"TWO EXERCISES", installation by Blumer horizontal Design studio

The Teatro dell’architettura Mendrisio (TAM) of the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) presents, from November 14, 2025 to March 29, 2026, two exhibitions promoted by the USI Academy of Architecture: “STEFANO GRAZIANI. Reality Show”, curated by Francesco Zanot, offering a reflection on the status of contemporary photography, between documentation and simulation of reality; and “ARCHISATIRE. A Counter- History of Architecture”, curated by Gabriele Neri in collaboration with the Library of the Academy of Architecture, a journey through caricatures, cartoons, and publications that recount with irony the relationship between satire and architecture over the past centuries. Accompanying the two exhibitions, the ground floor of the TAM will feature the installation “TWO EXERCISES”, created by first-year students of Blumer horizontal Design studio.
 

TWO EXERCISES
installation created by the first-year students, curated by the Blumer horizontal Design studio,
promoted by Academy of Architecture of Università della Svizzera italiana.

The exercises on display are the result of work created in the second semester of the academic year 2024-2025 and the first semester of academic year 2025-2026. These exercises have been repeated for over twenty years, different each time, involving half of the first-year students – about seventy per semester – and alternating with the Ruf horizontal Atelier, dedicated to drawing by hand.

The Blumer horizontal Design studio has always focused on themes dealing with the body, movement and events, explored through constructive and performative practices. The exercises, which are strictly interactive, call for the designed objects to be activated, transported and exhibited in a sort of “turning on” operation, a direct verification of their constructive precision and functioning.

In the Spring 2025 semester, students worked on the theme of the “bell wheel”. Starting with an identical construction, each student had to design and construct a wooden box capable of generating a sound using the rotary and oscillatory movement of a wooden clapper.
Meanwhile, the atrium features mobile articulations made with cylindrical wooden profiles connected by nylon threads and set in motion by a pendulum. The assignment was to design a dynamic body that, when activated manually in an alternating rhythm, would transform itself with surprising effects and geometric complexity.

The training of young architects at the USI Academy in Mendrisio also involves constructive exercises designed to stimulate their insight into architecture’s many expressive possibilities through indirect phenomenon of its existence. Such exercises combine manual skill, knowledge of materials, perception, the body and sharing, restoring to architecture the unquestionably technical but, at the same time, communal and poetic value that belongs to the distinction we must always defend between building and architecture.

Professor: Riccardo Blumer
Assistants: Matteo Borghi (coordinator), Francesco Tencalla and Francesco Fusillo, with the help of Claudia Broggi