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Francesco Zuddas

Pretentious equivalence.

De Carlo, Woods and mat-building

Giancarlo de Carlo et al., Piano di Ristrutturazione dell’Università di Pavia (1971-76). Diagram

Giancarlo de Carlo et al., Piano di Ristrutturazione dell’Università di Pavia (1971-76). Diagram

Abstract [1]
In the 1960s-70s, unrest in universities leads to the spilling out of the academic institution into the city - as is manifested in the student protests. The encounter between university and city is rapidly appropriated by architecture that turns it into one of the most used and abused metaphors to legitimate a sought-after epistemic break from the functionalist dogma. By considering the design and intellectual work done by Shadrach Woods and Giancarlo De Carlo on the changing condition of higher education, this article discusses two approaches to the metaphor university=city. While similar in their intentions – to the point of being grouped under the same label of “mat-building” – they diverge widely in the ways they propose how the architectural project could address such a metaphor.  


Text
“Can a university become an opportunity for broad cultural interaction, which implies creative disorder, if its pattern is entirely and perpetually conditioned by the strait-jacket of a materialized grid? [...] Shouldn’t a grid be just an intellectual discipline that ought to fade out, and allow a counter-move of contradiction, as the generation of space and forms takes place?”

[Giancarlo De Carlo][2] 


“[…] The intellectual grid is all in your head.
But people (& pipes) need direct routes, instead

Of so much indeterminate art,

In which building is clearly to be the last part.” 


[Shadrach Woods][3]


For about a decade, between the 1960s and 70s, the university becomes a breeding-ground for desires and frustrations. The widening of the ideological divide of the Cold War puts increasing pressure on technological progress and the related need for a deep revision of the ties between industry and higher education. If we add to this the fact that the baby-boom generation reaches college age in the 1960’s, it becomes apparent how the university becomes a major instrument for controlling and planning a rapidly changing society. The ways in which the university is organised in space plays a central role and this represents a favourable contingency for architecture, which finds itself among the main actors called upon to advance novel thinking about the academic institution [4].   

The new centrality accorded to the university within society is effectively captured by Joseph Rykwert who, in 1968, defines it the institutional archetype of its age – much like the temples for ancient Greece, the baths for the Romans and the cathedrals for the Middle Ages.[5] For the architects this causes the university to act as ground for the experimentation of settlement forms and principles for a wide restructuring of urbanised territories. In other words, the project of the university is seen as the possibility of shining a light on the critical condition of society that is rapidly projected towards its total urbanisation.   

It is probably just a chance that the crisis of the élite university develops in parallel to the formulation of the promise of a new season for architecture. For some architects, this is arguably a fortunate coincidence. It is indeed on the topic of higher education that much of the rhetoric eloquence of a new generation of architects is spent with the aim of overcoming the functionalist dogma of previous years. The most eloquent image of such aim is the photo of the founding members of Team X posing with the death certificate of CIAM in 1959 at Otterlo. However, the promised generational switch is not exempt from demagogy. Conversely, it is precisely on the formulation of somewhat demagogic slogans that the young generation challenges the old one. The slogans vary from the recovery and “learning from” traditional habitats to the exhumation of the street from Corbusian murder. One particular slogan postulates the identity of university and city. 

It is established knowledge that the first tangible signs of academic protest emerge around 1963.[6] From sit-ins at Berkeley to the occupation of the architecture schools in Italy [7], the discontent with a paternalistic university that still discriminates between who can or cannot access it, combines with a critique of the power collusion between national and academic governments. The university is thus placed under scrutiny in a trial against social oppression orchestrated by the highest authorities so that thinking of a new idea of the university means undermining its stability and territorial control. For many, the final goal becomes to move authority into the hands of those who should benefit of higher education as an open service. The pouring of the university onto the streets during the student protests appears a particularly attractive metaphor for the post-Modern Movement generation of architects, to the point of being immediately appropriated for a more general goal: the university offers the possibility for an epistemic rupture in the architectural and urbanistic discourse. The identity of city and university thus becomes one of the most used and abused rhetorical figures that are deployed to legitimise a change of direction in the way of conceiving the built environment. The change is, allegedly, from the aerial gaze of modernism back to more “humanistic” concerns; that is, back to the gaze of the man in the street. 

