About

BORGO DIGITALE is the Research Platform of Syracuse University School of Architecture abroad study in Florence.

Abroad studies and Global Engagement across the curriculum are central values of the students' experience at Syracuse University School of Architecture. Coherently integrated within the academic structure of the Undergraduate curriculum, our Program extends ongoing conversations developed on Main Campus to confront them with diverse cultural backgrounds. At the same time, operating within the Italian academic and professional landscape, we offer the opportunity to experiment with embedded pedagogical perspectives, some of which find their way back to the core curriculum.

Our students, moving continuously across these different pedagogical areas, become vital carriers of these investigations, strengthening the collective knowledge around the way we teach architecture on Main Campus and Abroad. Most of all, we reject the adoption of distant pedagogies applied over an abstracted context.

This program is built upon the 40+ years commitment of the Syracuse Architecture to articulate a critical model for architectural studies abroad, leveraging field experience, direct engagement, and experimental teaching methodologies to best support students' critical thinking and trans-cultural development. Our research moves from the studio to cityscapes, wetlands, urban piazzas, gardens, atria, natural parks, etc. to problematize how architects and designers practice in the field. At its core, it can be understood as a critical pedagogy of positionality, encouraging students to reflect on their relation to the historical, cultural, material, and everyday context they are working and learning with. As such, against historical lineages suggesting the inescapable ossification of a canonical/disciplinary regime of knowledge, it continues to produce fluid learning environments in which both the objects of study as well as the figure of the architect are renegotiated and interpreted anew at every encounter.