In the fascia trasformata of southern Sicily, intensive greenhouse agriculture has expanded across the coastal plain in a process this thesis terms plastification. Its fragility is layered: depleted groundwater, a territory saturated with plastic waste, a volatile same-day market, and an exploitative seasonal labour regime. The project asks how an architecture of logistics might ease these pressures while keeping intact the agricultural flow on which the region depends.

The work unfolds in two phases. An analytical phase reads the territory through six mapping themes and locates logistics, the movement, storage, and exchange of produce, as the point at which its fragility concentrates and at which architecture can meaningfully act. A synthetic phase develops this finding into a corridor-wide network of rail-connected agricultural terminals with long-term storage, designed in depth at a single terminal in Licata.

The terminal turns storage into a buffer against market volatility, absorbs the quality verification that currently invites fraud, and reuses the territory's discarded greenhouse film as its facade. Sited where road and rail meet, it gives the new logistical backbone a presence along the highway. In doing so, the project argues that an architecture grounded in a systemic understanding of its territory can soften the very conditions that make it fragile. ... Read more

This dissertation explores the enduring influence of John Ruskin's ideas about the grotesque within architectural theory and history. Though the grotesque has long been recognized as a complex and multiform theme within art and architecture, Ruskin's contribution—notably as stated in The Stones of Venice—reframed it as an important moral and aesthetic force. By dividing the "noble" and "ignoble" grotesque, Ruskin established architectural ornament not merely as decoration but as an expression of social values, personal imagination, and religious expression.

The study falls into three discrete sections. The first part outlines the historical development of the grotesque, tracing its origins from Classical and Renaissance art forms to its appearances in the Gothic, Baroque, and Neoclassical periods, thus providing the intellectual background for Ruskin's redefinition. The second section addresses Ruskin's own writings, his retooling of the Gothic grotesque, especially, as a dynamic, humanist response to classical rationalism and industrial dehumanization. The third section traces the afterlife of Ruskin's grotesque in contemporary and postmodern practice.

It explores how William Morris, Antoni Gaudí, and Louis Sullivan aestheticized Ruskinian ideals through organic ornament and craftsmanship, and how theorists like Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Peter Eisenman re-conceptualized them to protest architectural purity and promote contradiction, irony, and interpretive complexity. Finally, this thesis concludes that Ruskin's grotesque offers an incisive lens for critiquing architectural convention, advocating human expression, and defying aesthetic reduction. The grotesque emerges as an integral, generative presence in architectural thought—one that still provokes and inspires current design thought. ... Read more