This text discusses two interpretations of the metaphor city=university – a metaphor that should be understood as two-directional. While born from common ideological foundations these interpretations offer two very divergent ways of postulating how architecture can operatively appropriate that metaphor. The first interpretation postulates the feasibility of an interior diagram; that is to say, of a large building capable of fusing city and university from within. The second argues that it is only in the larger urban domain – and without any stable configuration – that such fusion can happen. The former response is offered by American architect and Team X member Shadrach Woods; the latter is proposed by his colleague and friend, the Italian Giancarlo De Carlo.

I mentioned that by the early 1960s the identity of university and city is instrumentally used by architects to shift attention towards the viewpoint of the man in the street. “The man in the street” is the title given by Shadrach Woods to a series of lectures he delivered in Scandinavia in 1966.[8] More in general, this is a title that summarises an entire generation of architects and their thinking. At the same time, Woods is also the mind behind what architectural history has registered as a virtuous interpretation of the role of the university as testing ground for new urban forms and for new ideas of the city. This is the project for the Berlin Free University, which was produced by Candilis, Josic & Woods in 1962-63 – that is, in parallel to the emergence of student unrest.[9]

The first to acknowledge a paradigm shift caused by the Berlin project was Alison Smithson, who partook with Woods in Team X’s attempt to renovate architectural culture. Writing on the pages of Architectural Design in 1974, the British architect saw in the completion of a first construction stage of the building in Berlin the coagulation of an architectural trajectory that considered the built environment as process rather than as product. The phenomenon observed by Smithson was only lacking an official name, which she promptly attributed: mat-building.[10]  

At the beginning of the new millennium and triggered by growing interest in Landscape Urbanism’s postulation of large scale planning as the articulation of “fields” of forces – an approach that develops in parallel and as an alternative to the proliferation of objects of “iconic” architecture – mat-building has found new followers. Eric Mumford has talked of “mat approach” to define a switch of focus from the creation of finite forms “to the provisional organization of fields of urban activity, which are understood to have a constantly changing character.”[11] Referring to Smithson’s article, Stan Allen has firstly listed the architectural objectives of mat-building – “a shallow but dense section, activated by ramps and double-height voids; the unifying capacity of the large open roof; a site strategy that lets the city flow through the project; a delicate interplay of repetition and variation”- to then almost discredit such architectural reading and point out that the “sense of accumulation and change [proper of mat-building]…is most effectively put in play within an urbanistic assemblage.”[12]

In Mumford and Allen’s statements we find the contradiction that is inherent to the very notion of mat-building. As already pointed out by Timothy Hyde, mat-building is uncertainly trapped between the status of a noun and that of a verb.[13] On the one side, it can be understood as a specific object that, extensive as its dimensions and complex its interior organisation can be, endures in its status of a finite building. On the other side, mat-building can be conceived as a way to design; that is, an organisational diagram that cannot be trapped within the walls of a single building but that aims at defining settlement principles of a wider scope.       

Such an ambiguous definition becomes all the more apparent if one confronts the Berlin university and its theoretical-rhetorical bases – that also apply to a lineage of projects produced by the same office of Candilis, Josic & Woods – with the intellectual and design work between university and urban planning of another Team X member: Giancarlo De Carlo. De Carlo’s oeuvre on this topic is influenced by his direct observation of the student protests in the 1960s and is developed through the publication of some key texts on the meaning of educational institutions [14], and the production of three projects for universities in Urbino, Dublin and Pavia. 

A re-reading of the design responses by De Carlo and Woods appears all the more relevant today. That is because talks of the “crisis” of the university are still widespread – albeit not much among architects as in the past – and the metaphor city=university (or the related city=campus) seems to be back in shape with all its demagogic power.[15]

To understand affinities and divergences in the ways Woods and De Carlo deal with the idea of an identity of university and city, it is useful to consider their simultaneous participation in two different occasions. The first was the architectural competition for the design of University College Dublin in 1963 where both architects submitted, without winning, their interpretation of mat-building. The second is the publication of two essays on the Harvard Educational Review in 1969: “Why/How to build school buildings” by De Carlo and “The Education Bazaar” by Woods [16].

