ABSTRACT
The student protests of the 1960s in Italy found in the schools of architecture a major laboratory for political discussion and critique. In 1963, the first occupations at the Politecnico di Milano opened a season of turbulence that opposed the students’ requests for renewal to the hard-core traditionalism of part of the faculty. Guido Canella was among a more progressive group of academics who backed the students’ protest. Of the same generation as Aldo Rossi and Vittorio Gregotti, he was, like them, affiliated to Ernesto Nathan Rogers whose courses at the Politecnico tried to renew how architectural design was taught. Rogers’s theme-based method to deal with topics of social significance contrasted with the traditional one based on a sterile repetition of academic exercises aimed at the mere professionalisation of students. He left a fundamental mark on Canella who, after a few years as Rogers’s assistant, conceived the briefs for design studios as research projects to be conducted collaboratively by teachers and students – thus anticipating the teaching experimentation called for by the Milanese students in 1967. In the realm of Canella’s activist pedagogy, the realities of an academic course and a professional office blurred, written briefs were as long as books, confrontation was constant, and teaching could take the form of a theatrical performance. Addressing design themes such as the primary school, the theatre, the prison and the university, Canella’s studios explored the fundamental institutions that could build a ‘system of learning’. Ultimately, a pedagogical preoccupation connected the studios, following a trajectory that, around 1968, inevitably focused on the problem of higher education. For Canella, the university had to reclaim the role of confronting reality and to act as an anti-city set against the acceptance of the status quo. Overcoming the bubble of the affluent industrialised North, he led a cohort of 100 students to discover the problems of the Italian South. It was there, in the region of Calabria, that they developed an idea of the university as a nomadic service that could roam a vast territory with the aim of nurturing the formation of a new industrial milieu to redeem the destiny of a land forsaken by the processes of modernisation.
