(THE) CURE

(THE) CURE. Converging Viewpoints Holding Complexity in Architecture and Design Culture

Info call:  https://events.unibo.it/the-cure-phd-architecture-conference-bologna-2026

Deadline 3 luglio 2026 (Ci sarà un'estensione, ma lo comunicheremo prossimamente)

 Cure carries more than one meaning. In its medical sense, it is the act of healing, restoring what has been broken. In its Latin root, cura, it is care, attention, the deliberate act of tending to something. In its architectural and curatorial register, it is the act of selection and composition: giving coherent form to what was scattered. This conference proposes a convergent gaze: a way of looking that overcome partition finding a common focus. Architecture, urban planning, design, ecology, technology and social science are not adjacent fields. They are facets of a single act of care. Cure names both the diagnosis and the method.

3 tracks, covering:

- Digital Technologies

- Cultural Heritage

- Health & Well-Being

TRACK 1 - Cura Technica_The Healing Interface

Technologies as instruments of convergence

Technological innovation increasingly permeates all phases of the architectural lifecycle, from design and construction to operation, conservation, and adaptation. This track explores how digital, material, environmental, structural, and operational technologies can foster new forms of integration across disciplines. By considering technologies not as isolated instruments but as mediating interfaces, the track asks how they can generate knowledge, enhance performance, and reveal possibilities for the built environment that might otherwise remain inaccessible.

TRACK 2 - Cura Memoriae_Tending What Remains

Cultural heritage as living practice

Heritage is not a static deposit to be preserved in isolation: it is a living field that demands continuous acts of care, reinterpretation and reactivation. This track explores the convergence of conservation, community, narrative and technology in keeping memory productive. How do we tend to what remains without enclosing it? How does heritage become a resource for future-making rather than a boundary around the past?

TRACK 3 - Cura Vitae_Space That Heals

Health and wellbeing as a design brief for every scale

The relationship between space and health has always been implicit in architecture but rarely held as a primary convergence point across scales. This track treats wellbeing not as a specialisation but as a condition of all good design: from therapeutic interiors to biophilic urbanism, from inclusive public space to the mental health dimensions of density and disconnection.

 Contatto email: thecure@unibo.it