The two architects share many common concerns and their overall thesis seems to be the same. It can be summarised thus: education – including higher education – cannot be accomplished only inside the institutional space of the university. Rather, it derives from experience. Inevitably – as the argument goes – the institution of the school impedes those experiences that are not relevant to the fulfilment of its own interests. This is the way an institution can guarantee its survival. 

Only when institutions are “interrupted” can “total experience” be reached. This was stated by De Carlo in the essay “La Piramide Rovesciata” (The Overturned Pyramid), which originated from an observation of student unrest between 1963 and 1968, that is, when the university spilled out onto the streets.[17] The predicaments of John Dewey and Ivan Illich resonate particularly clear with De Carlo’s statement. The former had postulated the coincidence of education and experience whereas the latter went even further to make the hypothesis of overcoming the very idea of the school as an institution.[18]

Illich, De Carlo and Woods share a common goal: how to make such overcoming possible. Aware of the unlikeliness of an abrupt rupture, they agree that the only possible strategy to attempt is the set up of the conditions that will eventually allow alternative routes to learning. Dismantling the still feudal reality of the university thus becomes the main objective. However similar the intentions, the design approaches of the two architects turn out to be highly different, almost opposite to one another. 

A main difference between the two mentioned essays of 1969 relates to how they are positioned in relation to their respective authors. Woods’s “The Education Bazaar” can be considered a retroactive manifesto in which the American architect articulates in written form the theses at the basis of his projects for the universities of Berlin and Dublin. It is thus no coincidence that the text is illustrated with the conceptual drawings produced for the Berlin competition and a portion of the plan and a bird’s eye perspective of the Dublin project. Conversely, De Carlo’s is a manifesto “a priori” that is waiting for a project, hence the choice of illustrating it only with photos of the student protest in Milan rather than with architectural drawings.  

It would be incorrect, however, to think that De Carlo waited the aftermath of ’68 to act “as an architect”, that is, with a project. The Genoese architect had indeed been active for about a decade in “Planning and designing universities” (also the title of a book he edited in 1968). Despite both being active as designers of universities, there is a fundamental difference between the conceptual approaches of De Carlo and Woods. The latter has perfected an architectural device that was originally conceived in 1961 to revitalise the urban centre of Frankfurt and has found fertile ground in the domain of university space. It is in Berlin that Woods fine-tunes his prototype, which is then ready for faithful reiteration in the Dublin project. In fact, both projects are always labelled in Woods’ hand-drawn notes as “University as City”, a motto purposefully counterpoised to “University in City”. [19]   

The equivalent of a prototype cannot be found in De Carlo’s work. Therefore, the possibility of labelling his and Woods’ projects for Dublin as “mat-buildings” starts showing its shortcomings. [20] A general look at the two projects would, indeed, lead to find in both of them most of the architectural objectives summarised by Stan Allen. Thus, they appear to rightly belong to Alison Smithson’s genealogy. Differences are, however, more relevant than affinities.

The most evident difference is in the handling of the project’s boundary. Repeating what done the previous year in Berlin, Woods defines a clear limit, a rectangle that is in stark contrast with the complexity of the interior spaces. Woods’ project is indeed fundamentally a project of interiors. It aims to redefine the idea of the university from within by reshuffling its components. This is the literal transposition into space of an idea that in the 1960s was becoming central to the theory of knowledge creation, namely the idea of multi-disciplinarity. In fact, it was becoming common belief that innovation never happens within the comfort zone of a single discipline but always on the divide among different domains.  

De Carlo’s project for Dublin also moves from a willingness to dismantle a culture of mono-disciplinarity. Similarly to Woods’, his project deploys a modular grid for the organisation in space of a university’s programmatic requirements. These are separated in their elementary components and scattered throughout the university site. Whereas Woods explicitly declares the presence of an organising grid, De Carlo aims at its blurring into a settlement with uncertain edges. The interior streets designed by Woods as the linear materialisation of an orthogonal grid distributing the ever-changing programme of the university are contrasted to the tree-diagram conceived by De Carlo. Here, the only fixed element is the central spine onto which spaces of varying specialisation levels are attached. It is, in fact, on the literal and constricting handling of the grid that De Carlo moves his main critique to his friend Woods, getting as response: “The intellectual grid is all in your head. But people (& pipes) need direct routes, instead”. [21]

]If it is undeniable that the same rhetorical levels – as manifested in notions of indeterminateness and variability - apply to both projects, the different treatment of the settlement’s boundary and the different handling of the grid as an organising device is fundamental to understand the divergence between two approaches to the metaphor university=city. 

