The Accademia di architettura of USI annually promotes WISH, an acronym for Workshop on International Social Housing, a design course that was created with the specific intent of addressing and investigating, through architectural design, the theme of collective and social housing. The course has a profound international vocation and tries to establish with interested countries and institutions, a fruitful academic collaboration. WISH, in fact, moves by the consciousness that the architectural project cannot represent just an intellectual exercise isolated from the concreteness of a real context: the projects are developed in areas truly studied by the local authorities as potential sites for new residential neighborhoods and critically face the rules and the laws in force, suggesting their positive reinterpretation. The investigation, focused on these cities sectors, leads WISH to collaborate with the local authorities, the city administrations and the universities of the country, in a mutual profitable exchange of thoughts and proposals. The workshop wants to be a research and critical analysis opportunity on the topic of dwell and on the social sense of collective living. A research that tries to combine the design desires with the principles of repetitiveness and cost-effectiveness, that are emblematic in large scale architectural projects, with the conviction that, through a coherent and sensitive drawing of a neighborhood or of part of it, it is possible to enrich and to increase the vital and changing weft of the cities.

Each year a students group from the Accademia di architettura of Mendrisio and from its partner University, participate in this course that takes place during the summer months. The course is divided into two parts: the first one, about two weeks long, takes place at the partner university and consists on research in order to have a better knowledge of the city where the projects will be, with the precise intention of knowing the most possible of the cultural, social and political reality in which the workshop takes place. The second one represents the elaboration and synthesis of the collected informations, condensed in an architectural project that the student develops during five weeks at the Accademia di architettura and that represents his particular, personal answer to the theme. During the course, specialists are called to offer contributions on specific arguments and to actively participate in the intermediate and final projects critics debate.