Not only human. Not only terrestrial. Teaching through the measurement of body and space.

Designing a new, non-architect-specific heritage course meant planning ahead. We envisioned a design-focused curriculum exploring either design elements or industrial objects. To bridge the two modules (restoration and interiors/exhibition design), we needed objects existing within a culture understanding "conservation vs. restoration." Vintage cars and motorbikes fit perfectly, embodying "conserved-restored" through diverse economic values. These familiar objects become time capsules, allowing students from various backgrounds to engage with heritage and appreciate preservation and reinvention in design and industry. We soon realised that, as much as the examples could be of extraordinary value both historically and aesthetically, the ‘field of action’ very quickly became self-limiting in time and in the variety of cases. We therefore progressively adjusted the scope by trying to define with questions of terminology what the students themselves meant by ‘heritage’ and ‘exhibition’. The basic ingredients were narrowed down to the bare minimum of ‘time’, ‘space’ and ‘matter’. For the first two years of the course we therefore focused on the terms ‘time’ and ‘space’, playing on the possible ambiguity of their literal interpretation. Objects that marked the passage of time or its evolution in technological terms and subsequently space understood as the universe (later reduced to the solar system). The concomitance of the pandemic events also suggested that an ex tempore exercise could consist of the creation of wearable devices; in the first experiment to realise a possible social distancing, in the second a minimal endowment for survival on planets with characteristics very different from the Earth's atmosphere. The encouraging results of these first two years of the course have prompted us to use the same experimental approach to a topic that is finally more ‘real’ and close at hand: the exploration of the zoological garden as a complex of small architectures created by Luigi Piccinato for the animal park annexed to the Mostra triennale delle Terre d'Oltremare, inaugurated in 1939 in Naples. The considerations arising from the study of this work have gradually proved to be less and less confined to the study of an obviously historicised object, with exotic evocations of habitats for serrarium animals, but on the contrary have led to the contemporary conception of artificial spaces generated to support the life of all the inhabitants of the modern environment: humans - visitors, but also and above all animals - inhabitants.