For Woods, an understanding of the university as an organism portraying the complexity of an urban environment is translated into a large spatial device that promises infinite possibilities of interior recombination from within the certainty of its boundary. It is thus not a coincidence that Woods changes the title of his 1969 essay from “The educational super mart” (an early manuscript [22]) to “The Education Bazaar”. The Arabic bazaar, that is, a large architectural machinery marked by labyrinthic interiors contained within a clear edge, becomes for Woods a main reference. 

Woods’ university=city can only function as a remedial device inserted within a specific urban – or more precisely suburban – condition. As it has been observed by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, the Berlin university is located in one of the richest residential suburbs and its aim is to swallow up its inhabitants to dissolve their suburban identity and convert them “to a more humanistic way of life”. [23] The university-bazaar cannot go beyond this, as noted by Kenneth Frampton’s observation that “however much a university may function like a city in microcosm, it cannot generate the animated diversity of the city proper.”[24] In Berlin – and subsequently in Dublin – the promise of the university=city shines in its entire rhetorical splendour. 

For De Carlo, Dublin is the opportunity to fine-tune the definition of what he discussed in his texts as a new model for the university. The objective is to overcome established and old-fashioned models that, according to the Genoese, have become similarly ineffectual. These models are the American campus, the university complex of continental European origins and the university fragmented into faculties. The latter was an array of dispersed atoms that characterised the schizophrenic Italian academic system.[25] The Dublin competition engages De Carlo with what has become a canonical brief in the 1960s, namely the creation of a large university settlement in an urban periphery. In fact, the number of universities that during that decade expand their physical presence or build entire new settlements on former rural areas is almost countless throughout the western world. However, De Carlo does not insist on a comprehension of the university through the dichotomy “out of town versus inside town”. Rather, for him the university is the key institution to allow the very rethinking of the idea of the city. This is the idea of the “City Region” (Città Regione), for which De Carlo contributed a preliminary definition in 1962 at a conference on urbanism in Stresa, presenting it as the new scale of thinking for urbanists.[26]   

An interest in understanding the university as the foundation for a new idea of the city is thus a constant in De Carlo’s work. However, this does not result either in the definition of a prototype or in the reiteration of an architectural model. Dublin is where De Carlo starts reshuffling the components of a large university settlement. His aim is to infiltrate within the more specialised spaces a whole array of generic spaces that could be open to general public use. The exterior spaces of the university are also catered for public use and conceived as a new urban park that is to be understood as a response to the growth of a leisure-based society during the post-war years. The large scale of the university settlement - while located on a peripheral site – guarantees it capacity to enable the projection of urbanity over a large territory. This objective is not dissimilar to what De Carlo is simultaneously pursuing in Urbino. The creation of a new “rock” – the new university colleges – in front of the old one of the medieval city – itself modified through the injection of academic spaces – expresses a notion of the “urban” beyond what the term “city” – at least in Italy – still evokes.[27]  

The approach set in Urbino and Dublin culminates in the Plan for the Restructuring of the University of Pavia, on which De Carlo starts working in 1971.[28] In the Lombard city the territorial dimension of the city and of the university is most explicitly stated. The plan is based on a diffusion of university “poles” that De Carlo classifies as “central”, “intermediate” and “peripheral”. Similarly to what done in Urbino the project mixes new construction with the reuse of existing buildings. What is more relevant about the project is that the poles are not only scattered throughout areas that are properly “urban”. Indeed, the university is provided with mobile elements, which are conceived as temporary observatories in a continuous pilgrimage over a wide regional territory.   

The university is thus declared as the key element to allow re-thinking the city at the larger scale of a wide territory. More specifically, what De Carlo accomplishes in Pavia is the definitive affirmation of the architectural project as an instrument to put into crisis the very idea of the university. This happens in a very different way than done by Woods with his university-bazaar. As seen, the latter is mostly concerned with interior recombinations so that it never accomplishes the final de-territorialisation of higher education. The university, in other words, endures in its nature of a large, fortified complex – the very nature fought against by the ’68 generation.  

