no longer fit within historic town centres or are no longer desired there. It may well be that some of the region’s true “hidden gems” are located precisely in these places. The commercial areas of the Adige Valley are therefore not merely economic spaces; they are lived everyday places.
The project seeks a site-specific and compelling response to the following question:
Climate adaptation is needed everywhere. How can it also become an opportunity to strengthen social life in commercial areas – by bringing existing, sometimes hidden, social uses into the open space? And how can we simultaneously weave these areas into the surrounding cultural landscape?
The objective of the design studio is to develop new spatial models for socially and landscape-integrated commercial districts.
Hybrid Spaces
Students will reimagine commercial areas as hybrid spaces of production, consumption, leisure, and landscape. The starting point is the identification of those uses that already shape these areas today but often remain invisible. These hidden practices are to be spatially expressed, connected through open spaces, and related to the surrounding cultural landscape.
Multifunctional Spaces
The task is not simply to improve the functional performance of commercial areas, but to develop new qualities for everyday life, work, and recreation. The proposals should demonstrate how commercial districts can evolve into productive, multifunctional, and climate-resilient landscape, urban, or village components.
Atmospheric Spaces
The proposed spatial structures may incorporate densification, transformation, and new programs. The key challenge is to formulate a clear spatial and atmospheric concept that remains legible across all scales of the design.
New Images in the Age of Climate Change
The studio challenges students to rethink a spatial type that has rarely been treated as a design problem. How commercial areas might look and function in the future remains an open and urgent question. In response to the challenges of climate change, the project seeks new spatial imaginaries, new typologies, and new relationships between production, landscape, and everyday life.
This design studio offers freedom in the choice of scale:
- Urban design and landscape design proposal for a specific commercial area within the region (1:500–1:5,000)
- Development of a landscape design strategy for multiple commercial sites across the Adige Valley (1:10,000–1:25,000)
- A combination of both scales (site-specific intervention and regional landscape strategy)
The design phase will conclude with the final project presentation approximately two weeks before the end of the semester. In the subsequent Research through Design phase, the projects will be brought together and comparatively evaluated. The aim is to derive transferable open-space typologies and design strategies for commercial areas from the work produced.
The focus will be on identifying which new approaches have been developed to connect commerce, cultural landscape, climate adaptation, and everyday social life, and on assessing the potential of these approaches for other sites and contexts.
To introduce and practice research through design, we will conduct the accompanying Research Seminar (Integration) on selected Monday mornings throughout the semester.
Phase I . Design Analysis
Mon, 12 Oct 2026 Introduction and Project Presentation
(Tue, 13 Oct 2026 Distribution of a preliminary assignment (online))
Mon, 19 Oct 2026 Analysis Tutorial I
Presentation of the assignment and formation of working groups
Mon, 26 Oct 2026 Analysis Tutorial II
Mon, 02 Nov 2026 Analysis Tutorial III / Excursion Preparation
03–07 Nov 2026 Field Trip
Mon, 09 Nov 2026 Analysis Tutorial IV and Development of Design Concepts
Mon, 16 Nov 2026 Presentation of Analysis and Conceptual Approach
Phase II . Design Phase
Mon, 23 Nov 2026 (Morning + Afternoon) Conceptual Design Studio
Mon, 30 Nov 2026 Design Development I
Mon, 07 Dec 2026 (Morning + Afternoon) Design Development II
Mon, 14 Dec 2026 Interim Design Review
Mon, 21 Dec 2026 (Morning + Afternoon) Design Development III
24 Dec 2026 – 01 Jan 2027 Winter Break
Mon, 4 Jan 2027 Design Development IV
Mon, 11 Jan 2027 Design Development V
Mon, 18 Jan 2027 Final Design Presentation (Main Review)
Phase III . Research Through Design
Mon, 25 Jan 2027 Research Through Design Tutorial
Mon, 01 Feb 2027 Research Through Design Presentation / End-of-Semester Review