ABSTRACT
Of the Italian postwar architects, Giancarlo De Carlo is commonly associated with the production of designs for university buildings. His projects for the University of Urbino are widely regarded as exemplars of a possible dialogue between modern architecture and an historical urban environment. But De Carlo’s relation with the topic of university design went well beyond issues of contextual integration, to encompass not only other projects for academic environments but also a wider intellectual interest in interpreting the revolts that shook higher education worldwide in the 1960s. De Carlo was particularly concerned about the urgency of a radical restructuring of the Italian university that in its current state was a disaggregated institution made up of parts set in voluntary isolation from one another and treating students as a generic mass. A believer in the need to empower individuals within an increasingly homogeneous mass society, his work focused on finding the spatial solutions to enable a dialogue between the individual subject and the collective. Through a series of three main projects – the colleges in Urbino, the competition entry for University College Dublin, and the plan for the University of Pavia – he showed how a university that acknowledges the individual could trigger change at multiple scales, from the single institution to a vast territory. Despite sharing the ethos of Team X, he did not stop his search at the definition of a prototype for a new university as his colleague, Shadrach Woods, had done with the project for the Free University in Berlin. Instead, De Carlo understood that the ‘city as university’ – a concept that he shared with Woods – could not be comprehensively translated into an architectural machinery. His final aim was the conquest of the entire city-territory, which he realised in his project for Pavia where, through the deployment of a multi-nodal strategy, the university found its ultimate dilution from being a concentrated power structure accessible to few to becoming an open-access service for the urban population.