De Carlo’s definition of the university as a system of dispersed poles in the urban fabric and the simultaneous injection within the poles of spaces for generic public use are a statement for the dilution of academic systems of power and the destabilisation of the old centralised university. This is the way he uses the architectural project to respond to the critique of the “unity of place” of educational institutions, which he proposed in his 1969 essay. The university is exploded and transformed into a large urban infrastructure that is expected to house properly “academic” functions only temporarily. The real aim is for a long-term strategy to set up the conditions for continuous re-territorialisations of the university, which would enable routes to learning alternative to the traditional, top-down ones.[29] That is to say, the aim is the ultimate deschooling of society postulated by Illich.  

The result is the constantly unsettled urbanistic assemblage described by Stan Allen as the correct interpretation of the notion of mat-building. The diagram conceived by Woods identifies city and university through an understanding of mat-building as a noun – the mat-building, that is, a built object allegedly capable of recreating the city. Pavia – but also Urbino and Dublin – shows how De Carlo interprets mat-building as a verb, that is, as a project in continuous becoming. The logic response to an institution that is itself in continuous becoming – the university – is to guarantee its enduring in an unsettled condition. The university does not want to integrate itself in the city: it has to act as a disturbing element. If that weren’t the case, we would face the ultimate death of the university – which we probably are still mourning today.  

