The university as a settlement principle. The territorialisation of knowledge in 1970s Italy

The thesis investigates the project of the city by looking at one of its main institutions, the university. If the production of knowledge is a constant element of human development the thesis argues for the possibility of considering the university – a privileged space for knowledge production since the Middle Ages – as a testing ground for new ideas of the city. Nevertheless, for a long time the university has been accounted as a separate element from society. As such, it has crafted for itself a condition of spatial self-isolation that would allow the processes of knowledge creation and exchange to unfold unobstructed by the daily chaos of urbanity. The university could thus be defined an anti-city; a place that is in a relation of inevitable, permanent separateness from urban space; a heterotopic place for a specific, heterotopic community. The definition of the university as a bastion of knowledge received its final condemnation when society acknowledged the momentous change that took place in the aftermath of the Second World War. Over the span of two decades between the 1960s and 1970s the elitist educational model was attacked for its unsuitability to respond to a rapidly changing social fabric. The thesis considers the response given by architecture to the need of profoundly altering knowledge institutions during the years around the student protests of 1968. That was the moment when the switch from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy started taking place. Architecture contributed to foster such a switch through the production of an unprecedented high number of projects for new university settlements. Those settlements were conceived as a way to dismantle the closed, elitist model of the old university. Read as a phenomenon that took place on a global scale, the projects for the “New University” constituted an important episode in which architectural and urbanistic culture expressed the highest confidence in the capacity of its disciplinary means to shape social change. In particular, the thesis reviews the plans and projects for new universities in Italy that were elaborated during the early 1970s as part of a wider attempt at reforming the university and education system of the country. Within an international context that was seeing the expansion of higher education being coped mostly through the deployment of quasi-self-sufficient university campuses set in detachment from cities the Italian projects tried to develop an original approach to the reform of higher education that was based on a refusal of the campus as a universally valid architectural type. The launch of some architectural competitions for the design of new seats for the Italian universities was seen by the architects as an opportunity to further the elaboration of an idea of the territorial city. The notion of città territorio had been central to the post-war Italian architectural debate, and the university emerged as a new topic that could give new impulse to the development of an understanding of urbanity at a large scale. The university thus appeared as a possible catalyst for large territorial transformations. Some of the most important Italian architects took part to the competitions for new universities. The thesis analyses the four competitions for the universities of Florence, Cagliari, Calabria, and Salerno. Those cases are matched with some university projects produced by Giancarlo De Carlo over the same period. The latter, together with the critical project by Archizoom at the competition for the University of Florence, defined a counter-voice to the formal theses proposed by architects of the likes of Giuseppe Samonà, Vittorio Gregotti, and Carlo Aymonino. Despite the lack of consensus as to the ways to interpret the space of the university, all those projects are the representation of a marriage between large scale thinking about the centrality of knowledge as engine of social transformation and its architectural and formal dimensions. The Italian experience of design for higher education introduced within the international debate of those years the possibility of reading the university as a settlement principle, that is to say, as a ground for critique, advancement, and experimentation not only of specific ideals of teaching and research but also of a wider idea of the city. The notion of settlement principle is here considered in its interrelated meanings of a kick-starting element for a new condition, and of a set of spatial rules. In short, the university is a paradigm, that is, an exemplar instance providing criticism towards its surrounding context. Today, even more than in the 1960s-70s, knowledge is considered to be irreducible to unity of space, unity of time, and uniformity of the community among which it is exchanged. In the light of the continuing interest for the project of the university within a contemporary society that has turned knowledge into a commodity, the relevance of the projects of the 1960s-70s and the cultural climate they contributed to shape are today all but exhausted.