The Department of Planning, Design, and Technology of Architecture was established with the merger of three major areas of interest: that of design and process and product innovations involving industrial artifacts, that constituted by the body of research in the field of technological innovation and implementation processes in architecture, and that represented by all those acquisitions, related to studies on the processes of territorial transformation typical of mature industrial societies, arising from a particular attention to the problems of environmental rebalancing.
This merger, which took place within the framework of Sapienza's restructuring according to the principles of the new Statute, has resulted in a particularly lively scientific and teaching unit. The new Department gathers 82 units and in particular 64 faculty and researchers incardinated in scientific-disciplinary fields that are strongly interrelated and 18 units of technical-administrative and library staff active in the Administrative Secretariat, Library and Laboratories.
The Department of Planning, Design, and Technology of Architecture has administrative and organizational autonomy, promotes and coordinates research activities in the areas attributable to the following prevailing scientific-disciplinary areas:
Area of Design, as a pole of cultural, scientific and experimental aggregation capable of orienting the educational and research offerings of the design areas of material and immaterial artifacts; through the innovation of design methodologies and practices; through the study of the evolution of languages, also from a historiographical perspective; through the investigation of changes in technological, scientific, social, economic, environmental contexts and their influence in the construction of the artificial environment.
Area of Architectural Technology and Environmental Design, aimed at the definition and experimentation of theories, methods and technical-operational tools for the innovation, evolution and transformation of the built environment; promoter of the technological culture of design, capable of governing the entire building process with a view to quality and environmental, social and economic sustainability, and able to provide answers to the epochal problems of resource limitation and climate change, both in new construction and redevelopment interventions, with a multi-scalar approach to the existing built heritage.
Area of Urbanism and Territorial Government, capable of identifying and testing the theoretical-definitional and methodological-operational components that oversee the processes of programming, planning and design of the city and the territory aimed at the pursuit of objectives of public and general interest, as well as the maintenance and achievement of high levels of quality of natural contexts and urbanized areas and those to be urbanized, including through the verification of the dynamics of transformation, socioeconomic and the methods of interaction and participation of public and private subjects.
Area of Planning, Design and Management of the processes of protection, enhancement and transformation of the Landscape, in its environmental and human components and in their interrelationships, safeguarding biodiversity at different scales.
Area of Technical Environmental Physics, concerning specific topics such as energy aspects in spatial planning, building-plant system, outdoor and indoor environmental quality, acoustics and lighting engineering.
It also promotes and coordinates teaching activities for courses of study under its exclusive or pro-rata competence.