Note
[1] This text is a re-worked version of part of a chapter from the PhD thesis by the author titled The University as a Settlement Principle. The Territorialisation of Knowledge in 1970s Italy, (Università degli Studi di Cagliari, 2015).
[2] G.De Carlo, Comment on the Free University, Architecture Plus 2, no. 1 (January 1974): 50–51.
[3] S. Woods, Remember the Spring of the Old Days?, Architecture Plus 2, no. 1 (January 1974): 51.
[4] For a recent and detailed discussion on the institutional and physical expansion of universities in the 1960s-70s see S. Muthesius, The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College (London: Yale University Press, 2000). Among the numerous texts written at the time of the events see (for a mostly Anglo-American discussion): C. Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); R. P. Dober, Campus Planning (New York: Reinhold Pub. Corp., 1963); M. Brawne, ed., University Planning and Design: A Symposium, Architectural Association Paper 3 (London: Lund Humphries for the Architectural Association, 1967). Similar critical accounts were contributed by some Italian architects; see in particular: G. De Carlo, ed., Pianificazione E Disegno Delle Università (Roma: Edizioni universitarie italiane, 1968); P. Coppola Pignatelli, L’Università in Espansione. Orientamenti Dell’edilizia Universitaria (Milano: Etas Kompass, 1969).
[5] Joseph Rykwert, Universities as Institutional Archetypes of Our Age, Zodiac 18 (1968): 61–63.
[6] VV.AA., Contro l’Università. I Principali Documenti Della Critica Radicale Alle Istituzioni Accademiche Del Sessantotto (Milano: Mimesis, 2008).
[7] Cf. M. Biraghi, Università. La Facoltà di Architettura del Politecnico di Milano, in Italia 60/70. Una stagione dell’architettura, a cura di M. Biraghi et al., 87-98. Il Poligrafo, Padova, 2010.
[8] Woods used the same title for one of his books, which was published posthumously: S. Woods, The Man in the Street. A Polemic on Urbanism (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1975).
[9] The project for Berlin was amply covered on the international magazines of architecture. See in particular: Architectural Design, August 1964 (issue on Team X) and January 1974; and S. Woods, Free University Berlin, ed. John Donat (New York: The Viking Press, 1965), 116–17. See also Gabriel Feld et al., ed., Free University, Berlin: Candilis, Josic, Woods, Schiedhelm (London: Architectural Association, 1999). For a general discussion of the work of Candilis, Josic & Woods see: Tom Avermaete, Another Modern. The Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods (Rotterdam: NAi, 2005).
[10] A. Smithson, How to Recognise and Read Mat Building, Architectural Design, no. 9 (September 1974): 573–90.
[11] E. Mumford, The Emergence of Mat or Field Buildings, in Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival, ed. Hashim Sarkis (Munich London New York: Prestel Verlag, 2001), 48–65.
[12] S. Allen, Mat Urbanism: The Thick 2-D, in Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival, ed. H. Sarkis (Munich London New York: Prestel Verlag, 2001), 118–26.
[13] T. Hyde, How to Construct an Architectural Geneaology, in Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival, ed. H. Sarkis (Munich London New York: Prestel Verlag, 2001), 104–17.
[14] The most important texts by De Carlo on education and the university are: G. De Carlo, Why/How to Build School Buildings, Harvard Educational Review, no. 4 (1969) re-published as ‘Ordine Istituzione Educazione Disordine’, Casabella, no. 368–69 (August 1972): 12–35; La Piramide Rovesciata (Bari: De Donato, 1968); Pianificazione E Disegno Delle Università;: 65–71; Il Territorio Senza Università, Parametro, no. 21–22 (November 1973): 38–39.
[15] An interesting recent study of the relations between university and city that, despite its title, goes beyond the mere metaphorical treatment of their identity is: S. Haar, The City as Campus: Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
[16] S. Woods, The Education Bazaar, Harvard Educational Review, no. 4 (1969): 116–25.
[17] De Carlo, Why/How to Build School Buildings.
[18] John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: The Macmillan company, 1938); I. Illich, Deschooling Society (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1970).
[19] A manuscript note by Woods held at Avery Drawings & Archives, Columbia University, shows explicitly this contrast: the label University in City is modified into University as City
[20] For De Carlo’s Dublin project see: Giancarlo De Carlo, Proposta per Una Struttura Universitaria (Venezia: Cluva, 1965).
[21] Woods, Remember the Spring of the Old Days?
[22] S. Woods, The Education Super Mart, Avery Drawings & Archives, S. Woods Archive, Papers collection, Feld Box 08.
[23] A. Tzonis and L. Lefaivre, Beyond Monuments, Beyond Zip-a-Tone, Into Space/Time, in Free University Berlin: Candilis, Josic, Woods, Schiedhelm, by Architectural Association, Exemplary Projects 3 (London: AA Publications, 1999).
[24] K. Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p.277.
[25] The university models are discussed by De Carlo in the introduction of De Carlo, Pianificazione E Disegno Delle Università.
[26] “A first hypothesis sees città regione as an indeterminately growing city, which expands as an urban continuum across a territory […] A second hypothesis considers città regione as an agglomerate of urban centers each of which, while involved in a common development process, retains its autonomy […] A third hypothesis sees città regione as an artifice of forms meant to solve the problems deriving from congestion. Finally, there is a fourth hypothesis – with which I personally agree – that sees città regione as dynamic relations substituting for the static relations proper of the traditional city.” Giancarlo De Carlo, ‘Relazione Conclusiva al Seminario dell’ILSES Sulla Nuova Dimensione e La Città-Regione’ (Stresa, 1962); my translation from the Italian.
[27] Among the many texts on De Carlo’s work in Urbino see: Giancarlo De Carlo and Pierluigi Nicolin, Conversation on Urbino, Lotus International, no. 18 (March 1978): 6–22.
[28] The original documentation of the Pavia University Plan can be accesses as Giancarlo De Carlo, Pavia Piano Universitario: Relazione Generale, 18 February 1974, IUAV Archivio Progetti, Fondo De Carlo, pro/057.1/18/22, 040550, Venezia. The Plan is discussed by De Carlo in Giancarlo De Carlo, Un Caso Di Studio: l’Universicittà Di Pavia, Parametro, no. 44 (March 1976): 20–22, and in Un Ruolo Diverso dell’Università: Il Modello Multipolare per l’Università Di Pavia, in Progettare L’università, by Giuseppe Rebecchini (Roma: Edizioni Kappa, 1981), 144–51; 
[29] For a discussion of the university as a continuous cycle of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation see Gerald Raunig, Factories of Knowledge. Industries of Creativity (Los Angeles: Semiotext (e), 2013).    

