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Campus e città Campus and City

Editorial

Issue 34 of FAmagazine is dedicated to the theme of the “university campus”, a type that unquestionably falls among those that have stood to the fore in the history of the modern architectural project and in the process of founding cities.

A tool that is “poleogenetic, continually experimented with in the historical course of cities and that is arguably now, in so many ways, burdened with further responsibilities”. In the articles that follow, the university campus is considered in its relation to the University-City where, as Carlo Quintelli maintains, the university component has become an element that is “strategically indispensable in the development of a knowledge economy, one where research is the basis of every production lab characterized by innovation”. This approach, to be found in the Mastercampus project being sponsored by the University of Parma advances starting from these presuppositions drawing from them two guidelines, described by Quintelli in his article, in which a first is “that of a strategic consideration of the university settlement applied to the entire urban fabric, from historical nucleus to the inner suburbs and the suburbs proper”, while a second establishes “a critical relationship with the city on the demonstrative plane as regards certain critical points, presupposing a positive knock-on effect for the context”.

This is followed by a detailed description of the Mastercampus project by Andrea Matta, whose article describes the experience had inside it and how this stimulates reasoning with respect to certain key elements to grasp this “settlement type” and the relationship it establishes with the city in question, namely, Parma, in the light of new needs and European opportunities.

Paolo Strina then gives us a thorough description of some American study cases of campus models, performing an analysis through identification of some morpho/typological invariants such as polarity, residentiality, aggregation, the very compositional/architectural layout, maintaining that the campus, according to the American ideal, “nowadays represents a completed city part that wishes to impress the spectator – whether student, city inhabitant or visitor – by heightening emotional effects through its capacity to introject the complex functional programme of the entire urban settlement” and to express this via figures that Strina defines as “thespian”.

Francesco Zuddas offers a discussions of two interpretations of the metaphor “city=university” which, although born from a common ideological substrate, as he himself states, distinctly set out the way in which architecture can operatively make this metaphor “its own”. Lingering over experiences from the '60s and '70s characterized by a rethinking of the university idea, Zuddas compares the work carried out by the American architect Shadrach Woods with the thinking of Giancarlo De Carlo. A comparison based, therefore, on the possibility of an interior diagram organized inside a large building able to fuse city and university (Woods' case) with the second model, proposed by Giancarlo De Carlo, which suggests that only in the vastest urban field, and without a one-time definite layout, can such a fusion take place.

Lastly, Rafael Lopez-Toribio delves into the questions of university teaching nowadays, in a historical moment when we are facing a radical change towards new models of knowledge. A change which he maintains to be characterized by a transitional phase from an industrial society to an information society. Hence the necessity of places designated for teaching to “redefine their function, not only as places of formal education, but by attracting and promoting synergies that facilitate new ways of educating and learning”.

Tommaso Brighenti

THE SPECTACULARIZATION OF DISMISSION

y. VII - nr. 42 - oct, dec 2017