Bibliografia 
S. Allen, Mat Urbanism: The Thick 2-D, in Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival, edited by H. Sarkis, 118–26, Prestel Verlag, Munich London New York, 2001.
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M. Brawne, ed. University Planning and Design: A Symposium. Architectural Association Paper 3, Lund Humphries for the Architectural Association, London, 1967.
P. Coppola Pignatelli, L’Università in Espansione. Orientamenti Dell’edilizia Universitaria, Etas Kompass, Milano, 1969.
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———. Il Territorio Senza Università, Parametro, no. 21–22 (November 1973): 38–39.
———. La Piramide Rovesciata, De Donato, Bari, 1968.
———. , ed. Pianificazione E Disegno Delle Università, Edizioni universitarie italiane, Roma, 1968.
———. Proposta per Una Struttura Universitaria, Cluva, Venezia, 1965.
———. Relazione Conclusiva Al Seminario dell’ILSES Sulla Nuova Dimensione E La Città-Regione, Stresa, 1962.
———. Un Caso Di Studio, L’universicittà Di Pavia, Parametro, no. 44 (1976): 20–22.
———. Un Ruolo Diverso dell’Università: Il Modello Multipolare per l’Università Di Pavia, in Progettare L’università, by Giuseppe Rebecchini, 144–51. Roma: Edizioni Kappa, 1981.
———. Why/How to Build School Buildings, Harvard Educational Review, no. 4 (1969): 12–35. 
G. De Carlo, and Pierluigi Nicolin, Conversation on Urbino, Lotus International, no. 18 (March 1978): 6–22.
J. Dewey, Experience and Education, The Macmillan company, New York, 1938.
R. P. Dober, Campus Planning, Reinhold Pub. Corp., New York, 1963.
G. Feld et al., ed. Free University, Berlin: Candilis, Josic, Woods, Schiedhelm, Architectural Association, London, 1999.
K. Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, Thames and Hudson, London, 1980.
S. Haar, The City as Campus: Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011.
T. Hyde, How to Construct an Architectural Geneaology in Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival, edited by Hashim Sarkis, 104–17, Prestel Verlag, Munich London New York, 2001.
I. Illich, Deschooling Society, Marion Boyars, London and New York, 1970.
C. Kerr, The Uses of the University, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1963.
E. Mumford, The Emergence of Mat or Field Buildings, in Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival, edited by H. Sarkis, 48–65, Prestel Verlag, Munich London New York, 2001.
S. Muthesius, The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College, Yale University Press, London, 2000.
G. Raunig, Factories of Knowledge. Industries of Creativity, Semiotext (e), Los Angeles, 2013.
J. Rykwert, Universities as Institutional Archetypes of Our Age, Zodiac 18 (1968): 61–63.
A. Smithson, How to Recognise and Read Mat Building, Architectural Design, no. 9 (September 1974): 573–90
A. Tzonis, and L. Lefaivre. Beyond Monuments, Beyond Zip-a-Tone, Into Space/Time, in Free University Berlin: Candilis, Josic, Woods, Schiedhelm, by Architectural Association. Exemplary Projects 3, AA Publications, London, 1999.
VV.AA, Contro l’Università. I Principali Documenti Della Critica Radicale Alle Istituzioni Accademiche Del Sessantotto, Mimesis, Milano, 2008.
S. Woods, Free University Berlin, edited by John Donat, 116–17, The Viking Press, New York, 1965.
———. Remember the Spring of the Old Days?, Architecture Plus 2, no. 1 (January 1974): 51.
———. The Education Bazaar, Harvard Educational Review, no. 4 (1969): 116–25.
———. The Man in the Street. A Polemic on Urbanism, Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1975.
F. Zuddas, The University as Settlement Principle. The Territorialisation of Knowledge in 1970s Italy, PhD Thesis, Università degli Studi di Cagliari, 2015.

Francesco Zuddas (PhD, MA) is Senior Lecturer at the Leeds School of Architecture and Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins in London. He studied architecture, engineering and urbanism at the University of Cagliari, where he also taught between 2009-2015, and at the Architectural Association. His Ph.D. thesis “The University as Settlement Principle” investigated the space of the university as a critical testing ground for an idea of the city.

Candilis, Josic & Woods, competition projects for Berlin Free University (1962-63, above) and for the reconstruction of Frankfurt’s urban center (1961, below).  - ZOOM

Candilis, Josic & Woods, competition projects for Berlin Free University (1962-63, above) and for the reconstruction of Frankfurt’s urban center (1961, below).